New play development often promises playwrights feedback, but feedback is too weak a word for what playwrights actually need.

A playwright does not need a room full of people deciding whether a script is good. A playwright needs useful information: What story is the page actually telling? What theatrical world has the writer already built? What does the audience understand without explanation? What remains trapped in the playwright’s head? What choices are creating meaning, and what choices are only creating noise?

At Northwest Theatre Workshop, two related development processes answer those questions from different sides: the Create Workshop and the New Works Workshop. The Create Workshop gives playwrights a table-based analytical process for understanding the underlying structure, meaning, motifs, themes, frontside action, backside pressure, and motivated causal logic of their work. The New Works Workshop then puts that work into the mouths and bodies of actors, with a director shaping what happens in the room, so the playwright can see what the script communicates without authorial explanation.

The Create Workshop process asks: “From smallest detail to the big picture, how is this play built as a text?” The New Works Workshop process asks: “How well does the play communicate its ideas and story to directors, actors and audience? How well does the scene work play on its feet?”

Together they form a path toward the practical development of new work. The Create Workshop helps playwrights organize and deepen the play they think they are writing. The New Works Workshop reveals the play actors, directors, and listeners actually receive. When the two processes are used together, they not only generate opinions about a draft, but also give the playwright evidence.

Both workshops are necessary because a play has to work on the page as well as on the stage. The structure of the Create Workshop is built upon that premise. A play is not merely an assembly of dialogue and plot. It is a constructed relationship between concrete stageable action and deeper meaning.

The Create Wheel names those two sides the frontside and backside of the script. The frontside is what can be seen and heard: dialogue, stage directions, setting, costume, props, spectacle, and stageable behavior. The backside is what the frontside implies: inner life, relationships, motivations, history, symbols, and themes. The Create materials argue that the frontside gives the script structure and style, while the backside gives it meaning and depth. Too little backside and the play can feel superficial. Too little frontside and the play can feel incoherent.

Effective dramatic writing finds the balance.

A playwright may know a character is lonely, for example, but an actor cannot play loneliness in the abstract. The actor needs playable action: hiding a letter, making a joke, refusing to sit, touching a prop, changing the subject, offering help, withholding help. The audience then infers loneliness, denial, shame, desire, courage, need, cowardice, or other meaning through what happens in front of them.

Moving From Analysis to Enactment

The Create Workshop gives writers tools to make that relationship visible. It asks playwrights to identify frontside elements: people, places, objects, symbols, events, activities. It asks them to chart attributes and associations connected to those elements. It asks them to find motifs, then motif clusters, then subthemes and primary themes. It asks them to define protagonist, place, and problem. It asks whether the story is built through motivated causal logic: characters act because of objectives, circumstances, backstory, and who they are. It prompts writers to evaluate turning points because they change the protagonist’s perspective and motivation. Another tool, the Push-Pull Chart, tests whether a plot line is actually moving through a conflict between meaningful opposing forces, rather than merely arranging events in order.

This tablework side of development helps the playwright ask: What is already here? What keeps recurring? What has the draft accidentally revealed? What is the protagonist’s problem? What pressure is moving the play forward? Do the backside and frontside conflict match?

The New Works Workshop tests those discoveries under theatrical circumstances. It moves the play from analysis to enactment. A director works with actors. The playwright hears rhythm, confusion, humor, silence, pace, resistance, and emotional logic. The action on stage shows what the script is doing, not what the playwright hoped it would do. Such a revelation can be uncomfortable, but it is a discomfort all playwrights need.

The feedback philosophy behind the workshops is based on utility and truth. Ciji Guerin, who developed both workshops and the playwrights’ process of moving between them, says playwrights often receive feedback that is vague, sugarcoated, opinionated, or full of unsolicited fixes. Her argument in Seeking a Better Feedback Process for Playwrights is not that playwrights should be protected from hard information. The opposite is true. The information must be useful. The goal of one who offers feedback is not to become a critic who judges the play from the outside, but to become a careful witness who helps the playwright understand what the work is communicating.

