About

your portal to new plays

Massive Draft brings you inside the process of plays being produced, developed, and read at Steppenwolf Theatre Company.  It is your portal to the workshops, readings, writing, thinking, and dreaming that takes a play from inspiration to production. The act of making a play is a diverse collection of processes. Some are solitary: the writer staring down a blank page, digging through archives. Some are collaborative: actors in a room experimenting with emotion. Some rely on words, some images, others sculpt space, layer sound and play with time. With Massive Draft, you’ll be able to explore all these processes through image, audio and video as well as the written word. Because plays are more than words on the page – they are a full sensory experience in a particular time and space.

An evolving play is constantly at the center of a sprawling discussion about the experiences the play aims to create, and how these all relates to the larger world. One of the aims of Massive Draft is to invite you into that conversation. In UNSCRIPTED, you’ll find off-the-cuff observations about what’s happening now. In PLAYLIST, you’ll find video and images – everything from interviews and video blogs to source material that’s being used in the process(es). And in DIALOG we will be calling on you to participate – digging into the collective wisdom, asking you to share your stories. In short, expanding the conversation about the project of making plays.

This project is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.