By DAVID PRATT

"We have an embarrassment of riches here. Young people come from all over with a shared passion. It makes Juilliard a remarkable institution, in the middle of one of the most exciting arts centers in the world, in the middle of what is still one of the most exciting theater cities in the world. There's so much to work with."

Adam Rapp (Photo by Steven Freeman)

The speaker is James Houghton, the newly appointed Richard Rodgers Director of Juilliard's Drama Division, beginning with this season. The topic is—or at least, began as—a new playwrights' festival at Juilliard, a series of workshop performances to be given this month, featuring fourth-year acting students in works by two students and one alumnus of Juilliard's Playwrights program. The thinking behind the festival, and the possibilities it opens up, naturally made Houghton wax eloquent.

For four years, second-year Drama Division students have appeared each winter in works by playwriting students. It made even more sense, the Drama Division thought, to offer the same opportunity to students about to graduate. Four years of studying Shakespeare, Chekhov, Molière, and Ibsen behind the travertine walls of Lincoln Center (now being jackhammered to pieces, but that's another story) may be Heaven, but when Juilliard actors graduate, they will also audition for plays by Stephen Adly Guir-gis, David Lindsay-Abaire, Julia Cho, Neil LaBute, Adam Rapp, and others. (Lindsay-Abaire, Cho, and Rapp are Juilliard grads.)

Adam Szymkowicz (Photo by Ewa Kara)

"Because our playwrights tend to write plays set in the present day," says Christopher Durang, co-director of Juilliard's Playwrights' program, "the kind of challenges the actors face are similar to what they'll find in the real world, especially TV and movies."

But Juilliard graduates won't just act in these plays. Often they will have to work face-to-face with the writers ("No offense, dude, and I love your work, but if you cut the whole speech, it would flow better"), perhaps over the course of more than one production. And writers—until they join Shakespeare et al. in the beyond—will have to sit in rehearsal while some actor suggests cutting the most important speech in the whole play! It's just part of the process. "Playwrights," Durang explains, "learn writing skills as they learn what actors 'need.'"

So when Houghton says that "Juilliard has the opportunity to reinvigorate and reimagine theatrical training in 2006," he doesn't just mean less Suzuki or more mask work. His point isn't even entirely about contemporary playwrights as such. The Drama Division already has a record of producing the living writers who are staples of regional nonprofits and Manhattan institutional theaters like the Public Theater and Manhattan Theater Club. When Houghton suggests that Juilliard "reimagine theatrical training," he is speaking of finding one's place in a new kind of creative process, due to an economic reality that has crept up on the American theater over the past three decades.

How many of us still have in our heads the 42nd Street model of play development? Announce the show, work like a dog for four weeks, open out of town, they love it or they hate it, you fix it or you don't, you open on Broadway. And the director is a tyrannical genius and the lead actor is subject to fits.

That was then.

Kara Corthron (Photo by William Kraypole)

Today, even Off Broadway costs too much for a producer to make the leap from the page to the New York stage so cavalierly. For some years now, playwrights have instead had to run a gantlet of readings, workshops, and regional productions, all meant to fine tune the product so as to make a costly New York or London production worth the risk. The workshop circuit has become something of a cottage industry that demands a unique skill set. It is no surprise that, concurrent with the rise of the workshop, the tyrant-genius has faded. The give and take, the sit-in-a-circle ethos of the workshop process disintegrates if subjected to so much ego. Today's top directors are lauded as much for their quiet indirection as for their direction (think Daniel Sullivan, director of recent Broadway productions of Rabbit Hole, Sight Unseen, Proof, and many more), and the new vocabulary includes such concepts as collaboration, process, listening, giving, and mutual respect, alongside mainstays like structure, event, and action. Both sets of concepts/skills must be part of actor training in 2006. This is why Houghton says he wants Juilliard to produce "respectful, smart, and skilled artists, who are generous, sympathetic, and fiercely talented." In both trios of adjectives, talent and skill come last. They are the givens. What's in The Daily News, as the song from Guys and Dolls goes, is the stuff about respect, generosity, and sympathy. And that is what this intensely collaborative new festival is all about.

It began with Kara Corthron. Last spring, Houghton visited Juilliard and saw a laboratory production of Corthron's Wild Black-Eyed Susans, a wrenchingly clear-eyed yet droll drama about three women and one angry, forlorn man living on the edge of poverty in rural Maryland. Houghton loved the play and wanted it as the cornerstone of a new play festival cast with fourth-year acting students. The players would be the same as for the lab production. Now two more plays had to be found to take care of the remaining fourth-years. First-year playwright Adam Szymkowicz had just turned out three new plays. According to Joe Kraemer, the Drama Division's literary manager and dramaturg, Szymkowicz's work "really pops with the students. It has this young, zany, comic energy." Pretty Theft, the play that got Szymkowicz into Juilliard, "suited certain actors in the class in fun and interesting ways," Kraemer says. In the play, a rudderless adolescent girl befriends a mental patient obsessed with ballerinas, kicking off a meditation on the abandonment, alienation, and often sad fantasies of 21st-century middle-class teens. (But the approach is nonetheless, as Kraemer says, zany.)

With Corthron's and Szymkowicz's plays in place, several men remained uncast. The solution was a comic drama by a Juilliard graduate whose work the acting students had long begged the Drama Division to mount. Adam Rapp's Finer Noble Gases, first developed at Juilliard, had the right assortment of male roles. The history of Finer in fact shows what the path to success has become for young writers, and why patient collaboration has become a required skill for all involved. In the introduction to the published script, Rapp acknowledges the director of a reading at the Ojai Playwrights Conference; the director of a "guerilla workshop" at Williamstown; Jim Houghton (the very same), who chose Finer for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference in 2001; Michael Garcés, who directed the play at the 2002 Humana Festival; and the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, where the New York premiere took place. This summer, Finer went to Edinburgh with Rapp in the cast. This fall it joins the conservatory canon. Corthron and Szymkowicz, meantime, are starting at the conservatory end (though Szymkowicz has already workshopped his script (with Chuck Mee, the author of bobrauschenbergamerica), with Ojai, O'Neill, Louisville, Rattlestick, Edinburgh, and untold other stages still ahead.

"It's really important to keep students aware of the type of new work being done," says Corthron. "It's good for them to understand that there are new, fresh voices going to school with them right at this moment." Spoken like a woman who, along with her compatriots, is making certain that New York remains one of the most exciting theater cities in the world.

The Playwrights Festival runs from Saturday, September 9, through Monday September 11. It is open to a limited audience and members of the Juilliard community.

David Pratt is a freelance arts writer and development consultant living in New York City. In addition to The Juilliard Journal, he has written for The New York Times, Playbill, and many other publications.