Writopia Lab – Worldwide Plays Festival

Founded in 2010, Writopia Lab’s Worldwide Plays Festival is an annual Off-Broadway festival of one-act plays written by playwrights ages 6 to 18 and produced, designed, directed, and acted by New York City theater professionals.

​

Since its inception, the festival has produced live theatrical productions of plays written in workshops at Writopia’s labs across the country and plays submitted to our competition from playwrights around the world! Comedies, musicals, monologues, historical dramas, tear-jerkers, and thought pieces—all written by the talented young playwrights of tomorrow.

​

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic prevented us from hosting live gatherings, Writopia Lab released the plays as 40 short podcasts. For 2021 and 2022, we continued to meet the moment with both virtual performances and socially-distanced outdoor readings of plays in Central Park, Riverside Park, and Bryant Park. This allowed us all the communal experience of theater, while keeping our playwrights, artists, and audiences safe. Since 2023, we have returned to the stage!

​

WPF 2025: Light Up The Dark!

It’s dark out there. Through these winter months, the sun goes down early. Through challenges, we may not immediately see the light. But as Bob Marley tells us, we have the chance to "Light Up the Dark!"

​

So for this year’s Worldwide Plays Festival, we task our playwrights to spend these winter months exploring Light and Darkness, Shadow and Shine, both literally and thematically.

​

Write plays that take place in the sun or take place in the shadows.

Write plays that explore the darkest feelings or situations and find the light shining through.

​

As songwriter Leonard Cohen once wrote, “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in!”

• Playwrights must between the ages of 6 and 18 
• Playwrights must have participated in a Writopia program—workshops, private sessions, W2R, retreats, camps, school/organization partnerships, etc.—over the past year.

• March 14th, 2025

• Lighting
  • Please write plays that utilize lighting
    • Flashlight
    • Regular Lamp
    • Upright Lamp
    • Christmas Lights
    • Candles (they’ll be fake candle)
    • A Spotlight
• Length
  • 10 minute plays
    • (If writing in a lot dialogue, think 8-10 pages, if your play has a lot of monologues, think 5 pages)
• Number of Actors
  • 3 actors Max!
    • (This means you could have one or two actors playing multiple roles. But make sure that there are high stakes between the characters. You could also think about having one central character going through a crisis, and two actors might play multiple roles surrounding that central character. The key is — 3 Actors Max, and HIGH STAKES for the play.)
    • Please include a character breakdown at the top of your play!
• Genre
  • The play can be any genre—comedy, drama, horror, polemic, tragedy, historical, docudrama, solo play, interactive, sci-fi, musical, or anything you dream up.
• Format
  • There is no standard playwriting format in the world of theater. Feel free to use the Writopia Lab Playwriting Format as a model, if that works for you.
• Narrators
  • There can be no narrator of the play who is not emotionally invested in the story. (i.e. Ramona can tell her story to the audience, but an unnamed narrator cannot tell her story to the audience.)