“The apparatus for new-play development has really cratered since COVID,” says playwright Mike Lew.

He’s not wrong. The Lark. The Humana Festival. Book-It. All over the country, storied theatrical venues and institutions whose primary focus was the generation of new work are disappearing. And new work, as it is with any artistic discipline, is the lifeblood of theater.

Which makes the necessity and importance of Profile Theatre’s Playwright Festival, going on this week and culminating in public offerings on June 26, 27 and 28 at The Armory, that much more of an imperative.

“New work doesn’t just appear, ready-made,” says Jen Silverman, who along with Lew will be working at the Playwright Festival. “Artists have to have the time and space to explore multiple pathways on a project, build a draft, try it out on audiences, learn from the trying and rework and rewrite.”

Silverman and Lew also will be the featured playwrights during Profile’s 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons, which will include commissioned plays and world premieres by both.

“The playwright residency is the most Profile thing that we do,” says Profile Artistic Director Josh Hecht. “It really gets to the heart of the mission.” That mission, according to the company’s website, is “to produce a season of first-class productions and community engagement activities centered around featured writers whose visions broaden our perspective on our world and deepen our collective compassion.”

For all that, this year’s festival almost didn’t happen: Promised funding from the National Endowment for the Arts was abruptly pulled after the federal administration’s DOGE slashed the NEA’s budget and staff. Emergency funding by the community kept the festival going.

Profile’s focus has always been on the playwright. For the first 15 years of the company’s existence, under founding Artistic Director Jane Unger, that meant highlighting the work of some of the greatest scribes of the 20^th century stage. During her tenure as AD, Adriana Baer began the focus shift to newer playwrights who would be creating the American canon of the future, and Josh Hecht has evolved the mission further in the ensuing years since he took over. “This is the core of not just what Profile does but what theater needs,” says Hecht.

Though every playwright’s process is different from every other playwright’s, for the vast majority, to write something worthy of presenting to the public as a completed play takes not one but several iterations. “We need that,” concurs Lew, “because playwrights are sitting alone typing out something that they think works in their head, and you don’t know what you have until you see it with actors in front of people.”

Silverman and Lew, two of the most exciting American playwrights of the past quarter-century, will be spending this week working with directors and actors developing their latest projects during what is essentially the commencement event for what will be a two-year deep dive into their past, present and upcoming work. 

Jen Silverman, who is also a novelist, essayist, TV writer and educator, grew up traveling throughout Europe and Asia. They didn’t initially picture themselves living the life of an artist. “I didn’t grow up going to the theater,” says Silverman. “I’m the child of two scientists; it had never occurred to me that a playwright was a thing that a person could be.”

Silverman met playwright Paula Vogel as an undergraduate at Brown University, and the experience was life-changing.

“Paula Vogel and some of her incredible MFA students were teaching playwriting and I was fortunate to study with them and fall in love with the form because of them,” Silverman says. “I went on to get an MFA in playwriting at the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop, then moved to New York, and eventually did the playwrights program at Juilliard when Marsha Norman and Chris Durang were running it.”

A sampling of Silverman’s work as a playwright includes Still, which brought Silverman the Yale Drama Series Award; Witch; and The Roommate, currently running on Broadway and starring Mia Farrow and Patti Lupone. Among Silverman’s other accolades are a Lilly Award, the Helen Merrill Fund Award, and the PoNY Fellowship.

Silverman will be working on an as yet untitled piece about Harry Houdini’s 1926 appearance before the House of Representatives, “to testify on behalf of a new bill, HR8989, one that would make acts of fortune-telling illegal,” says Silverman. “The hearings were a raucous, rowdy few days that quickly pivoted into a dangerously political space, after Houdini and his colleague Rose Mackenberg revealed that many of the politicians present consulted mediums or attended seances – including President Coolidge himself. 

