Green Mountain New Play Festival Debuts in Plainfield

The former Goddard College campus in Plainfield will feel a little like its old, artsy self next week when playwrights move into dorm rooms and congregate for workshops and readings at the inaugural Green Mountain Playwright Retreat, which runs next Wednesday through Saturday, August 6 through 9.

Members of the public are invited to join the playwrights for the Green Mountain New Play Festival, also new this year. From August 6 through 8 at Haybarn Theatre, local directors and actors will present staged readings of four new plays, selected from 603 submitted from around the world. Founder and artistic director Erin Galligan Baldwin closed submissions three weeks early “because I was just inundated,” she said.

The festival and retreat are part of Green Mountain Shakespeare Festival, a new division of Plainfield Little Theatre that is also staging work on the Goddard campus this summer. The small, progressive college closed last year. “It just seems like the perfect place and time to be starting something like this,” said Galligan Baldwin, who earned an MFA at the college in 2019.

Opening the festival on August 6 is Victorian Vape by Andy Boyd. The Brooklyn playwright was a 2018 winner of the Columbia@Roundabout New Play Reading Series for Os Confederados. Her new work follows Carey, a young transgender woman called back to her hometown to help care for her aging grandparents, who do not support her identity. Renewed connections with friends and relatives there give her greater understanding and certainty about pursuing her authentic life.

On Time by Wesley Cappiello takes the stage on Thursday, August 7. The two-actor play, intended for mature audiences, presents a series of vignettes that travel through time to depict the beauty and struggles of men seeking the freedom to openly love one another. The New York City playwright’s work has been praised for its layered characters, psychological depth and emotionally gripping narratives. His dystopian thriller The Waiting Room had a sold-out run at Teatro LATEA on the Lower East Side.

The Friday, August 8, matinee features Polaroids From the Apocalypse by Sara Alanis Morales, about a family of four grappling with their personal history and desires to connect or disconnect on the last day before the sun explodes and destroys all life. Morales is a Mexico native and rising sophomore at Stanford University. Her play A Bathroom Eulogy was a winner at the Blank Theatre’s 2025 Young Playwrights Festival in Los Angeles.

Out of the Scorpion’s Nest by John Minigan closes the festival that evening. The play, formerly called Queen of Sad Mischance, won the 2022 Judith Royer Award for Excellence in Playwriting. The story follows Beverly, a prominent feminist professor and writer with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease; her 28-year-old son, who left grad school to care for her; and the graduate student Beverly hired to help compile her opus. Their intertwined lives raise complex questions about class, race and intellectual ethics. Minigan, of Framingham, Mass., was the 2019 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow in Dramatic Writing. His work has been widely produced across the country and abroad.

A discussion will follow each performance. “It’s a really nice way for theater lovers … to come in and engage with the creative process,” Galligan Baldwin said. None of these plays has been fully produced yet. “To be able to see something that’s new, that hardly anyone has seen before, that is in its development stage,” she said, “there’s a real vibrancy and excitement about that.”

This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.

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