LAKE WORTH BEACH, FLA.: Launched in 2014, the New Play Exchange was designed as a way to increase the transparency and efficiency of the play-submission process. In the years since, the National New Play Network (NNPN) effort has attracted 32,000 subscribers and included profiles of more than 61,000 theatrical works from 13,000-plus living writers in 67 countries, and is available to more than two million college and university students.
Today NNPN is launching a new way to unlock the resources of NPX: two new Actor Pro subscriptions, at $10 monthly and $15 yearly, which will allow actors to search a growing library of more than 3,500 monologues, all contributed by NPX playwrights. They will give actors access to monologues, the plays from which they are excerpted, information on the play’s history of development, and playwright profiles, including bios, artistic statements, and other works by the same writer. The service allows actors to filter search results by length, genre, audition type, and audience suitability, as well as the pieces that best suit their own self-designated demographic markers, including age, gender, and race or ethnicity.
It will also allow actors to save their favorite monologue searches, with new results delivered weekly to their inboxes, and the option to write recommendations of scripts they discover on the platform. These features “can’t be found in a traditional compilation of monologues, often generalized for gender-specific pools of talent,” said executive director Nan Barnett.
According to Barnett, NNPN began receiving requests from actors about New Play Exchange “almost as soon as we launched,” Barnett said. “They are using New Play Exchange as a resource for plays, of course, but the idea of being able to find audition materials that are just right for them and the work that are auditioning felt tantalizingly close but not quite there.”
Over the years, NNPN came to recognize how often actors are a conduit between new plays and producers, as they noticed through anecdotal conversations that actors were bringing in pieces from lesser known or unpublished plays to avoid the “we’ve seen that same monologue four times today” remark, Barnett said, “and creating conversations about the play and writer that benefited everyone.”
“As we’ve worked to bring more diverse stories and artists into the seasons of theatres around the world, we’ve found that supporting artists at all levels of their careers, especially in their ability to share the most authentic reflection of themselves, is a win/win for the theatremakers and for audiences,” Barnett said.
NPX’s other subscriptions include Writer and Writer Pro, Reader and Reader Pro, Organizational, and Higher Education levels.