That principle makes both workshops useful. The Create tablework process can become overwhelming if collaborators start prescribing what the play needs. The New Works Workshop can become damaging if actors, directors, or listeners respond with personal taste masquerading as truth.

The productive questions are not about whether a play is good. The productive questions are: What story do you see? What relationships do you understand? What motifs are repeating? What is confusing? What did the actor need but not get? What did the audience receive that the writer did not realize was on the page?

Excavating Deeper Meanings

The playwrights’ own reflections from the Create Workshop and New Works Workshop show why this process works.

Playwright Wayne Harrel says his Create Workshop experiences revealed to him how a writer’s stated subject may not actually be the play’s deepest subject. In an reflection called, “Journey to the Center of the Self,” he notes how characters often move through two journeys at once: the conscious or frontside goal they know they are pursuing, and the unconscious or backside goal they do not yet understand. He applies the same discovery to himself as a playwright. He initially thought his play was about forgiving someone before it’s too late, he says. But after studying the elements he had actually put into the script, he realizes the deeper subject was how to achieve personal independence.

The tablework process has helped him see what his own material is doing, he adds. “Time to revise and reconfigure.”

The Create Workshop enables participants to audit intuition. A playwright may arrive with a conscious premise, but the actual draft may be carrying a different backside significance. The workshop tools help the writer detect the mismatch and work with it. Once such a mismatch is visible, revision becomes structural and thematic reorientation.

In other reflections, Brad Bolchunos points out how the Create process forces selectivity. Early drafts of a play often feel alive because they contain many possible plays, and that openness can be intoxicating. It can also become paralyzing. In a reflection called, “I Felt a Troglodyte in My Brain,” he says one sorting exercise resembled a Choose Your Own Adventure book because it forced him to pick one path and stick to it. This is something he needs, he says, even though constraints make him feel restless and “wiggly.”

In the process of writing, a play’s infinite possibilities must collapse. The writer must make choices about the world, the protagonist, the problem, the pressure, the recurring images, the oppositions, and the turning points that will limit everything else. The Create Workshop helps writers to make those choices concrete enough to examine. It gives the writer a way to choose without simply guessing. Bolchunos says it requires him to accept the path he picked and build it “brick by brick.”

A later reflection deepens this point. In “Event Horizon,” Bolchunos notes how the workshop’s black-hole metaphor helped him understand a blind spot as “an area of avoidance we can’t quite recognize in our own work.” Playwrights are often least able to see the thing they are most carefully avoiding. Other writers at the table may see and help to point out the “gravitational pull” of that avoidance. The process does not make blind spots painless, but it gives the writer a context for facing them.

Bolchunos also connects the New Works Workshop to the same demand for theatrical commitment. In “Momentous Moments,” he describes learning how playwrights must not merely describe the world of the play, but create it through moments actors can inhabit.

“It’s the playwright’s responsibility to consistently and meaningfully create our worlds on stage,” he says.

The Create Workshop helps define the world’s logic. The New Works Workshop tests whether actors can enter that world moment by moment.

J Aron Braide, writing as John Servilio, reflects on the physical aspects of tablework in the course of grappling with concepts and abstractions. In “My Play (A Visual Representation),” he describes working on dry-erase sheets spread across a large table, hashing out ideas, photographing the work, and going home to try to make sense of it. The process can feel profound and energizing in the room, only to become bewildering later when the writer looks back at the visual record and feels “sure of nothing.”

That uncertainty becomes part of the process. The work at the table often externalizes thought before thought is fully organized. It lets the writer and collaborators see patterns forming before the playwright can explain them cleanly. Not that every scribble becomes part of the final play, he says, but the Create materials help the patterns become visible enough to handle.

Servilio elaborates on the power of teamwork in this effort. The group writes down motifs they see in the play, then looks for motifs that belong together in clusters. This exercise becomes part of a way “to define the world of our play, and see how all the people and the settings fit into this world.” Motifs building to subthemes and themes are how a play teaches the audience what kind of world it is watching. If people, places, objects, and actions keep pointing toward related meanings, the world begins to cohere.

