Young Playwrights Festival 2025 – 40th Anniversary!

The Young Playwrights Festival is our longest running learning program that encourages expression and creativity in students across the state. Each spring, we invite and receive hundreds of play submissions from participants in our residencies, and many more from students across Maryland. Playwrights in grades K-12 submit their short plays, and each year up to six plays are chosen to receive a professional production produced by Baltimore Center Stage. All YPF playwrights whose work is chosen for a full production are assigned a mentor to help them refine and edit their scripts before the plays are presented onstage.

Learn more about the Young Playwrights Festival here!

This year’s performance will take place on May 10th, 2024.

YPF Residency Program

Bring a YPF Residency to your school! 

YPF features “in-school” residencies where BCS Teaching Artists partner with classroom teachers to develop original plays by young people across Maryland. Over 8 sessions, our professional Teaching Artists will work with K-12 classroom educators to facilitate lessons from our YPF Curriculum to guide students through the playwriting process with the goal of creating short, completely original plays that can be submitted to our annual Young Playwrights Festival competition. Students are given many tools to communicate their ideas, develop characters, write dialogue, and shape their stories for a unique opportunity we are so proud to continue to offer. Contact education@centerstage.org for more information on our in-school residencies.

YPF OPEN CALL

Write Your Own Play

Young playwrights all throughout Maryland are invited to write an original play using our official YPF Playwriting Guide and Coach Form. To maintain and uphold principles of accessibility with our programs, we continue to adapt our YPF curriculum year by year, and we offer it as a free online download for those who cannot host an in-school residency. Teachers and enterprising students across Maryland can register at the links below to receive the curriculum and implement it in their classrooms and/or follow it at their own pace individually.

 

Play Parameters:

  • Play must be no more than 10 minutes (8-10 pages)
  • Play must be between 1-6 characters (actors can play multiple roles)
  • The play must respond to this year’s theme

 

This year’s “I Love My City, I Love Myself” Young Playwrights Festival theme is all about encouraging the youth to think intentionally about what community means to them and how they exist within their own communities – real or imagined. Some starting questions are included below:

 

  • Place yourself (or your characters) in a historical moment that took place in your home town. Or bring a historical event to the present day in your community. What does that look like?
  • What does a community hero look like to you? Write about someone who acts heroically in their service of their community.
  • Have you ever seen a group of people work together to solve a conflict that was a problem for several people? What does that look like in the community you’re representing or imagining?
  • Who are the characters in your neighborhood/community?
  • How do you/your character relate to your community?
  • What’s your favorite place to go?
  • What’s your favorite thing to see when you go outside in your community?
  • What do you like about yourself?
  • What are places you think of when you think about your hometown?
  • What do you see/hear/feel?
  • What’s your favorite smell in your city/neighborhood?

 

Craft a story that speaks to or about a community and that puts people, place, and ideas in conversation with one another. How do your characters color the community’s landscape? How does the characters’ environment impact the person they are/aim to become? What societal norms or traditions are in place, and how are the characters and the physical space around them affected by them?

 

Additional Questions for Playwriting Prompt:

  • If you could leave a message to the world or heal something in the world, what would it be? 
  • What kind of traditions do you practice in your community?
    • How have you grown or changed since you were little?
    • What changes have you seen occur in your hometown over time?
    • How is my community currently thriving? How can it be better?
    • What makes my city/hometown unique?
    • How has my perspective or point of view about my city changed from when I was younger to now?
  • If someone from outside of your city/hometown asked you about it, what would you want them to know? What would you tell them? Where would you take them and why?
  • Everyone eats! What are we eating when we visit your city/hometown? Who’s sitting at the table?

Writer’s Group

Baltimore Center Stage’s Writer’s Group is back and offering a FREE program for students in grades 3-12. For six sessions over the course of four weeks, these groups will guide students through learning about the different elements of playwriting using a slightly accelerated version of our longstanding YPF residency curriculum. Each session will build upon the previous one in the playwriting process, and by the end of the 4-week period, students will have written their own plays that they can submit to our YPF Open Call! The Writer’s Group is open to students from all over Maryland on a first come first serve basis.  

We will have two groups this year, one which will take place in-person at Baltimore Center Stage, and the other which will take place virtually on Zoom. Each Writer’s Group has a cap of 10-15 attendees. 

Through the support of our Teaching Artists, these Writers’ Groups can function as a supplement to any solo work a student does. Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity for self expression and creativity!

 

IN-PERSON WRITER’S GROUP MEETINGS:

This group will meet on January 14th, January 16th, January 21st, January 23rd, January 28th, and February 4th from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM at Baltimore Center Stage in our Education Studio (4th floor).

Register for our Writer’s Group – link to come

 

VIRTUAL WRITER’S GROUP MEETINGS:

This group will meet on January 14th, January 16th, January 21st, January 23rd, January 28th, and February 4th from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM. A scheduled Zoom meeting will be sent out ahead of the start of each session.

Register for our Virtual Writer’s Group – link to come

 

We ask that if you sign up for the Writers’ Group that you plan to attend all 6 sessions. All of the virtual sessions will take place on Zoom, so we ask students in that group to have access to a technological device and a reliable source of WiFi.

 

Submit Your Play

Submissions for YPF – COMING SOON! 

Our submission portal will open on January 6th, 2025. The deadline for all play submissions is February 7th, 2025.

 

Eligibility requirements:

  • K-12 student
  • Enrolled in a school (or homeschooled) in the state of Maryland

 

If you have any questions about how to submit your play to YPF this year, please reach out to education@centerstage.org.

Frequently Asked Questions