World Premiere Wisconsin will return with a year-long statewide festival in 2026, building on the success of this year’s inaugural event.
World Premiere Wisconsin launched earlier this year, running March 1 through June 30 at various venues throughout the state, as part of what organizers touted as the first festival of its kind anywhere in the United States.
After gathering feedback from theaters that took part in this year’s festival, World Premiere Wisconsin decided that a year-long model would allow for maximum participation and exposure by including theaters that produce performances at varying times throughout the year.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
The decision to bring back the festival came after overwhelmingly positive feedback from participating theaters, said Jennifer Uphoff Gray, founding artistic director of Forward Theater Company in Madison and the driving force behind World Premiere Wisconsin. She spent four years working to make the concept a reality.
World Premiere Wisconsin was conceived as a celebration of Wisconsin’s thriving and diverse theater scene, bolstered by encouraging theaters of all types – professional, semi-professional, educational and community – to take on new scripts.
All told, 47 new works were produced for the 2023 festival.
“We thought it was enormous success,” Uphoff Gray said. “The goal that we set was to bring people together and build relationships that never existed before, not just within theaters in a particular city or between professional theaters but across the entire ecosystem. There was phenomenal relationship building.”
As a result, talks then turned to whether to bring the festival back for another run.
“The first thing we had to decide was whether to do it again or not,” she said. “From the beginning, we said we are going to do it this one time and we might be able to achieve all of our goals and then never do it again.”
Post-festival feedback fueled to decision to not only bring back the festival but to expand its length.
“There was near unanimity to do it again,” Uphoff Gray said. “So, we got deeper into questions about how soon and how often it should be happening and as we had those conversations, what we were discovering is that one of the challenges or even barriers to participation was the timeframe because we are covering so many different kind of theater companies. If you pick any four-month span, there will be companies that can’t participate because it doesn’t align with their own calendar.”
Participation among theater groups was the most important of the goals organizers had set for the inaugural festival, Uphoff Gray said.
The first iteration of the festival had three goals – build community among theater makers across the state; encourage the production and development of new works; and publicize the effort beyond the state borders.
“As we talk about bringing this back for another go-round, we really wanted to add a fourth goal, which is building audience support and enthusiasm for new work,” Uphoff Gray said. “As we thought about that, we know that a somewhat longer time frame would allow us to invest more in communicating with an audience and telling the story of why this is important, exciting, cool and fun and something to really take pride in.”
Uphoff Gray described the pursuit of a year-long festival as a “big, bold experiment.”
“Where we really kept hesitating is that we really don’t know of any other models for a year-long festival,” she said. “Ultimately, with new play workshops and festivals closing all over the country over the last couple of years, we decided that we shouldn’t feel beholden to an existing model so let’s feel emboldened to start a new one.”
The nearly three-year gap between festivals came about based on discussions with theater groups about what would be sustainable.
“That was just from polling participants about how frequently they could commit the resources to do new work,” Uphoff Gray said. “Some companies do world premieres every season or nearly every season. Other companies had never done them before World Premiere Wisconsin. It does take more resources such as time, money and energy to put on a brand-new play. The three-year cycle seems frequent enough to keep the energy going but spread out enough that we weren’t asking companies to commit resources that they don’t have.”
Many companies will continue to create world premieres in the interim and World Premiere Wisconsin will celebrate those through its social media presence, which will remain active, she said.
Moving forward, World Premiere Wisconsin expects to repeat the festival every three years.
“My personal opinion is that we are looking to set this up as a recurring event,” Uphoff Gray said. “This year-long festival will be a first of its kind experiment, so certainly we will see how it goes and we will solicit feedback from all the stakeholders. But the clear message that we got from those who participated the first time was that they wanted this to be a recurring event, so we are trying to set up our planning to facilitate a repeat again in 2029.”
Being part of the festival helped increase attendance and awareness for theater in Wisconsin, she said.
“We’re feeling really terrific about what was accomplished and as the instigator of this, I didn’t have any hesitation about repeating it because it succeeded beyond our goals,” Uphoff Gray added.
Generating conversation and interest in the Wisconsin theater scene among out-of-state residents also remains a goal, she said.
“As somebody who makes theater in this state and is deeply impressed by and proud of what Wisconsin theaters do – and I say this having spent 12 years working in commercial Broadway and off-Broadway theater – I get really tired of the national conversation about theater focusing almost exclusively on New York, with a little chatter about Chicago,” Uphoff Gray said. “When it comes to uplifting the field and frankly solving some of the problems in the field, I really wish that more consideration would be given to work that is happening in other parts of the country. So, on a sort of advocacy level, I am hoping that some national attention will get paid to what we do here and what we have been doing here, not just what was part of World Premiere Wisconsin.”
Economic stimulation through the arts is impactful for the state, she said. And Uphoff Gray added that she’d be willing to share the World Premiere Wisconsin model with theater leaders in other states.
“We need incubators for new work. We need new models to strengthen the field,” she said. “I’ve certainly heard from quite a few colleagues around the country wanting to know about this festival.”
She noted that ongoing updates about World Premiere Wisconsin 2026 will be posted on the festival’s website and Facebook page as they become available.
