EVERYTHING'S GOING MY WAY Wins 2026 Premiere Play Festival at Kean
Katherine Swan's RED BELL earns a finalist prize and staged reading at the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center.
Premiere Stages at Kean University has announced the winner of the 2026 Premiere Play Festival. The Premiere Play Festival is an annual competition for unproduced scripts that offers developmental opportunities to playwrights.
Premiere Stages is also pleased to announce that they are the recipients of a Premier Award in Theatre by the Masterwork Music and Art Foundation. The Foundation has long been a supporter of “excellence in the arts” and this marks the fourth Premier Award the organization has given and the first award of its kind for playwriting. This year the Play Festival cash rewards are graciously funded by the Masterwork Music and Art Foundation.
Premiere Stages has selected Everything's Going My Way by Sophie Boyce as the winner of the 2026 Play Festival. In Ms. Boyce's new play, Colin is a psychotherapist assigned to work with the volatile, complicated 17-year-old, Noah. As Noah rebels against the sessions, his mother clings to a belief that he can get better while Colin is drawn into a dangerous paternal protectiveness. Everything's Going My Way compassionately explores masculine intimacy, the ferocity of motherhood, and connection in its most fragile and complicated forms. Ms. Boyce will receive a $10,000 award and Everything's Going My Way will have a full production in Premiere Stages' 2027 season in the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center.
Sophie Boyce is a NY-based Lyricist, Librettist and Playwright, originally from London UK. She has most recently been honoured as a Fred Ebb Award Winner (2025), Dramatist Guild Fellow (2025), Richard Rodgers Award Winner (2025), Eric H Weinberger Librettist Award Winner (2025), Eugene O'Neill NMTC Winner (2023) and a Kleban Prize Finalist (2025). Her work in development includes The Dark Lady and Little Red (with composer Veronica Mansour), Unglamorous (with composer Fred Feeney) and The Forty Elephants (with composer Einar Adalsteinsson). Sophie has an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU Tisch and is an alum of the BMI Bookwriters Workshop.
A second Play Festival Finalist, Red Bell by Katherine Swan, will receive a $3,000 award and a staged reading this December at Premiere Stages in the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center. In Ms. Swan's new play, when ex-dancer Rina shows up at Hank's gym wanting to learn how to box, she triggers a past trauma that she has struggled to leave behind. As she hurtles towards her first fight, Rina embarks on a journey that will forever transform who she is and who she will become. Red Bell is a wise, provocative play with a startling spin on the underdog narrative.
Katherine Swan's plays have been performed or developed at The Road, A Red Orchid Theatre, The William Inge Festival New Play Lab, The Artistic Home, Renaissance Theaterworks, and others nationally and internationally. Her play Pony was a winner of the Carlow Little Theatre's 2021-22 International One Act Play Competition in Carlow, Ireland. Her work is anthologized by Smith & Kraus in their collections Best Ten-Minute Plays and Best Stage Monologues. Katherine is an ensemble member of the experimental performance collective The Feast. Since 2021, she has studied playwriting at The Barrow Group under Arlene Hutton.
The two other Finalists of the Premiere Play Festival, Biting The Hand by Deneen Reynolds Knott and Next/Life by Matthew Capodicasa will each receive a $1,000 award. Both plays received a professional reading with Equity actors at Premiere Stages in June 2026.
In addition to funding from The Masterwork Music and Arts Foundation, Premiere Stages is also made possible in part through funding from W. John Bauer and Nancy Boucher, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The Shubert Foundation, The 1772 Foundation, Carole Shaffer-Koros and Robert Koros, The Northfield Bank Foundation, Blue Foundry Charitable Foundation, Union County Savings Bank Charitable Foundation, The Hyde and Watson Foundation, The Union Foundation, E.J. Grassmann Trust, The New Jersey Theatre Alliance, The Union County HEART Grant and through the generous support of individual patrons and local organizations. Discover Jersey Arts is our marketing partner. Visit JerseyArts.com for more information about other arts programming happening around the Garden State.
Premiere Stages is committed to producing topical plays and interactive programs that reflect people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, national origins, nationalities, ancestry, religious groups, gender expression or identities, sexual orientation, political beliefs, ages, abilities and disabilities.
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