Orlando Shakes Up Their Sponsorships
In October and November 2023 the Orlando Shakes in Partnership with UCF presented their annual PlayFest new reading festival. The festival typically runs for two consecutive weeks where we host six different playwrights from all over the country, and their works as they undergo a 20-hour developmental workshop.
Photo by Caroline Hull. Pictured L to R: Jim Helsinger, Diana Butbano, and Roberta Emerson.
Playwrights are flown in and spend the week on site working closely with professional actors and local directors to hear their playout loud and develop their pieces. With the festival falling over two weeks, three different playwrights per week get the opportunity to hear their words out loud and make changes in the room and sometimes even completely rewrite scenes. All of this work ultimately culminates in the opportunity to present their work in front of an audience as a staged reading. The audience participates in a talkback with the playwright and director immediately following the reading where the playwrights get the chance to speak about their plays, hear specific feedback and answer audience questions.
This year’s featured playwrights were:
The Facts are as Follows: by Christopher Washington
who hurt you? By Katie Đỗ
Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars By Sandra Delgado
Only Some of God’s Children or Mississippi Magnolias By Paris Crayton III
Beheading Columbus By Diana Burbano
AGATHE by Angela J. Davis
One of the things that I think made our festival stand out from previous ones was how we did our sponsorships, an innovative feat spearheaded by Roberta Emerson, Director of New Play Development.
Historically PlayFest always has had some kind of sponsor that funds the entire festival as a whole and then we’ll take any additional donations as they come in. This season, however, instead of just having a sponsor of the festival only, we had donors both familiar to the company and new, to step up to “sponsor” one of the shows at $1,000 even going so far as having one person sponsor two playFest shows.
With this sponsorship model donor contributions are able to go so much further than just financially providing for the festival. The sponsorship itself provides a stronger connection to the playwright and the playwright, in turn is connected with someone with the financial means to connect and possibly even follow their work as it grows.
Sponsors were given opportunities to meet one-on-one with the playwright of the show they sponsored and chat with them; a few took the playwrights out for coffee or lunch to pick their brains and get to know them. For this past festival we held events prior to our Saturday evening readings where attendees and donors got opportunities to join the playwrights before the readings to chat and converse with them about their works while enjoying a nice meal.
It makes a world of difference, especially for shows like who hurt you? by Katie Đỗ that features a primarily female Asian-American cast. A casting pool that requires hiring actors that. Unfortunately, our local area isn’t abundant in, which then makes casting much more difficult in normal circumstances. However,with these sponsorships our organization is able to look out of state and fly actors in for shows that need out of town actors.
Photo by Caroline Hull. Playfest Dinner.
The idea behind this new way of sponsorship is to provide a life after the festival is over. The reasoninging is because there are many festivals that do great work in promoting new works but there’s also an unfortunate amount of plays that plateau and whose futures stall after the initial reading, a lot that get stuck in reading purgatory. With this model we’re able to start to undo the transactional relationship between playwrights and donors and personalize it by providing longevity for the life of a new play.