Acting Practices and Approaches for Working on New Play Development/Readings
Acting Practices and Approaches for Working on New Play Development/Readings
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This three-hour workshop for actors will focus on the role of the actor in the development of new plays, from the beginning of the process through an initial reading for an audience.
We will discuss and experiment with techniques from preparation, table discussion, stage directions and physicalization, interaction with the writer, dramaturg, and director, as well as acting techniques for both cold and rehearsed readings.
The workshop will be led by Nancy Boykin, an accomplished actor who previously taught acting and theatre at Temple University and Villanova University and recently appeared as Miz Martha in The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington by James Ijames at Wilma Theater.
She will be joined by playwright and Foundry Lead Artist L M Feldman, who will share insights into what best serves the writer, the script, the actor, and the creative process. Participants will experiment with both rehearsed and unrehearsed new text, as well as generative prompts before the text even exists.
About the Instructors
Nancy Boykin has been devoted to the development of playwrights and their work for much of her career, starting with a tiny group called Merely Players in New York City, later at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and in recent years as an actor, reader and Board Member with PlayPenn. She has had the good fortune to be involved in in the process of bringing to life more than 200 new works over the years in dozens of theaters, workshops and readings.
L M Feldman is a queer, feminist, GNC playwright who writes theatrically audacious, physically kinetic, ensemble-driven plays that are both epic & intimate. Plays about the women & queers in the margins. Plays that shift the prism. Plays that quest & grapple. Plays that explode space & time & dramaturgical form. Plays that seek to create a communally transcendent experience – for those both onstage & off. Recent plays include: S P A C E (Central Square Theater); hand foot hand (Playwrights Realm); Limber, A Love Story (Emerson Stage); Thrive, or What You Will [An Epic] (American Shakespeare Center); Scribe, or The Sisters Milton, or Elegy for the Unwritten (Playwrights’ Center); and Another Kind of Silence (City Theater Company); among others.
L is ongoingly thankful to have been a Venturous Playwright Fellow & a Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center, a finalist for the FEWW Prize & the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Drama, and a nominee for the Herb Alpert Award, Wendy Wasserstein Prize, Barrie & Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award, & Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. A movement artist by trade, L spent a decade performing duo trapeze at festivals around the world, and they continue to teach both playwriting & circus dramaturgy around the country. L is passionate about theater that MOVES, and circus that DELVES. L has lived in seven cities and is based in Philadelphia, where they write, collaborate, advocate, teach, and handstand.
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 Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, 302 S Hicks St, Philadelphia, PA 19102