During my tenure as chief drama critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, we covered more plays in more Wisconsin theaters than at any time in the newspaper’s long history. And yet.

We barely scratched the surface of what’s on stage on any given day in the state of Wisconsin. Although I saw and wrote about more than 200 plays every year, there were just as many productions I missed.

Don’t believe me?

Thanks to Spring 2023’s World Premiere Wisconsin – a first-of-its-kind play festival featuring all new plays that will debut across Wisconsin through June – you’ll get to see for yourself how much is out there.

Featuring nearly fifty world premiere productions unfolding on festival theater stages from Mineral Point to Door County and from Eau Claire to Milwaukee, World Premiere Wisconsin is not only the first such statewide festival to ever be staged in Wisconsin. It’s also the first such statewide festival to be mounted anywhere in the United States.

As if that isn’t enticement enough, audience members can sign up at World Premiere Wisconsin’s website for a WPW digital passport and rack up points every time they attend a WPW show. Points will be redeemable for rewards; collect enough of them and you’ll be entered into a festival drawing giving you a season’s pass to every WPW theater.

Making it New

At the time of the 2008-09 financial meltdown, two thirds of theaters surveyed for a landmark study on the new American play believed that it had become harder (58 percent) or much harder (9 percent) to develop new plays during the preceding decade. Three quarters of these theaters pointed to challenging financial circumstances in explaining why they couldn’t risk staging new
work that would, by definition, be unfamiliar to their patrons.

Things are even worse now.

Creating a festival as ambitious as World Premiere Wisconsin – involving all new work, in a state that regularly ranks near the bottom in public arts funding – would merit a standing ovation in even the best of times. For arts organizations battered by the pandemic and still rebuilding audiences, the current moment often more closely resembles the worst.

But new work is also the lifeblood of the American theater, which is why Mark Clements, Jennifer Uphoff Gray, and Jeff Herbst – the artistic directors, respectively, of Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Forward Theater, and Northern Sky Theater – have all consistently championed new work. It’s no accident that these three theaters are the lead WPW producers.

Gray has been dreaming of a celebration like this for years; as she rightly noted in an Isthmus interview last November with Madison-based theater critic Gwendolyn Rice, “little attention is paid nationally to the exceptional theater created in this country” unless it comes from Chicago or New York.

She’s right, making me all the more excited to contemplate a nearly five-month stretch during which I’ll be crisscrossing Wisconsin to share my thoughts with you on festival productions in a variety of media outlets, including World Premiere Wisconsin’s newsletter and blog.

I’ll report on festival productions I’ve seen. Share profiles of various festival artists. Perhaps most important, I’ll try to suss out some of the common themes festival shows explore. New plays invariably reflect and challenge the world in which they’re made. A festival like WPW offers a rare opportunity to look at a substantial cross-section of such plays, giving us a kaleidoscopic view of the fraught moment in which we live – and daring us to imagine how it might be different and better.

Connecting the Dots

I’ll go further still: A festival like World Premiere Wisconsin allows seemingly unrelated plays to enter into conversation with each other. And as with any good dialogue, every participant becomes more nuanced as a result, while also becoming more appreciative of all they share with people and places with which they’ve rarely interacted.

Here’s an illustrative examples of what I mean.

Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers, now playing at Milwaukee Rep as the first-opened of WPW’s plays, gives voice to Asian immigrants to 1970s America, where their efforts to adjust to the New World jostle with nostalgia for the one left behind. How might Suh’s play affect how we see Play-by-Play Theatre’s Lincoln & Liberty Too in DePere come May, as it examines how an immigrant’s pursuit of the American Dream is tested by the crucible of the American Civil War?

How might these two plays inform how we experience Out of the Blue when it’s unveiled in Green Bay in June, given that this new musical features an adopted orphan’s search for her South Korean roots?

How is the way we process that orphan’s angst regarding an unexpected teen pregnancy shaped by Hush the Waves, through which Strollers Theatre will juxtapose two such pregnancies when this new Sam White play opens in Madison in April?

Four plays – Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Hoops, BlackArts MKE’s Zuri’s Crown, American Players Theatre’s The Barber and the Unknown Prince, and First Stage’s adaptation of India Hill Brown’s The Forgotten Girl – are among the WPW plays excavating African-American history and culture in a country that often ignores both.

Two Madison premieres – Forward Theater’s production of Lauren Gunderson’s Artemisia and TNW Ensemble Theatre’s A Woman Is . . . – profile charismatic and strong-willed women trying to find their way in a world they never made.

Multiple offerings involve how we rework old stories, from Greek myths and Grimm fairy tales through Mozart operas and American folklore. There’s even multiple festivals within the festival: three WPW events each showcase multiple short plays.

What all of these WPW plays have in common is that they’re brand new, ensuring that connections like those I’m tentatively suggesting here will be revised as these premieres are born in Wisconsin before making their way into the world. I can’t wait to see them come to life alongside you.