New Play Festival 2026

The Old Pueblo Playwrights organization provides a venue where playwrights can bring their works for a candid review as a play or screenplay by their peers. For 36 years, OPP has provided an annual four-day play festival inviting local actors, directors, and technicians to help perform these works so that a playwright has the real-life experience of mounting a play, conducting auditions, assembling their cast and crew, rehearsals, working with costuming and sets, and performing before a live audience for the first time.

The OPP New Play Festival for 2026 will take place March 3-8 at the Cabaret space at the Temple of Music and Art in Tucson, AZ!

Keep checking back for updates.  Check out an OPP meeting for a sneak preview to some of the potential new plays or to join and have your work considered. 

The February 2025 New Play Festival featured 17 original works by 11 playwrights.

Festival newcomers included Michael Singervalt, Jeffrey Webster, and award-winning Dramatist Guild member Leslie Powell. A recent OPP board addition, Powell’s plays have been read and produced in Phoenix, San Antonio, Scottsdale, Toronto. She co-founded the North Shore Readers Theatre Collaborative, Writers & Actors Ink, and Random Acts festival.

Festival veterans included award-winning playwright Gavin Kayner and OPP Treasurer Mel Hector, MD, a University of Arizona College of Medicine professor who explores the family dilemma of a young man’s addiction in You Never Know. OPP board member and Southern New Hampshire University Professor Liisa Rose returns with seven (!) shorts. Other veterans include OPP board member Sydney Flynn, husband Vince, Sharon Surhoff. And David Rochon’s Finding Mary Tyler Moore is a change of pace from his Curious Incident of the Dogs Who Might Bite (2022) and Shower Monster (2023).

“Like Hamlet, we believe the play’s the thing,” notes best-selling author, actor, playwright, director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, and Active Imagination Theatre co-founder John Vornholt. “Each play is performed just once, script in hand, on a bare-bones set. Post-performance talkbacks add a workshop experience.”

Playwrights Scott Berg and Liisa Rose cochaired the 2025 festival.