Bloomington Playwrights Project

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In 1980, in Bloomington, Indiana, the Bloomington Playwrights Project (BPP) was founded by two MFA students at Indiana University Bloomington, Tom Moseman and Jim Leonard. They sought to create a venue more hospitable to local playwrights than the staid university, and the theater became a scrappy and lively space where shoestring productions came together very quickly for short but energetic runs. Early productions at the BPP included Leonard’s And they Dance Real Slow in Jackson and Queen of Bakersfield by Greg Owens. The theater endured despite the constant turnover of personnel and participants that comes with being set in a college town, eventually establishing itself as the only theater in Indiana—and one of few theaters in the country—dedicated to producing only new plays.

Jim Leonard left Bloomington for Hollywood; his play The Diviners has been produced countless times nationwide, and he has gone on to write and produce for television, most recently the procedural series Close to Home on CBS.

In 1993, BPP benefactor Reva Shiner helped establish an annual new play competition, the Reva Shiner Full Length Play Contest, which gradually brought submissions of scripts from all around the country, including work from both established and up-and-coming playwrights. In its first year of existence the contest, which awards the winner both a cash prize and a full production, was won by Glenn Alterman and his play Nobody’s Flood. Subsequent winners include Between Men and Cattle by Richard Kalinoski; Sister Calling My Name by Buzz McLaughlin; Medea With Child by Janet Burroway; Alice in Ireland by Judy Sheehan; The Return of Morality by Jamie Pachino; Outrage by Itamar Moses; and Maleficia by Suzanne Wingrove. Many of these plays and playwrights have gone on to win additional awards and high-profile productions and to produce work on television, Off-Broadway, and elsewhere.

Other playwrights who’ve had work produced at the BPP include Wendy MacLeod, Don Zolidis, Toni Press-Coffman, Jim Henry, Arlene Hutton, OyamO, Trista Baldwin, Susan Lieberman, Marsha Estell, Janet Allard, Suzanne Bradbeer, and Sheila Callaghan.

Though the growing pains have sometimes been awkward and some past artistic directors have departed under less than harmonious conditions, the BPP has gradually expanded from a ragged band of unpaid and underpaid people in the beginning to a paid staff and dependable constituency of volunteers. It has grown from a simple black box to encompass both the Timothy J. Wiles mainstage as well as the Lora Shiner Studio theater spaces. And it’s gone from producing an ad hoc string of barely advertised productions to having a full subscription season along with—at various times in recent history—a drama school, children’s play festival, resident improv and sketch comedy, an edgy late-night theater series, and a cutting-edge cabaret series. In 2006 a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Arts subsidized a festival of plays by Latino and Latina writers.

Its budget is still slim compared to many theaters of its vintage, and production quality can vary wildly from show to show. An acute tension persists between local playwrights (who think the theater should prioritize staging their work) and the theater itself, which places importance on bringing in work by writers with a more national reputation. And neither of those priorities can inoculate the theater from sometimes mounting a script that's just plain bad. Still, the BPP remains one of the country’s few outlets devoted exclusively to producing—not just developing or commissioning—new and recent plays, with an ongoing commitment to providing playwrights with the always elusive second or third production of a work that might otherwise have languished after its premiere.