His reflections on his play Candied, a contemporary riff on Voltaire’s Candide, also shows how the process connects craft to personal artistic discovery. He describes a naive, compassionate hero overwhelmed by people telling him to protect his pleasurable things, who is then besieged by con artists and wartime suffering, and finally discovers that acting on his compassionate nature brings true happiness. Writing the play, he says, has helped him understand that even with little control in the world, he still has power to effect change.

Countering Abstraction

The Create process can help a writer locate their own discoveries embodied in the play’s journey.

Emilie Landmann’s “Specificity: A Storytelling Focus Tool” shows the Create tools helping a writer escape abstraction. “I am a chronic overthinker,” she notes. She wants to know all the answers before she writes. Where is the story going? What is she trying to say? Who are the characters? What is the plot? The result, to her, is familiar: the story remains in her head.

She describes a premise of a piece she is developing: A woman accidentally hits a bicyclist with her car on a deserted road. She has a setup, but not yet a sequence of actions. “I have the characters, yet no actions,” she adds. Her response is to use the Elements Chart, listing every tangible thing she has so far, and finding the associations and attributes of each item. She starts with transportation, cell phones, connection to the outside world, a broken phone, no insurance, a first-aid kit, a car, and a bicycle.

Beginning with what is concrete, she finds herself asking: What kind of car? What kind of bike? Who has a working phone? Who does not? Who has insurance? Who has a first-aid kit? That leads her to ask questions such as: What does that reveal about class, preparation, care, responsibility, fear, guilt, self-image, or power?

A clean Smart car belongs to a different character than a dirty 2000 Honda Accord with scratches and dents, she observes. The Elements Chart gives her a way to move from objects to meaning, from meaning to possible action, from possible action to story. For a writer stuck in abstract overthinking, the tool provides a practical entry point by starting with the specific things on stage.

Redmond Reams, in “The Exquisite Art of Floundering,” adds a necessary corrective to any fantasy that a good process makes writing tidy. He describes himself as “floundering towards progress.” He is getting somewhere, but not linearly. A plot point that feels clear one week becomes unstable the next because another change has altered its function. That tweak then forces a change somewhere else.

But participants agree with him that this challenge is evidence that the process is doing real work. Change one major element of a play and the effects of that change will manifest elsewhere. If a character’s motivation changes at the midpoint, the crisis may no longer land. If the crisis shifts, the primary thematic conflict may need to be clarified.

Reams interrogages his sense of floundering, asking whether the play is moving toward “greater clarity and depth.” If yes, he concludes, the effort is productive. The Create Workshop does not eliminate ambiguity, but helps writers to evaluate whether it is leading somewhere.

Accommodating Doubt

Jonathan Hernandez, in “To Boldly Go,” brings in another part of the development process that craft discussions often underplay: doubt. Before nearly every workshop, Hernandez admits, he feels excitement and anxiety. He likes helping others with their stories and learning to become a better storyteller, but he also hears the question: “Am I doing writing wrong?”

Every serious workshop process must account for such questions. A room full of smart people discussing motifs, themes, major dramatic questions, and plot logic can easily make a writer feel exposed. Hernandez finds his way by trusting in the process and persistence, reminding himself that he is learning to become a better writer “each and every day.” His final instruction is simple: “Just write.”

Development of new work demands not only analysis, but also stamina. An effective process does not remove doubt, but it does not allow doubt to stop the work.

Eve Johnstone considers both the Create and New Works Workshop across multiple stages of development with her play Itch, about three women and their experiences with self-harm. From the beginning, Johnstone names an artistic problem with precision. In “Starting Fresh by Looking Back,” she notes she is writing from personal experience, but she does not want to “archive” her past. She wants to ask questions: “Do other people think like this? Have others crossed the same lines?” She wants to address self-harm in a true-to-life, non-romanticized, personal manner without reenactment or unnecessary trauma for affected audience members. She also wants to avoid writing an “Issue Play.”

