Profile Theatre Hosts Playwright Festival 2025
The event runs June 20th - 28th, 2025.
By: Stephi Wild Jun. 09, 2025
Profile Theatre will welcome two-time Guggenheim Fellow Jen Silverman and Richard Rogers award winner, Tony Voter, and Dramatist Guild Council Member Mike Lew for their residency in Profile’s 2025-2027 cycle!
The Playwright Festival brings together Profile’s Featured Playwrights in residence in Portland June 20th - 28th, 2025 to develop new plays to be premiered in Profile’s 2026-2027 season. The festival re-imagines play development festivals by developing new plays within the context of a two-year exploration of the writers’ bodies of work and a commitment to produce their newest plays.
Audiences are invited to see readings of the new plays-in-progress on June 26th and 27th, with the Festival culminating in a special event on Saturday, June 28th at 12pm, Artist Salon: Jen Silverman and Mike Lew In Conversation. Our Featured Playwrights will read a selection of their work, and will engage in a conversation with audiences and Artistic Director Josh Hecht. This Artist Talk will be followed by a catered reception with the featured playwrights, where audiences are invited to deepen their personal connection to the playwright’s work.
While the readings of the works-in-progress are not open to review, members of the press are invited to attend the readings and Artist Talk, to cover the festival as a whole, and to interview the Featured Playwrights and artistic staff. All events are held at The Armory.
On June 26th at 7:30 PM, audiences are invited to attend a reading of Jen Silverman’s newest project, under the Working Title Untitled Houdini Project. Silverman’s script theatricalizes Harry Houdini’s 1926 testimony before the House of Representatives on behalf of a new bill that would make acts of fortune telling illegal. Weaving text from the Congressional hearings, theatrical séance sequences, and the growing complexity of Houdini’s relationship with Spiritualist mediums, this brand-new play asks the questions: are we to be a country of hard facts, scientific data, and honesty? Are we to be a country of comforting possibilities, where the boundary between the living and the dead is crossable if the right guides are permitted to take you? What does it mean to argue over the character of a nation in 1926? And, of course, what does it mean to do that right now?
Mike Lew’s newest play Alpha Asians will have its public reading on June 27th at 7:30 PM. Alpha Asians is a strikingly comedic exploration of Asian-American identity and toxic masculinity, inspired by the real life frat hazing death of a pledge at an Asian-American fraternity. The script dramatizes this frat’s fateful pledge week in a work that smashes together Greek life with Greek tragedy. Using an ensemble largely composed of Asian actors who were assigned female at birth, Alpha Asians is a character-driven comedy that explores the dramatic possibilities in “cosplaying” masculinity, and lifts frat culture into the realm of ritual.
“The Playwright Festival is always the jewel in the crown of a cycle at Profile” says Artistic Director Josh Hecht, "It's an opportunity for our community to get to meet these writers in person, to learn about what motivates and drives them, and to get a sneak peek into new work before it hits the stage. Best of all, at the Artist Talk they get to hear the writers read some of their own work themselves. It’s an intimate literary experience unlike any other, and I can’t think of more inspiring, intelligent, engaging, and imaginative writers than Jen Silverman and Mike Lew. These are writers that have already been rocking the theatre industry, and are soon to become household names.”
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