Actor and playwright Gavin Lawrence’s The Barber and the Unnamed Prince – which will be unveiled Monday night in a sold-out reading in American Players Theatre’s Touchstone Theatre – may be APT’s entry in the World Premiere Wisconsin festival of new plays.

But it’s actually the third such world premiere introduced by APT this year courtesy of its wildly popular Winter Words program, through which APT has been taking a close look at mostly new and newish plays since APT Artistic Director Brenda DeVita began the program in 2015.

“This year all three of our Winter Words readings were either original pieces or adaptations by Core Company actors,” noted APT Managing Director Sara Young via email.

In early February, the 2023 edition of Winter Words began with Nate Burger’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Two weeks later, David Daniel followed his 2021 adaptation for APT of Oedipus Rex with Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, an aggregation of six Greek plays focusing on the often fraught relationship between sacrifice, duty, and revenge.

This 2023 Winter Words hattrick follows another: Last summer, all three of APT’s Touchstone plays – Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size, Marisela Treviño Orta’s The River Bride, and Jen Silverman’s The Moors – made their debut at APT as Winter Words readings.

Each of those plays was written in the 21st century. Excepting productions of plays by Chekhov and Shaw, APT had barely journeyed into the 20th century when the 21st began.

Grow or Die

“If we don’t challenge our audience and ourselves, both in tackling new plays and seeing new things in those we’ve done before, we’ll become predictable and die,” DeVita said to me nearly a decade ago, as she became APT’s Artistic Director. “We need to ensure that our actors grow on stage, just as they do at every point in their lives,” she continued.

“As the world moves, we need to move with it,” DeVita then said to me in 2015, the year APT launched Winter Words. “We need to exhibit greater diversity on our stage – which, hopefully, also results at some point in greater diversity within our audience.”

Despite APT’s grounding in a classical canon that’s stuffed with dead white men, one third of its Winter Words readings have featured plays by global majority playwrights; the audience response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“For years – a decade at least – we’d done play readings with our acting company so the artistic staff can hear them out loud and see which of them might be an option for future seasons,” Young said.

“At some point, Brenda suggested maybe we could invite an audience to watch and discuss their reaction afterwards,” Young continued. “We had no idea if anyone would be interested – getting to APT in the winter months is not for the faint of heart. But Winter Words turned out to be popular.”

Did I mention that Monday night’s reading is sold out?

Creating the Classics of Tomorrow

Winter Words isn’t the only program through which APT is looking forward rather than backward.

Two years ago, APT launched “New Voices: Creating the Classics of Tomorrow,” with a stated goal of focusing on new plays written by global majority playwrights, thereby helping “expand the ‘classical canon’ through the incorporation of new classics.”

Former APT Artistic Associate Jake Penner, who played an integral role in developing the New Voices initiative and who will be directing at APT this summer, explained at the time New Voices was introduced why such a program was necessary.

“If APT was going to continue its mission of providing great, timeless poetic works for everybody, while at the same time expanding the company of artists to more equitably reflect the world around us, then we were going to have to create work that didn’t need to be bent to suit who we now were,” Penner said.

Instead, he continued, APT would need to stage work that “had room enough to accommodate our DNA in its current, more inclusive form from the outset. In other words, we were going to have to write some plays.”

Lawrence’s play fits the bill.

Given that Lawrence is already an established playwright who helped develop New Voices and who participates in selecting New Voices plays, The Barber and the Unnamed Prince isn’t being presented under the auspices of the New Voices initiative.

But as another installment in Lawrence’s longstanding exploration through his plays of Black life in Washington, D.C., the debut of Barber on Monday night is consistent with Penner’s vision of what New Voices might accomplish in the years to come.

APT describes Barber as the story of how “a local icon’s death signals the end of an era and the beginning of a new look for a once predominantly African American neighborhood in Washington,” where Lawrence spent much of his childhood before attending Howard University there.

“Most of my plays have been set in D.C.,” Lawrence said in 2019 interview with Madison journalist Lindsay Christians.

“I am interested in illuminating how that place has changed for me, how it doesn’t feel as warm, like home, as it used to,” Lawrence continued. “And I am passionate about presenting African American men in a different relief than they’re normally seen. All my plays grapple with what that means.”

We’ll know much more about what Lawrence’s play means and how it lands come Monday; what makes a festival of world premieres so special is that each new production is akin to unwrapping yet another present and being surprised yet again by what’s new.

Young is optimistic that APT will soon give us more of the same, thanks to the inaugural play in the New Voices program.

“Wildfire (working title) by Reginald A. Jackson is in progress and received its first workshop last fall,” Young said via email about the first New Voices offering. “We hope the first public reading will be part of our 2024 Winter Words series.”

Young’s future forecast drives home a larger point about the Badger State’s commitment to world premieres, both before and after as well as during the official dates of World Premiere Wisconsin.

A festival like WPW doesn’t happen – indeed couldn’t have happened, or even have been conceived – if Wisconsin didn’t already have a substantial and ongoing history, spread across many companies, of creating and championing new work.

The WPW festival isn’t a one-off. It’s simply a showcase, highlighting what’s long made Wisconsin theater special, from companies like Northern Sky Theater that regularly create new musicals to companies like APT, eagerly looking to the future even as it continually explores new ways of imagining the past.

Monday’s reading at APT of The Barber and the Unnamed Prince is sold out. For more information regarding APT’s upcoming 2023 season, visit https://americanplayers.org/plays.