The Keegan Theatre has recognized the vital importance of new work since our founding in 1997, producing world and area premieres season after season. But the theater ecosystem often leaves emerging and underrepresented playwrights to develop in isolation, with few paths from a promising idea to a fully realized production. The Boiler Room Series was founded to close that gap between napkin drawings with promise and performance-ready work.
BRS gives emerging playwrights a launching pad through a three-year arc of full support, from first draft to full production. We center I.D.E.A. to bring in voices the industry too often leaves out. Our home in Washington, DC, a major metropolitan market and cultural capital, gives those voices real exposure. And through our growing commitment to National New Play Network rolling premieres, a BRS show doesn’t stop on our stage. It travels.
Our Boiler Room Series offers a stage and real support to voices that might not otherwise find one, and we work to help the creative minds driving DC theater reach audiences and stages well beyond our own.
Call for Playwrights
We welcome submissions of all types on a rolling basis. We’re currently seeking a playwright to create a new Theatre for Young Audiences work.
Events
The annual Boiler Room Series calendar includes workshop presentations, staged readings, cabarets, and other unique performances and events.
Archive
Since 2017, the Boiler Room Series has been offering support and shining the spotlight on emerging playwrights and artists with fresh voices.
Our BRS pipeline is unique in its depth of commitment. Many theaters offer readings or workshops; Keegan offers a full pipeline with draft review and editorial feedback, week-long collaborative workshops, a public staged reading with direct audience feedback, and a fully mounted world premiere on our mainstage, with professional design, full press coverage, and Helen Hayes eligibility. Playwrights aren’t handed off, they’re accompanied; the same team that selects a playwright stays with them through opening night.
Since its founding in 2017, the Boiler Room Series has seen plays and playwrights supported through this initiative receive acclaim and professional success around the country.
- Our most recent playwright in residence, Priyanka Shetty, has gone on from Keegan to tour her BRS productions around the country and the world, including to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where the Keegan-commissioned show #CHARLOTTESVILLE won the Scotsman Fringe First Award, the festival’s top honor.
- YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY by Alyssa Haddad-Chin, which was commissioned as part of The 2023 Boiler Room Series, just won the 2025 American Blues Theatre’s Blue Ink Award for Playwriting.
- Lisa Stephen Friday’s powerhouse one-woman musical TRANS AM, which completely owes its genesis to the Boiler Room Series, played Off-Broadway at Joe’s Pub, an artistic program of the Public Theater, in 2026.
- Another BRS pipeline script, STRANGERS WITH BENEFITS by Shadia Hafiz, was picked up by the Tony Award-winning Signature Theatre for its new play series.
- The genre-busting phenomenon FROM GUMBO TO MUMBO, by Drew Anderson and Dwayne Lawson-Brown, has taken top honors at regional theater festivals.
New and returning artists continue to work with the Boiler Room Series on all levels of the Pipeline for New Works. Some featured artists include:
- Audrey Cefaly’s THE BELIEVERS receives its world premiere on Keegan’s mainstage this season — the first BRS-commissioned production to enter the National New Play Network’s rolling world premiere program, carrying the play to NNPN member theaters across the country.
- Acclaimed artist Priyanka Shetty is developing THE WALL, the third in her triptych of solos exploring the immigrant experience in modern America, and poised to become BRS’s second NNPN rolling world premiere.
- Stay tuned for the announcement of our newest BRS playwright!
To create opportunities for emerging artists,
To increase representation onstage,
To provoke important conversations,
To turn art into action through exposure and giving,
To feed the fire of new projects in progress,
To raise the creative voices of tomorrow’s theater.
Keegan’s Boiler Room Series is radically committed to Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (I.D.E.A.). Since launching in 2017, at least 50% of featured BRS playwrights have been women and at least 50% of all BRS artists have been BIPOC. Many of our artists identify as LGBTQ+. We are committed to maintaining and improving upon those standards across all BRS programming.
The Boiler Room Series remains committed to:
- Featuring 50% or more BIPOC playwrights
- Casting 50% or more BIPOC performers/presenters
- Staffing 50% or more BIPOC production team members
- Hiring 25% or more artists who identify as LGBTQ+
- Maintaining a BRS play-reading and producing advisory panel with at least 50% or more BIPOC artists, 50% or more women artists, and 25% or more LGBTQ+ identifying artists.