Statement from Peter Nickowitz
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Dear Friend,

I write to inform you of an exciting new branch of activity here at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting called the Harold Clurman Playwrights Division. This is a division the Adler Studio in general and Tom Oppenheim, the Studio's Artistic Director in particular, have wanted to build for a long time. After all, it enhances the Adler's mission to create an environment that nurtures theater artists who value humanity, their own and others, as their first priority, together with their growth as theater artists in the twenty-first century.

The Playwrights Division grows organically out of The Studio's history and relates to its predominate technique. Stella Adler, as much or more than any acting teacher past or present, loved playwrights and anchored her techniques of acting into the close reading, analysis and interpretation of plays. Furthermore, among his many accomplishments with the Group Theater and beyond, Harold Clurman loved and nurtured playwrights. In this way, the Playwrights Division seems a necessary corollary out of our already existing Harold Clurman Center for Poetry, Poetic Drama, and the Spoken Word.

The Studio has recently engaged me, Peter Nickowitz, as Director of The Harold Clurman Playwrights Division. In addition to this position, I am also the first Harold Clurman Playwright-in-Residence. The residency is a year-long commitment to a playwright in which Adler produces a play of mine through the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theater Company, another two plays as student productions, as well as readings and workshops of original works and works-in-progress. As head of the Playwrights Division, I will also work to bring established playwrights to the Adler Studio for readings of their work and discussions of craft with our students.

The Stella Adler Studio has a great deal to give to both established as well as young and emerging playwrights and a great deal to get from them. On the giving side we have a seemingly endless supply of actors of all ages. We can therefore do readings, workshops and productions of new plays. On the receiving side, as a theater organization that has great appetite to generate new work, to make a palpable impact on the world, to become more deeply engaged in, and related to, that world, The Harold Clurman Playwrights Division connects us to new voices in drama and is therefore is an enormously rewarding new enterprise.

In the coming weeks and months, the Studio and I would love to reach out to the larger community of playwrights in order to speak more with you about our new Playwrights Division and to invite you to come to the Studio to present readings of your work and/or an informal discussion of it to our students.

We look forward to working with you.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Nickowitz
Head, Harold Clurman Playwrights Division
Harold Clurman Playwright-in-Residence