On this podcast, PlayPenn artistic director Paul Meshejian discusses the PlayPenn Annual Conference. I spoke with Meshejian in 2013 about the conference; since then, many plays that have been workshopped there have helped shaped the national conversation around contemporary theater. These new plays transfer from the conference to regional stages, and J.T. Rogers’s drama Oslo, about the negotiations surrounding the Oslo Accords, opens on Broadway April 13, 2017, featuring New Paradise Laboratories founding member and longtime Philly actor Jeb Kreager.

The highlight reel

PlayPenn describes itself as "an artist-driven organization dedicated to improving the way in which new plays are developed. Employing an ever-evolving process, PlayPenn creates a relaxed tension within which playwrights can engage in risk-taking, boundary-pushing work free from the pressures of commercial consideration."

Some of the conference's esteemed graduates and awards include:

• MacArthur Fellowship: Samuel D. Hunter (PlayPenn 2010)

• Whiting Award: James Ijames (PlayPenn 2013, 2015)

• Guggenheim Fellowship: Gabriel Jason Dean (PlayPenn 2013), Jordan Harrison (PlayPenn 2005), J.T. Rogers (PlayPenn 2005, 2009, 2015)

• Lilly Award for Playwriting: Lucy Thurber (PlayPenn 2005)

• Pew Fellowship: James Ijames (PlayPenn 2013, 2015)

• Sky Cooper Prize for American Playwriting: Samuel D. Hunter (PlayPenn 2010), Martin Zimmerman (PlayPenn 2012)

• American Theatre Critics Association's Osborn Award: Jonathan James Norton (PlayPenn 2012)

• Susan Smith Blackburn Prize: Sheila Callaghan (PlayPenn 2005)

• Terrence McNally New Play Award: James Ijames (White, 2015)

• Barrymore Award for Best New Play: R. Eric Thomas (Time Is on Our Side, PlayPenn 2015), Michael Hollinger (Ghost-Writer, PlayPenn 2009), Jacqueline Goldfinger (Slip/Shot, PlayPenn 2011)

• Top 10 Plays, New York Times: J.T. Rogers (Oslo, PlayPenn 2015; Blood and Gifts, PlayPenn 2009)

• Top 10 Plays, Time Magazine: J.T. Rogers (The Overwhelming, PlayPenn 2005)

On this podcast, we meet Mindy Dougherty, co-founder with Dan Dunn of Midtown Village's musical-theater training program Music Theatre Philly. Both Dougherty and Dunn have Broadway bona fides, and they have worked on some of the region's best-known stages. The company offers a unique blend of classes for both children and adults with "quadruple threat" aspirations: acting, voice, (several types of) dance, and music (guitar and piano).

Mind the gap

About 20 years ago, Dougherty noticed a gap between what she learned in Philadelphia's performance-training programs and the skills she saw in students coming out of a comprehensive independent program in Pittsburgh. She worked and attended graduate school in New York, but when she returned home to Philadlephia, she realized nobody in this city had stepped in during the intervening years to fill that gap. That's where Music Theatre Philly comes in, and Dougherty hopes it will help create this city's next generation of great stage talent.

On today’s podcast, we interview Thomas Choinacky to talk about his new work, A User’s Manual. Choinacky is the founder, producer, and co-curator of SoLow Fest, an 11-day festival of solo experimental performance in Philadelphia. He is also a company member of Applied Mechanics, a devised, collaborative theater ensemble. At the time of the interview, Choinacky was on location at Washington College in Maryland with Applied Mechanics for a residency of their FringeArts production, FEED.

Step into my parlor

A User's Manual is a solo performance designed to respond to the body's constant manipulation by the architecture that surrounds us. Drawing attention to structures, sounds, textures, and history, each site-specific performance catalogues the memory of its place. In Choinacky's own words, he attempts to make "visible how humans are constantly affected by the surroundings we pass through and by the architecture we build." This interview goes deep into Choinacky's philosophy of creating a performance and considers the spaces we occupy.

InterAct Theatre Company's world premiere of Mary Tuomanen's MARCUS/EMMA brings together Jewish immigrant and anarchist Emma Goldman and Jamaican immigrant and pan-African movement leader Marcus Garvey. Both were turn-of-the-20th-century activists deported from the United States, and in Tuomanen's drama, they meet in a sort of purgatory for a no-holds-barred, sex-fueled, bloody-minded battle to rekindle the smoldering flames of their legacies.

In this REP Radio interview, Akeem Davis, who plays Garvey, and Susan Riley Stevens, who plays Goldman, discuss what their characters' lives and actions mean today and how much more relevant they've become since the presidential election. You might even say the world has turned into the show's director's notes! The play is also intensely physical, and the actors discuss how they prepared for their roles, the many contrasts between their characters, and the way those contrasts are highlighted by InterAct's design team.

Stevens has been acting professionally in Philadelphia since 2001, won a 2007 Barrymore Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance in Act II Playhouse's production of Bad Dates. She also happens to be married to another Philly favorite, actor Greg Wood. Davis arrived in Philadelphia in 2011, has appeared on area stages almost constantly since then, and in 2015 won the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Artist.