NNPN in the DC Metro: Theater Alliance & Round House Theatre

NNPN’s national impact is made possible by the extraordinary Member Theaters bringing bold, adventurous new work to communities across the country. Throughout this campaign, we’ll be spotlighting Member Theaters from our hub cities to celebrate the incredible diversity of theaters, audiences, and stories that make up our network.

Through June 30, 2026, all gifts will be matched up to $20,000 thanks to the generosity of NNPN founder David Goldman and Carol Dweck - extending the reach of every contribution in support of new plays and the theaters that champion them.

This week, we’re excited to feature two DC metro based Members: Theater Alliance (Core) and Round House Theatre (Associate).

The Washington D.C. area has long been rich in culture and the arts. NNPN's vision of a robust, equitable new-play ecology that centers a wide range of voices and aesthetics seems particularly apt here. The region's Member Theaters include legacy new-play-focused organizations and recent additions to the scene; multi-theater campuses and itinerant companies creating place-based work; plush and suburban regional theaters and raw spaces where anything feels possible.

This set of interviews introduces two organizations that embody that range: Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, and Theater Alliance, currently shaping a new home for its work and community on DC's waterfront.

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Tell us a little about your theater and your role in the local arts community.

Theater Alliance: Theater Alliance is Washington, DC's home for bold, justice-driven new work. We produce world premieres and DC premieres, center stories by and about communities historically underrepresented on American stages, and root our work in genuine civic engagement. As Executive Artistic Director, I lead the organization's artistic vision and operations, with a deep commitment to building a theater that is accountable to the city it serves.

Round House: Round House Theatre is a theatre for everyone, celebrating our 50th anniversary in the 2026–27 season. We enrich our community through bold theatrical and educational experiences that inspire empathy and demand conversation, establishing us as one of the leading theatres in the Washington, DC area.

We produce a wide range of work, from modern classics and musicals to new plays and have become known as a destination for new work. Since 2020, Round House has received more Helen Hayes nominations for new plays than any other local theatre.

What makes the theater scene in your city or region unique?

Theater Alliance: DC's theater community is exceptionally collaborative and also shaped in part by the city's own identity as a place where policy, power, and community intersect daily. Local theaters regularly cross-support each other's work, share audiences and artists, and engage with pressing civic questions together. That spirit of mutual investment makes DC a distinctive and generative place to make new work.

Round House: I think what really sets this region apart is the scale of the theatre community. There are more than 90 professional theatres producing work across the region, all part of one shared cultural ecosystem. In almost any other city, that kind of artistic output would define the place, but because DC is so associated with politics, people from outside the region often don’t realize just how robust the theatre scene really is.

The other piece is the audience. This is a very international, very cosmopolitan area, with people from all over the world. That is true in many cities, but what is unique here is how civically engaged people are. You have a huge number of highly educated folks who are directly involved in shaping, analyzing, or responding to what is happening in the country. That creates an audience that is deeply curious, thoughtful, and eager for theatre that engages with big ideas and encourages conversation.

How does your theater contribute to the development of new plays or playwrights in your area?

Theater Alliance: Theater Alliance is DC's dedicated home for DMV playwrights. Through HotHouse, our year-round new play development program exclusively open to DMV-based writers, we offer a full pipeline of support: an open submission process, workshops, dramaturgical development, paid artist opportunities, and a public festival. Now in its third year, HotHouse has received over 90 submissions annually from approximately 170 unique playwrights across its first two years, with 75% of featured playwrights identifying as BIPOC. The program culminates each spring in the HotHouse New Play Block Party, a multi-day festival of world-premiere excerpts, readings, and performances. We take pride in our local artists and invest in them structurally, not just project by project.

Round House: The biggest way we do this is through our commissioning program and the Bonnie Hammerschlag National Capital New Play Festival, which just marked its fifth year. We launched it coming out of the pandemic, at a time when many theatres were pulling back from new work, but we chose to invest more deeply instead. We began by producing multiple world premieres and readings, later refining the model, but keeping new plays at the center. Since then, every major theatre in the region has created its own new play festival, which speaks to the ripple effect this work has had in the area.

How has being part of NNPN influenced your theater’s work or approach to new play development?

