• Casting: Bomber Jackets
• Open Auditions: Misfit One Acts
• Coral & Heart, Student Film
• Short Film- Yes, Yesterday

THEATER
• A Brush with Georgia O'Keeffe
• A Perfect Couple
• Vincent River
FILM
• "Trumbo"

Its five-year mission: to seek out new plays

With 450 performances under its belt, the Summer Play Festival must be doing something right.

Five years ago, Tony Award-winning producer Arielle Tepper Madover, troubled by the lack of opportunities for playwrights in New York City, came up with a simple idea: create a play festival to showcase the work of emerging scribes. While the concept may not seem revolutionary at face value, Tepper Madover’s version employed a formula that was uniquely friendly to undiscovered talent. She charged no application fees, openly encouraged unsolicited submissions, and offered full production support and professional guidance to the chosen playwrights. Additionally, by keeping ticket prices low (a mere $10), she made sure the plays had the most important element of all — an audience.       

The formula worked, and today Tepper Madover’s Summer Play Festival (SPF), which is produced by the non-profit Living Room for Artists, continues in its proud, pro-artist tradition. The event recently celebrated its five-year anniversary at the Union Square Ballroom, where Tepper Madover gushed over SPF’s ongoing success. “This has been a fantasy of mine for a long, long time — since I was in high school,” she told a packed crowd of theater artists and enthusiasts.

Play It Again: Effie Johnson and Shelly Stover in “Crooked,” part of the 2005 Summer Play Festival. The event just celebrated its five-year anniversary.

For its latest round of plays, which kicked off July 1, SPF is being held at Joseph Papp’s famed Public Theater, a venue that hints at SPF’s growing mainstream acceptance. Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said in a statement that SPF has become “an integral part of the New York theater scene.”

So what are your chances of having a play produced by SPF? Tepper Madover said the festival receives about 1,000 submissions per year, and, of those, eight are chosen for production. The selection process is meticulous, and each play is read multiple times by SPF staffers and volunteers. In the end, it all comes down to quality. “We don’t try to find specific genres,” Tepper Madover added. “We’re really just looking for good plays.” -Christopher Zara

The Summer Play Festival runs from July 1 - July 27 at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555