Good morning!

It is April 18th, around 1:30 am, and that must mean it is FESTIVAL TIME. Well, it means we're in pre-FESTIVAL TIME, so it's blog time. It also means that this post is off to a tired, incoherent start; sorry about that.

What I mean to say is: hi! Welcome to the official blog of the Element New Plays Festival, a play development festival based in Chicago and focusing on works in progress. We're here supporting emerging playwrights and their work, because there's not a lot of support out there for emerging playwrights or their work. My name is Will Goldberg, I am Playwrights' Liaison, and I may or may not be your host. The idea is to have lots of participants in the festival blogging some thoughts when they can, but they'll all be pretty busy, so maybe it'll be me taking pictures and mumbling to myself. In which case: sorry in advance.

This week, the various festivilians -- playwrights, directors, actors, and support staff -- will work on three plays in progress, which will be presented Friday and Saturday. They'll kick it off with an intensive work period in which everybody lives in the performance space, becomes dangerously obsessed with the material, and starts picking it apart to see how it works. The playwrights will rewrite their work at various points during the week, and on Friday and Saturday, we'll present staged readings to the public and have some talkbacks. Then, we will party. Party like we're in The Bacchae. (Maybe not exactly like we're in The Bacchae.)

So. Those are the rules. Let's play our game.

--Will