“The theatrical event that I’m building with (long-time collaborator) director Mike Donahue takes as its starting point the exact transcript for these Congressional hearings, a 171-page document in which a group of politicians, a group of mediums, and Houdini himself battle for what they consider the soul of America.”

What do Silverman and Donahue hope to accomplish in this week of generation? “We are not making a verbatim play exactly,” explains Silverman, “though we are both deeply enamored of the actual language being used in that hearing: the turns of phrase, the ways in which political and personal language become interchangeable. But we’re just at the beginning of figuring out how to cut and curate the transcript, and how to interweave those sections with sections we’re generating. By the end of the week, we hope to have completed that curation, and to have a clearer view of what comes next.”

Interestingly, Mike Lew also came from a scientific background (both of his parents are doctors) and similarly, hadn’t thought about theater as a possible career choice until he got to college.

In fact, in high school, he was an Intel Science Talent Search Finalist for work he did on homeobox genes, “which are the kind of genes that make proteins that control when other genes express,” explains Lew. “They can be important in early development when telling other genes, like, ‘Grow arms now, now stop.’” He laughs and claims that now he wouldn’t understand the paper he wrote as a high schooler (but after talking to him, I’m pretty sure he would.)

“Then I got to Yale for undergrad,”  Lew continues, “and they put all the science classes at the top of a hill and they put all the English classes in the middle of a campus and I was a lazy, California, San Diego guy and didn’t want to get up at 6 a.m. to go up a hill and learn science, and I just kind of sank into the arts.”

Lew was falling in love with the arts, but it took him awhile to persuade himself that the arts were actually a worthwhile pursuit for an adult. “It took a lot of soul-searching in terms of deciding that this is what I was really passionate about and where I most wanted to put my life’s effort,” he says.

Of course, once that decision was made, Lew has not looked back. He was a director for a time, but once he got to New York, his perspective changed: “I started to get an itch to tell my own stories, and that there was a perspective that was missing that I could fill in.”

He became involved with the Youngblood and Ma-Yi writers groups. Ma-Yi, in particular, was integral to Lew’s growth as a playwright. “I sharpened my voice there,” he says, “because the conversation you could start on was a little farther along than the one you had to warm a general audience into. So, to be able to have a conversation that was more advanced and to not have to stop and start and be like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my grandparents are from China, but I was born here and I speak —.’ To get past that, to get a little more intricate, was really explosive in terms of what became possible onstage and what  my aspirations might be within that.”

Ma-Yi is also where Lew met his wife, playwright Rehana Lew Mirza. They are working on a musical together, Bhangra Nation.

Lew has made his name with plays including Teenage Dick and Tiger Style! Like Silverman, he’s won too many awards and fellowships to list here, but they include a PEN Award, a Lanford Wilson Award, a Helen Merrill Award, and a Lark Venturous Playwright Fellowship.

For the Playwright Festival, Lew is working on his play Alpha Asians. “Alpha Asians is loosely based on a real-life hazing death that happened within an Asian fraternity,” he says. “The whole group was largely Asian American, and a freshman pledge died during hazing.”

For Lew, this simple, grim premise is a chance to “look at [the performance of] masculinity, somewhat put on, and the idea that this kid wants to get community and wants to find his place in the world but he’s being fed a role that doesn’t fit by these other fraternity brothers and he dies because of it.” To that end, in Lew’s vision currently, he sees his play cast with the young pledge who dies being played by an actor who is “male-assigned at birth,” he explains, “and the rest of the ensemble around him are female-at-birth actors.”

Both playwrights are super-sharp, extremely accomplished artists. Even within that given context they are keenly aware of the necessity of opportunities like the Playwrights Festival. For neither project is this likely to be the last stop before they are fully realized.

“I have this notion about the casting and what that might mean, but I won’t know until I see it in front of me what it actually means,” says Lew. “I’m really grateful to essentially use the time as a gym to work out my muscles and to see what I’ve got, and I think that is becoming increasingly rare.”