Theater Alliance: One of NNPN's most significant investments in Theater Alliance has been the Producer in Residence program. For two years, NNPN provided salary support for our Producer in Residence, Aria Velz, alongside dedicated community support that allowed us to grow our team, deepen our infrastructure, and provide more sustained, meaningful support to the artists we work with. That kind of structural investment, focused on building capacity rather than funding a single project, has directly shaped how we think about supporting new work and the people who make it.

Round House: A big part of this comes from talking with playwrights through NNPN and really paying attention to what works and what does not. One of the most valuable things I learned through NNPN is that plays usually need two or three productions to truly find their form. For example, Chinese Republicans, which we’re producing next season, has already premiered at Roundabout Theatre and had multiple workshops. Many theatres would consider it complete; we don’t. I saw the New York production and immediately began conversations with the playwright about what could be strengthened next. Alex will be in residence with us throughout the process, something we usually reserve for world premieres, because we believe that if a playwright wants to keep developing the work, we should support that.

That’s core to our approach: we actively encourage continued development, no matter where a play has been produced before.

What is one NNPN-supported project, production, or collaboration that best represents your theater’s impact in your region?

Theater Alliance: The NNPN Venturous Production Pipeline Award supporting Soul Records by York Walker represents some of our most meaningful work. This investment has allowed us to deepen development of York's play while deepening our ongoing relationship with him as a playwright, demonstrating exactly the kind of sustained, long-view artist support we believe in.

Round House: I’d say the most recent example is Bad Books. It’s nominated for Best Production this year, I’ve been nominated for Best Director, and the play received five total Helen Hayes Award nominations. Beyond the awards, it’s already gone on to three other theatres, which really captures what NNPN programs can do to support new work.

How does being part of a national network like NNPN strengthen the work happening locally?

Theater Alliance: It contextualizes local work within a national field and signals to artists that their work has reach beyond a single city. For a theater like ours, that national affiliation also strengthens our credibility with partners and opens doors to resource-sharing that would otherwise be out of reach.

Round House: One of the biggest benefits right now is the network itself. I joined NNPN when it was only a few years old, and there were so few of us that you really knew everyone’s tastes. You could read a play and immediately know where it belonged—e.g. not right for Southern Rep, but perfect for Curious Theatre in Denver—and you’d make that call.

Even as NNPN has grown, that basic function still works. We can say, for example, Bad Books is a play you should see, and that gets it into the right hands. We don’t do that with everything—sometimes a play already has a clear development path, like Indian Princess moving from a workshop here to production at La Jolla and then off Broadway. But when it doesn’t, having that network to share strong new work is incredibly valuable.

Have you collaborated with other theaters or artists in your region through NNPN? If so, what has that experience been like?

Theater Alliance: We collaborate regularly with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Mosaic Theater Company - I sometimes call them our Big Sister Theaters. DC's theater community is genuinely supportive; relationships here tend to be substantive rather than transactional, and NNPN membership has reinforced that culture of connection and mutual investment.

Round House: We have collaborated extensively with other theatres in the region, though not directly through NNPN. For example, we’ve done several co‑productions with Olney Theatre Center, projects that likely wouldn’t have happened without the relationship Jason and I built while I was serving as NNPN president and he was executive director. I began my role here a year before he began his, but we came in with a shared history and a shared way of working.

That relationship and the belief that collaboration can build something bigger rather than forcing organizations to compete for smaller pieces led us, early in our tenures, to sit down and ask some fundamental questions: Do we share audiences? How much overlap is there? And can we share projects in ways that let us aim higher together?

Every time we’ve taken that approach, it’s been hugely successful. While these partnerships aren’t formally through NNPN, they’re a direct result of networked relationships and a commitment to collaboration.

If you could share one message about your theater and your region’s creative community with NNPN supporters and donors, what would it be?

Theater Alliance: DC is a city of artists, organizers, and storytellers who are doing some of the most vital theater in the country. Theater Alliance is proud to be part of that, and proud to connect that local energy to a national network that understands why new work matters.

Round House: The DC metro area has numerous NNPN members because this is an incredibly rich area for theater and for new works in particular. If you don’t know the DMV theater scene, I hope you’ll come check it out. We’d love to have you at Round House!

Theater Alliance