An Indispensable Theater Incubator Faces a Troubled Future

On a sun-kissed summer day at the Connecticut shore, some 200 people huddled in a darkened room. They had come to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., to hear “Dead Girl Quinceañera,” a new play by Phanésia Pharel. The story of a Miami teenager who goes missing during her own birthday party, the play was performed by four young actresses, their scripts propped atop metal music stands.

When Pharel, a playwright newly sprung from graduate school, arrived at the O’Neill a week before, the play was much shorter. It lacked an ending. But she had since found one. After the reading, she floated back into the afternoon on an artist’s high. “It’s a dream,” she said of her time at the center. “It’s a little bit of a utopia.”

Pharel and three colleagues are the newest members of the National Playwrights Conference, which the O’Neill has hosted annually (barring a brief pandemic hiccup), since 1966. It is perhaps the country’s premiere spot for play development, its alumni functioning as a who’s who of American theater in the last half century.

John Guare was among the first cohort, with “The House of Blue Leaves.” Those who followed him include August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, David Henry Hwang, Beth Henley, Samuel D. Hunter, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Dominique Morisseau, Jeremy O. Harris. (Musical theater alumni include Jeanine Tesori, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Robert Lopez.) Celine Song, another alum, sets a scene from her recent film, “The Materialists,” at the center.