COMMUNITY BAKE-OFF Will Feature Play Ingredients Selected by Heather Christian

Hudson Valley Shakespeare has announced their 2026 Community Bake-Off, following the theme of “Revolution,” with ingredients selected by MacArthur Fellow, Obie Award winner, and Hudson Valley resident Heather Christian (Oratorio For Living Things, Animal Wisdom). Public Readings will be held on Saturday, November 14 and Sunday, November 15 at Snake Hill Rehearsal Studios at Hudson Valley Shakespeare.

For over a decade, Hudson Valley Shakespeare has been a welcoming home for new playwrights, with a commitment to supporting fresh voices in theater. Since its inception more than 1,000 community members have participated in free playwriting workshops, and nearly 500 plays were submitted, of which, 65 plays were selected and read by professional actors.

Created by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, the Bake-Off is a communal writing exercise that invites members of the public to attend free playwriting workshops hosted in libraries across the area. Participating writers are then assigned a random list of “ingredients” of which three must be incorporated into a play (for example: a kitchen sink, a front porch, and a withheld secret). The goal is to help inspire creativity and give writers permission to play.

For the 11th annual Community Bake-Off, the play ingredients will be selected by award-winning composer and theater artist Heather Christian, who most recently composed a five-part score performed by a community choir at HVS's Highland Lights. The public readings of the final selected plays will be directed by Catie Davis.

This year's theme is inspired by Shakespeare's line in King Lear, produced this summer as part of the 2026 Season: “The wheel is come full circle.” (King Lear, 5.3). As a theme, HVS is defining "revolution" broadly — not only as political upheaval, but as any turn of the wheel: cycles, reinvention, reversal, return. A revolution is what happens when something completes a full rotation and arrives back where it started, changed. That definition ties directly to the 250th anniversary, and it leaves writers wide open in how they interpret it; as history, as metaphor, as personal transformation, or as something still unfolding.

Christian's selected ingredients will be announced on Wednesday, October 1.

Submissions for the Community Bake-Off are due at 11:59PM on Wednesday, October 15. Plays should be around 10 pages and must be saved as a Microsoft Word or PDF file to be considered. Anyone who attends any of the playwriting workshops listed below or has submitted to previous Bake-Offs is eligible to submit a play. To submit, please visit hvshakespeare.org/bake-off.

In preparation, Hudson Valley Shakespeare will offer a series of free playwriting workshops led by Director of the MFA Playwriting Program at Hunter College, Christine Scarfuto. All workshop participants can submit short plays to be considered. Six of these plays will be selected to be performed by professional actors as part of an invited public reading in November.

The workshop locations are:

• Saturday, September 19
• 10:30 AM–12:30 PM
• New Era Creative Space
• Peekskill, NY

• Saturday, September 19
• 2:00–4:00 PM
• Julia L. Butterfield Memorial Library
• Cold Spring, NY

• Sunday, September 20
• 10:00 AM–12:00 PM
• Virtual Workshop
• via Zoom

• Saturday, September 26
• 10:30 AM–12:30 PM
• The Warner Library
• Tarrytown, NY

• Saturday, September 26
• 2:00–4:00 PM
• Desmond-Fish Public Library
• Garrison, NY

• Sunday, September 27
• 1:00–3:00 PM
• Jacob Burns Film Center
• Pleasantville, NY

To register for the workshop series, please click here.

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