“I am delighted to be able to start interrogating the Houdini piece here,” says Silverman. “Mike Donahue and I have been talking about it for years, reading and re-reading the transcript, but this will be the first time that we’ve been able to sit down together for a week with our sole focus on this project. (We’re currently getting ready to shoot a feature film, so that’s been a lot of our time of late.) Profile has generously provided us with time, space, and a group of Portland actors – and something I’ve learned in spending time with these kinds of dense, complicated transcripts is that the electricity and theatricality present in it becomes much easier to access when you have actors in space.”

Silverman and Lew know each other: They’re both alumni of New Dramatists, and they move in the same theatrical circles. They’re both artists whose work is defined by their respective, unique, humor and an unwillingness to be bound by strict parameters, either in theme or dramaturgy.

“I love theater that can’t be anything other than theater,” says Silverman. “Theater that requires the particular electricity of live performance. I also love TV and film, and I work happily in both of those media, but that has only fueled my love for plays that push and trouble their theatrical container in a way that’s unique to the form.”

“Plays take so long to come to fruition,” says Hecht. “They take a long time, and [the writers] need collaborators. They need directors with dramaturgical acumen, they need actors living into the scenes and bringing their humanity and asking all their questions, unpacking why they’re saying what they’re saying, why they’re doing what they’re doing. The playwrights need those collaborators to bring their own lived experience to the room to help refine and help the writer go deeper. Without those structures, without those opportunities, that doesn’t happen. In fact, plays need several of these to get to production. And even in production there are still new pages coming in all the way through.”

Which, of course, makes it all the more alarming that the festival was in danger of not happening at all when the National Endowment for the Arts pulled its funding, an event that was felt not just at Profile but at arts organizations around the city and the country as President Trump’s DOGE team took aim at cultural and other agencies.

If the festival was going to happen, Profile was going to have to do some fancy financial footwork, made possible only by its community. “On the one hand,” says Hecht, “I was so grateful that our community filled that gap quickly. But on the other hand, I know there is less ability to support other initiatives that come. That has ripple effects down the road.”

That is the tangible part of the equation, but it’s not the whole story. “Part of what was so meaningful about the NEA,” says Hecht, “was that the selection committee is made up of other artists and arts leaders in the state. So, the recommendation to support this project is coming from artists and arts leaders in Oregon. This was our colleagues saying, ‘This is worth the federal government’s time and money.’”

The ripple effects of the lost funding won’t just be borne by Profile. Less money means less work for artists, which means less art, which means a larger and larger hole sustained in the social fabric of the community. Extrapolate this dynamic out to Portland Playhouse, Oregon Children’s Theatre, Passinart, All Classical Radio and everybody else that lost their grants, and the picture of the cultural and economic cost begins to come clear.

And of course, there is an artistic cost as well. “I don’t know that everybody is aware that the tap got turned off,” says Lew. “Everybody’s downstream, and they’re all watching the plays that had been worked on five-seven years ago, and the downstream effect of having this industry crash out has yet to be felt.”

New work is how an art form survives. This is how we thrive. Portland is no stranger to creating environments specifically constructed to engender new work. Risk/Reward, Portland Center Stage’s JAW New Play Festival, Many Hats Collaboration’s The Hatchery. Shaking-the-Tree. PETE. CoHo.  IFCC. Fertile Ground, of course. To my mind, the best production of last year was Corrib’s original piece, From a Hole in the Ground.

This isn’t even everybody. But in today’s political and economic climate, we need everybody. Even certified, card-carrying, award-winning, nationally recognized badasses like Jen Silverman and Mike Lew need opportunities to go into the lab, to experiment, to fail big, challenge their own assumptions, and make exciting new discoveries. This is what the Playwrights Festival provides, and what Portland audiences have an opportunity to participate in.

“Organizations like Profile Theatre, that are dedicated to new work, are so vital to our cultural landscape,” says Silverman. “Without them, live storytelling becomes impossible.”