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a funny group shot of the cast and creative team during JAW Playwright Festival a funny group shot of the cast and creative team during JAW Playwright Festival
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Every July Portland Center Stage assembles artists, playwrights, directors, and actors to rehearse, and often rewrite, new plays.
Credit: Portland Center Stage

JAW New Play Festival

This annual theater festival invites the public into the creation process.

Editor's Pick
2 min read Pearl District

Oregon Arts Watch

Editor's Pick
Pearl District
This is a recurring event and we’re showing the details from its most recent past occurrence. We’ll update this page with future event info as soon as we get it. Please check back!
When
July 26–28, 2024
Daily
Where
128 NW 11th Ave
Portland, OR 97209

Writing can be hard work, especially when it comes to the exacting craft and elusive art of writing plays. Fortunately, Portland Center Stage makes the process more productive and fun with its annual JAW Festival, which returns every July.

people sitting in chairs and on the floor reading a script out of binders
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JAW creates a space for playwrights to have creative control and the resources to work on developing new scripts.
Credit: Portland Center Stage
Two people in green JAW Festival t-shirts talk to another person
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Community labs, dance performances, live music, workshops, and more offer plenty of opportunities for attendees to engage directly with artists.
Credit: Portland Center Stage
three women behind a desk and a music stand
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JAW plays have gone on to receive world premiere productions at professional theaters across the country.
Credit: Portland Center Stage
a close-up of a woman smiling with another person in the background
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The JAW Festival launched in 1999 and has helped develop 95 plays with many going on to receive professional productions across the country.
Credit: Portland Center Stage
people sitting in front of music stands reading scripts
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The summer festival allows playwrights to share new work, hear it spoken by actors and perhaps workshop and rewrite.
Credit: Portland Center Stage
a person speaks into a microphone while another in headphones works audio equipment
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The Press Play event during the JAW Festival includes an ever-changing lineup of live music, art and performance.
Credit: Portland Center Stage
a woman in glasses is speaking while sitting at a table with a three ring binder in front of her
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The JAW Festival gives opportunities to fresh, engaging, powerful theatrical voices.
Credit: Portland Center Stage
three people dance and perform in front of an audience
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During the Jaw festival weekend Portland Center Stage also hosts the Press Play event, featuring pre-show performances and workshops.
Credit: Portland Center Stage
a row of actors sit in front of podiums reading a script
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Actors help playwrights hear their work during “music stand readings”.
Credit: Portland Center Stage

Celebrating more than a decade of festivals, JAW continues to draw some of the country’s most intriguing and entertaining playwrights to Portland. (These include the likes of Clarence Coo, recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award, and Ovation Award-winning playwright Meghan Brown.)

Best of all, the rest of us get to witness the fun!

JAW New Play Festival

JAW New Play Festival is Portland Center Stage’s annual summer camp for writers. The three-day event has a clear mission: Do what it takes to help writers improve their plays. Each year, the company painstakingly chooses plays (usually four) from hundreds of submissions by well-established and emerging writers. (The 2009 JAW writers, for instance, included  Will Eno, already a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Kimberly Rosenstock, who went on to acclaim as a writer for the Fox TV show “New Girl.”) Each writer brings a play in progress and works for a week with a director, a dramaturge and actors. Along the way, they revise and refine the words on the page to better tell the story on stage.

Portland Theater

Portland has a well-established network of venues and theater companies and an increasingly dynamic and diverse small theater scene.

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Since its start in 1999, JAW (originally called “Just Add Water”) has helped develop more than 95 plays with 92 writers. These have resulted in fully staged productions at more than 100 professional theaters across the country, including more than a dozen world premieres at Portland Center Stage. Among the many notable successes has been Dan O’Brien’s “The Body of an American,” about the Pulitzer-winning war photographer Paul Watson. The play had an acclaimed off-Broadway run and won the prestigious Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History.

JAW is thoroughly invested in the needs of writers, and that pays off big for audiences. The public is invited in for free to experience “The Big Weekend.” Fanciful, site-specific performances by varied Portland theater artists and short plays by local high-school writers enliven the atmosphere. The main event is a series of staged readings of the featured plays. Don’t expect much in the way of costumes or sets; these bare-bones presentations offer the crackling energy of great actors digging into fresh ideas and emotions.

New Plays are the bread and butter of the theater.

Kamilah Bush, Portland Center Stage’s Literary Manager and JAW Festival Director

“New Plays are the bread and butter of the theater,” says Kamilah Bush, Portland Center Stage’s Literary Manager and JAW Festival Director. “JAW is an opportunity for our entire community to be early investors in the future of storytelling and community building. JAW readings and Press Play Events bring together artists of all disciplines from right here in Portland and across the country, making the big weekend an explosion of art and connection!”