WHY WE NEED YOU:

And now, more than ever. 

For 25 years, ScriptWorks has stayed committed to playwright development, providing support in various forms: dramaturgical, financial, educational, networking, and production. For 25 years, our holistic programming has kept us an integral part of Austin’s culture of creativity and innovation. From Salon readings to the stage, past donations have paved the way for numerous playwrights. Today, 25 years in, your donation will mean keeping ScriptWorks alive.

We made it through the extraordinary challenges of the pandemic, but recent changes to city arts funding have presented a new challenge. We’re in a race to raise $20,000 before the end of February. Without this funding, ScriptWorks will begin cutting programming and staff, providing Austin with less and less of the beautiful support it deserves. 

We need you now, more than ever, to keep what we’ve built together alive and growing.

WHAT OUR MEMBERS AND COLLABORATORS SAY:

ScriptWorks provides a fundamental and necessary service that is critical to the health of any cultural hub that hopes to survive. By supporting live art at its absolute genesis – the stage at which an ephemeral idea becomes a written work you can hold in your hand and use to create a final work on stage – ScriptWorks focuses on a critical stage in creation in a way and with the scope that no other arts organization in town can or does. I value living in a city that creates an amount of new work that is far beyond what one would expect from its size and population. Austin is renowned throughout the country for being a place where new works are born almost constantly and many larger cities wonder how we can maintain such an enormous rate of creation. I would submit that it’s because of an organization like ScriptWorks. It’s an organization dedicated to writers and creating brand new work. The writers benefit from the attention. The city benefits from their work. And the nation continues to wonder how we do what we do.

Lowell Bartholomee, member playwright

ScriptWorks is a unique organization in the Austin arts community and an incredible resource for playwrights and producers. ScriptWorks provides support, feedback, education, production opportunities, and financial assistance to Austin’s many talented and emerging playwrights. They have worked tirelessly to help these writers since their inception in 1997. ScriptWorks serves a vital role in the development of new theatre for Austin. They are a community asset whose work benefits producers, playwrights, and patrons in equal measure.

Lara Toner, Artistic Director, Austin Playhouse

Through our years of working together, I’ve been impressed by the level of commitment from the staff, the community buy-in from the playwrights at-large in the Austin community, and the careful and robust culture of support and elevation this company provides to the artists through their many phases of programming. I can attribute a measure of growth of craft, ideas, and artistic development I’ve been able to see in the Austin community’s work directly because of opportunities ScriptWorks has provided to the writers via their services. They are important because companies who work in seeding ideas, are not as recognized as the companies who produce plays; however, without development, we would have no new plays to produce.

Dominic D’Andrea, Producing Artistic Director, One-Minute Play Festival (ScriptWorks’ national producing partner)