A different development process might treat the subject matter itself as the play’s justification. But Johnstone asserts how she understands that subject matter alone does not make drama. She has to build a theatrical world, a structure, a tone, a set of motifs, and a form that can hold the material without turning it into lecture or self-pity.

The Create Workshop gives her a way to think about that process. She identifies puppets as a motif, half-joking that for this playwright the immediate answer is always puppets. But she goes on to recognize they introduce play, awkwardness, displacement, theatricality, and humor into a subject that could otherwise become punishingly direct. A puppet can interrupt danger. A puppet can let a character say what cannot be said straight. A puppet can make the audience laugh and then realize what is sitting adjacent to the laugh.

Then New Works Workshop tests scenes with actors. Johnstone brings a scene in which a girl ready to self-harm is interrupted by another girl with finger puppets. Johnstone says she arrives to the workshop terrified because, unlike earlier work adapted from source material, this play comes from “a place that is purely my own.” But the New Works Workshop gives her information she could not get alone. The director helps her understand the limited space based on the bathroom setting and the difficult tonal balance the actors must strike.

Instead of simply telling her to heighten conflict between the two characters, she says, the workshop shows her how the scene is revolves around tension and negotiation with a razor, as well as shame, interruption, unexpected care, and the possibility of being seen.

It also shows her what is not yet working. The real moments puncturing the awkward comedy arrive too quickly, she says. “This is something I wouldn’t have known without seeing actors on their feet.”

With subsequent work, the lessons become more structural. She brings another Itch scene, this one featuring Marion, a young woman who tries to make something externally bad happen to match how bad she feels internally, and Sam, an EMT who interrupts the plan by wanting breakfast on a bench. Johnstone’s stated goal is to learn whether the two scenes she has brought belong in the same world.

In “Thin Ice,” Johnstone brings a third major scene, “The Drinking Scene,” about Ruth and a narcissistic inner voice. Ruth speaks to people at a party, but the audience only hears Ruth and the inner voice. Johnstone wants to know how well the concept will translate onstage. She also identifies the emerging form of Itch as an anthology play: vignettes connected by the theme of self-harm and coping with the violence of one’s mind.

The Create process helps her track recurring motifs and themes, and the New Works Workshop helps her test form, tone, staging, actor need, and audience comprehension. The result for her is a clearer sense of what kind of theatrical container the material requires.

In “Transforming Setbacks into Inspiration,” Johnstone offers another insight. Because of a computer problem, she cannot participate as a playwright and instead observes and reads as an actor. That experience allows her to watch other playwrights give their work to a director “without getting the chance to explain and excuse and apologize.” Seeing first-hand whether the script can stand without the playwright’s defense reinforces how, in production, the writer cannot step onto the stage and explain the intention. The workshop rehearses that reality while there is still time to revise.

Facing Intention and Reception

Nancy Campbell’s account of workshops of her play, Girl No. 102, reveals for her the difference between intention and reception. Campbell begins with images: a dark, heightened psychological horror world, recognizable but not naturalistic. In “The World of the Play: An Unrehearsed Reading Experience of Girl No. 102,” she is thinking about questions such as “Can monsters love?” and “Which of the characters is the monster?” She believes she is writing about Marilyn, a woman whose long-term self-deceit has compromised her perspective and who hides within an elevated world while procuring young women for herself and others.

Before the reading, Campbell works with dramaturg Ciji Guerin on a one-sentence synopsis: “When a young girl is kidnapped and held against her will, she finds herself unable to tell who is the monster that took her and who is the ally that’s trying to help her get free.” At that moment, the sentence seems to fit the draft’s intent.

The reading changes the question.

As Campbell listens, she begins to wonder whether the play is focused on Girl No. 102’s search for her sister or Marilyn’s fraying mind. Marilyn’s journey becomes more interesting to her as an audience member. The conflict she cares about, truth versus appearances, seems more strongly served by Marilyn’s games, social position, and self-protective double life than by Girl No. 102’s pursuit of a confession.

