PRESS
New plays and local playwrights have never had it easy for attention. I try to highlight them whenever I can, and sometimes that includes my Next Rung program.
Here are some times Next Rung Productions had the spotlight.
"[Kali's workshop] featured two students whose ten-minute plays became full-length plays premiering with the Tennessee Stage Company’s New Play Festival: Craig Smith with 2012’s The Good Son, and yours truly with 2013’s Online Fighting. While she currently lives in Soddy Daisy, she just finished teaching her playwriting workshop with my local program Next Rung Productions and also recently returned to town to act in a table reading of Alas Ajax by JP Schuffman."
"The Writer's Way - Kali Meister" in Blank News, 4/1/2025 - an interview by Harrison Young
"BN: What's the best advice you could give new playwrights?
BW: This was the same great advice you gave me when I first started: don’t get hung up on performability. Write something that may or may not have any hope of being staged anywhere. Set it in deep space, or a party filled with black decorations, or in an ancient Scottish castle, or wherever you want. Use none, or one, or 500 characters. The story is the important thing. Let your mind go crazy, write a good story that you like and feel comfortable with, and don’t worry if it’s unstageable – that’s not the point. Learn the craft. Learn the basics. Let the staging details work themselves out later in other versions or other stories."
"The Writer's Way - Barry Wallace" in Blank News, 2/1/2025 - an interview by Harrison Young
"I first met Jeannette in 2020 as the first person my Next Rung Productions-program provided playwright-mentorship for. She had never written a full-length play at that time, but she already had an extensive history in being published and receiving residencies for her other writing. It didn't take her long to create her stark drama Mutation, and then she has since gone on to write three more full-length plays."
"The Writer's Way - Jeannette Brown" in Blank News, 11/1/2024 - an interview by Harrison Young
"Next Rung Productions (nextrungpro.com) is an annual playwright development program mentored by yours truly. It’s built around the idea of year-long support for a local writer from their first ideas to their first public table reading. DG Member Jeannette Brown was the program’s first mentored playwright as she wrote her first full-length play in 2020, Mutation. Now that she has a different play called Cuba Libre getting a developmental stage reading in 2024 with TSC, she reflects back on her experience of writing Mutation. 'One thing that has stuck with me is the need to trust an idea and take it to the end before I begin tearing it apart. I can begin four more plays without taking one to a final draft.'"
"A Dramatist’s Guide to Knoxville" in The Dramatist magazine, 7/1/2024 - an article by Harrison Young
"As a playwright for the past decade and a half, one thing that’s been clear is that it’s a lonely difficult process between writing your first words on a page and getting it presented to the public. Most opportunities for playwrights are for already-created scripts that seek being produced…but what if you’re seeking help before you have a completed story? Or seeking help from before you even begin creating the story? It’s hard to always ask people for help who are both qualified and interested with these earliest stages. This is where Next Rung Productions comes in."
"Meet Harrison Young" in CanvasRebel, 11/3/2022 - an interview with Sarah Garcia
"I also mentor a local playwright each year through my Next Rung Productions program! This year Next Rung has got Sherridan Smee creating a play from scratch, and you can catch her play later this year when it’s complete. I teach other playwriting workshops along the way too. The goal’s to make things easier for writers now than it was for me when I first started writing, so it’s really rewarding to see people work hard for opportunities and then land them in really cool ways."
"Life & Work with Harrison Young" in Knoxville Voyager, 2/10/2022 -- an interview with Camila Sanchez
"A new playwriting program called Next Rung Productions provides playwrights a mentor as they create their next play. The first person selected in this program was DG member Jeannette Brown, a novelist who just reached an ending for her first full-length play: the unnerving Mutation."
"Ambassador Report: Tennessee – Knoxville" in The Dramatist magazine, September/October 2020 - an article by Harrison Young
