Free Playwriting Workshop for Teens with Madeline Charne and Philadelphia Young Playwrights
Free Playwriting Workshop for Teens with Madeline Charne and Philadelphia Young Playwrights
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Calling all teen playwrights!
Join PlayPenn and Philadelphia Young Playwrights (PYP) for an afternoon of playwriting inspired by PYP playwright Zoe Palmer's play Emergence, which will be presented as a reading on August 1 as part of PlayPenn's 2026 New Play Development Conference.
Together, we'll explore your BIG questions and investigate how plays can grow from curiosity, exploration, and personal inquiry. Through writing exercises and discussion, you'll discover ways to transform your ideas, interests, and obsessions into compelling dramatic stories.
By the end of the workshop, you will have written the first scene of a new play that dives deeply into whatever is occupying your mind today, whether existential or research based, universal or deeply personal.
Bring your curiosity, your questions, and your imagination. No previous playwriting experience is required.
About The Instructor
Madeline Charne is a teaching artist, dramaturg, facilitator, and arts administrator with a lifelong love of storytelling. Having worked as a teaching artist for over a decade, she has worked with students aged 3-93 at theaters, schools, libraries, day programs, prisons, hospitals, and camps across the east coast.
Madeline graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2020 with an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism and a focus on dramaturgies of disability and community based theater making. Although she loves her research and time spent in the rehearsal room, her true passion lies in teaching and she is grateful to have exercised that passion through theaters all over Philadelphia, teaching with the Wilma, the Walnut, Philadelphia Young Playwrights, the Arden, InterAct, Theater Horizon, the Lantern, and Wolf PAC.
Madeline is coming to Philadelphia Young Playwrights from a position as the Director of Education and Community at the Philadelphia Film Society, where she built a program of field trips, residencies, and community screenings that served over 8000 young people each year. In addition to this work, Madeline has dramaturged productions at Swarthmore College, La Jolla Playhouse, and Roundabout Theater Company, among others, and has had her writing published in Theater Magazine.
Madeline began her career as a teaching artist with Philadelphia Young Playwrights as an apprentice in 2015. Learning from the resident teaching artists and administrators at PYP to lead from a place of compassion, teach from a place of respect, and create from a place of curiosity. Since then she has taught in over a dozen PYP classrooms and dramaturged nearly 50 student plays. PYP has been Madeline’s artistic home in Philadelphia and she has spread the values of the organization far and wide, building programming in New York City and New Haven, CT that takes a trauma informed, student driven approach to storytelling instruction.
About the 2026 New Play Development Conference
PlayPenn’s nationally recognized New Play Development Conference brings together readings of new plays alongside a citywide series of civic gatherings, workshops, artist exchanges, and public conversations focusing on art, democracy, historical memory, belonging, and collective imagination. This community-focused approach to new play development reflects a broader vision of theatre in a shared civic life that illuminates what theatre can do, who participates in it, how it unfolds, and why it matters.
The 19-event Conference brings together 22 playwrights participating across workshops, conversations, and five new work presentations while expanding its scope to include an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eboni Booth (Primary Trust), free playwriting workshops for adults, teens, and women over 50, and a public conversation examining constitutional history and civic identity.
Additional programming includes a community workshop for queer theatre makers; a convening on innovation in theatre-making with leaders from Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Cannonball Festival, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Lemonade Stand, and Tiny Dynamite; and an acting lab focused on approaches to new play development and cross-community exchanges among theatre artists.
Location
The Louis Bluver Theatre at The Drake, 302 S Hicks St, Philadelphia, PA 19102