The talkback then provides the evidence. The first question to the audience focuses on the story they perceived, not whether they liked it. That keeps the focus on reception, not judgment. One listener sees a girl who discovers she is a victim of control and manipulation and then turns the tables. Another hears the story shift into one about a powerful person losing status. Campbell realizes she has not communicated the story she thought she had written. The audience focused on Girl No. 102’s journey, not Marilyn’s. Girl No. 102, as the perceived victim, had their empathy.

The actors provide another layer of evidence. Campbell hears responses that frame Marilyn as imprisoned, suicidal, losing her grip on reality, or trapped in a bizarre alternate world. The responses reveal how the draft is invites multiple explanations because its world and central arc are not yet clear enough.

This is hard feedback, but it is not vague. It tells Campbell exactly what the draft is and is not communicating. The world is not defined enough. The focus is not where she thought it was. The actors are inventing explanations because the script has not yet given them sufficient causal and theatrical grounding. The moments may work, but the larger story arc is not yet tying them together.

Campbell’s conclusion is practical. She sees her next step as connecting the “bits” into a story arc. She also recognizes a larger formal lesson: a full-length play is not just a longer ten-minute play. It gives more room to explore thematic ideas, but it also demands stronger architecture.

Setting Paths on the Writing Journey

The Create Workshop gives the playwright tools for the architecture of their work. The New Works Workshop reveals where architecture is missing.

Taken together, these playwright reflections make a compelling case for Create Workshop and New Works Workshop as an effective development model. They do not solve problems, but help playwrights to frame more helpful next questions on their writing journeys.

Harrel discovers that his play is about personal independence, not simply forgiveness. Bolchunos learns that he must choose a path and face blind spots. Servilio sees motifs as a way to define the world of his play. Landmann turns a vague setup into tangible elements that can lead to action. Reams learns to trust non-linear floundering when it moves the play toward clarity and depth. Hernandez locates doubt as part of the learning process rather than proof of failure. Johnstone tests tone, actor need, motif, world, and form. Campbell learns that the audience is following a different protagonist and a different story than the one she intended.

A development process should not flatter the playwright, nor overwhelm the playwright with fixes, nor reduce the play to group taste. It should help the writer understand the work more truthfully.

The Create Workshop is effective because it turns the playwright’s set of ideas into observable relationships. It asks writers to name what is concrete, what repeats, what connects, what conflicts, what changes, and what the protagonist is forced to face. It gives writers a vocabulary for the difference between the frontside story and the backside themes. It reveals whether the play has unity of action and unity of meaning.

The New Works Workshop is effective because it tests that developing structure in the actual medium of theatre. Plays are not meant to live only in the writer’s imagination. Actors reveal playable action. Directors reveal staging logic. Audiences reveal the story they receive. The playwright learns where the work is alive, where it is overexplained, where it is underbuilt, where it is funnier than expected, where the emotional turn comes too quickly, where the world is unclear, and where the wrong character is carrying the audience’s empathy.

The two workshops together protect playwright agency. They do not ask the writer to obey the responses they hear. They give the writer evidence from what comes out of the page and onto the stage. The playwright still decides what the play is. But after the tablework and the work with actors, directors, and feedback, playwrights are no longer alone with a vague feeling that something is wrong. They have names for the parts. They have seen which choices communicate well. They have a clearer sense of what the play wants to become.

A process like this does not make writing easy. It may make writing harder for a while because it reveals the real problems with a draft. But that is the point. A useful process does not protect playwrights from difficulty. Instead, it helps playwrights understand the difficulties so they can move forward.

The Create Workshop and New Works Workshop function effectively because they give the writers tools, collaborative witnesses, theatrical evidence, and paths to revision. The result is not a shortcut to a finished play, but something better—a disciplined way to find the play that is already beginning to take shape.