New Works Festival at the Firehouse Center for the Arts

Now in its 11th year the Firehouse Center for the Arts New Works Festival will once again showcase the abundant creativity that is to be found throughout New England. Area playwrights are asked to submit plays which are then judged by an independent panel of theater professionals in blind readings. This year's panel consisted of five members of the theatrical community and work formats included full-length to be presented as staged readings, and memorized ten-minute and one-act plays.

The festival continues to grow and this year's submissions were up by 30% over last year. The full-length winning play and the one-act winning play are both dramas while the majority of the seventeen finalists in the ten-minute short category are comedies. Presented over two weekends this festival has become highly respected throughout the theatrical community and writers from all over Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island participated this year.