DORSET THEATRE FESTIVAL
PO Box 510, Dorset, VT 05251 dorsettheatrefestival.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: DTF's mission is to create bold, innovative, and authentic theatre that engages a diverse, multi-generational community, and economically diverse region: enlightening, entertaining, and inspiring our audience through the celebration of great plays.

From June to September, the Festival mounts four main stage productions, drawing from some of the country's most talented playwrights, actors and directors. *** Under the recent leadership of Artistic Director Dina Janis, the Festival is changing the landscape of regional theatre. Bold and innovative, Dorset Theatre Festival is garnering accolades for its commitment to new play development and is proud to encourage a new generation of playwrights to test their voices here. We discover new talent. We launch plays that go on to national acclaim and the lights of Broadway. We mount regional premiers of Tony Award-winning plays to bring the best of Off-Broadway to Vermont. *** Since 2010, our Giving Back partners have helped expand the reach of our productions and educational initiatives by providing reduced-cost tickets to select groups. These efforts reach a new generation of theatre audiences by giving all members of our community the chance to see world-class theatre. Our Giving Back Program provides Pay-What-You-Like tickets to those who serve our community each day (and their families!), including EMS workers, firefighters, police, veterans and active-duty military, farmers, special needs community members, student graduates of the Refuse to Use Program, Habitat for Humanity families and volunteers and Living Proof mentors and mentees. *** Dorset Theatre Festival's New Play Development Program works with playwrights from conception to production, providing an incubator to help nurture new voices to speak from their own experience, engaging ideas that come from and return to our community. *** The Pipeline Series features new works and projects in process through four one-night-only presentations each year. Today's top theatrical talents travel to Dorset to work on brand new plays or to try out brand new collaborations. The Pipeline Series is where today's new works become tomorrow's classics; many of the plays in the series will be featured in future Dorset Theatre main stage seasons. Connecting artists to the Festival through this development opportunity means our audience can say they were HERE when hits were born. *** Dorset Theatre Festival's New Play Reading Series features three established writers in public readings of new work in development. Writers are invited to spend several days in creative retreat at a scenic Dorset farmhouse with their chosen team of actors and director in an atmosphere in which there is no pressure for performance results: only a respect for process itself as the end goal. The culmination of this work is a public sharing of their exploration of a new work with our New Play Reading Series subscribers. In a short time, this series has become a successful, vibrant, and anticipated aspect of our summer program offerings. *** The Women Artists Writing Group is a diverse group of mid-career female actresses and theatre artists who are expanding their artistry through writing. The group's purpose is to meet the whole female theatre artists where she is at as a writer, providing resources and support as she works to either discover her own voice or works towards completing a writing project. Writing gives agency to female theatre artists, who attest to the powerful liberating effect on all aspects of their individual artistic selves. *** Through the Festival's Young Playwrights Program & Competition, we nurture the youngest of aspiring regional playwrights with a series of Playwriting Workshops in regional middle and high schools. These workshops are led by some of the top playwrights in the country and culminate in a performance each fall of all the winning plays, which are developed by students in conjunction with mentorship from Bennington College advanced playwriting students, through our Jean E. Miller Young Playwrights Competition. *** Our Annual Writers Retreat, now in its eighth year, is hosted by Dorset Theatre Festival Resident Playwright Theresa Rebeck and produced in collaboration with Lark Play Development Center in NYC. With this weeklong retreat, our goal is to create a nurturing and collaborative environment where participants set a high bar for themselves and their fellow writers, encouraging, challenging and inspiring each other to take risks and plunge deeply into the issues that speak to them. We have served as a home to some of the most innovative playwrights working today. *** Though the summer 2020 season was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Theatre 1) presented the "pipeline series" production of "Wingspan" virtually (and free of charge) , 2) held one in-person event ("Gorgeous Nothings") free of charge to the public and 3) conducted numerous activities related to its new play development program. ***

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