As a playwright in the U.S., few words make my flesh creep as much as "new play development." This innocuous phrase generally means either (1) workshops, a process modeled on product development in the business world, in which it's assumed that every new play needs to be improved, reshaped, and focus-tested; or (2) commissions, such as ACT Theatre's FirstACT program, which gave three or four playwrights a small stipend (not enough to let anyone take time off from a job in order to write) to write new plays and then gave these plays a staged reading. Though FirstACT was supposedly a breeding ground for work ACT might actually produce on its mainstage, the organization had not produced a single play from FirstACT's entire 10-year history. Last year's readings were attended by almost none of ACT's artistic staff.

Which makes it astonishing that ACT has collaborated with the producers of the Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival to revamp FirstACT into FringeACT, a new play festival larger in scale but more modest--and better conceived--in ambition.

This began when Seattle Fringe Theatre Productions (SFTP) decided to move the Fringe Festival to September, in order to foster a relationship with the Canadian Fringe Festival circuit (a move this paper suggested eight years ago). This left open the Fringe Festival's previous time slot in March--a time of year originally chosen because there wasn't much else going on around the city. SFTP's executive director, Kibby Munson, realized that FirstACT generally took place in late February/early March and approached Liz Engelman, ACT's former literary manager, about expanding it.

To Munson's surprise, Engelman and Gordon Edelstein (who recently resigned as ACT's artistic director) agreed. The result is an entire weekend of staged readings: 35 new plays (ranging from 10 minutes to two hours) by 31 playwrights (ranging from Steven Dietz, who's one of the most produced playwrights in the U.S., to 15-year-old Margaret Waterbury, who's presenting her first play, to myself). Some plays will be given a spare staging; some will be read by actors with scripts on music stands.

What's good about this? Mass, proximity, and autonomy. Staged readings are not enticing, even though they're the most economical way of exposing a play to more than few people; by stacking 35 readings on top of each other, the event generates more drawing power than a few readings could. By housing all these readings in the same building, FringeACT fosters interaction among a huge collection of actors, directors, and writers. (Though Seattle's theater scene is pretty cozy, people still get mired in their own cliques; events like FringeACT and 14/48 facilitate valuable cross-pollination.) But most of all, once a play was selected by a jury of local theater artists, all decisions were in the hands of the playwrights--they chose their directors, they decided whether they wanted audience feedback. If the goal is to cultivate strong, individual artistic voices, this is the way to do it.

And, significantly, there are no promises, stated or implicit, that aren't being kept. Everyone involved gets a wee stipend and a little exposure, and original writing in Seattle as a whole gets some focused attention.

The danger of FringeACT is that, though the festival is juried, a majority of the work will be mediocre. It's unavoidable. Cities like New York and Chicago look at a small number of successes as confirmation of the city's quality. But Seattle--due to some combination of misguided fairness (we have to give attention to everyone regardless of merit) and a longstanding lack of civic ego (Seattle does not perceive itself as a place where real artists live, which is why audiences are so soothed when an actor is imported from New York)--tends to view the mass of mediocrity as confirmation that Seattle artists are mediocre. Fear of being tainted by that brush deterred at least one prominent local playwright, who declined to be named, from taking part.

Thus, much will depend on the expectations of the audience. Even the fully staged plays will be very limited, and straightforward readings are not very dynamic. This is theater in its rawest form, bones and sinew that may not have much skin, let alone pretty clothes and makeup. But the pleasure of discovering something great in that form--of hearing words and stories with the power to carry you into their own world--is a unique and unforgettable experience.