What is ''A New Works Development Initiative?''
Is there a set ''cast'' for the workshops?
Will this just be a bunch of readings?
Who all is involved in these workshops?
How does this help the playwright?
Why do this?
At Winding Road Theatre, we want to dive deeper than a single reading around a table. Great theatre is discovered through curiosity, collaboration, experimentation, and community. Road Works is Winding Road Theatre’s new works development initiative, designed to give playwrights, composers, devisers, and creators a dynamic, artist-driven space to explore, refine, and strengthen work through a collaborative multi-phase workshop process.
Rather than a single interpretation, Road Works embraces flexibility and discovery. A diverse ensemble of actors will rotate through roles and scenes, allowing creators to hear characters and moments embodied through different voices, energies, and instincts. The goal of this process is to create space for possibility and reveal dimensions of character, pacing, humor, conflict, emotional truth, and storytelling.
Select scenes and moments will also be placed “on their feet” through guided scene work led by a rotating group of participating guest directors, who will explore multiple staging choices, actor combinations, and interpretive approaches. This process allows creators to experience different visions of their work while also creating a meaningful artistic training ground for actors and directors alike.
In alignment with Winding Road Theatre’s mission to foster artistic growth, collaboration, and meaningful human connection through storytelling, Road Works also creates unique opportunities for cross-company engagement. Directors, playwrights, dramaturgs, performers, and other theatre-makers from across Tucson’s creative community may be invited to observe, participate, and offer feedback, turning each workshop into both a development process and a vibrant exchange of ideas.
At the conclusion of each session, participating artists will engage in facilitated feedback discussions guided in part by questions and areas of inquiry identified by the playwright, to support continued refinement of the piece (Sessions may also be livestreamed or recorded, allowing creators to revisit discoveries, absorb observations, and continue revisions between workshops).
Road Works is rooted in a simple but powerful belief: new work thrives when artists gather around possibility. By bringing creators, actors, directors, and artistic collaborators into the same room, Winding Road Theatre hopes to create a process that is joyful, collaborative, and deeply human.
Development Timeline
Workshop Session One
Late July
Exploratory character, story, and structural development
Workshop Session Two
Late September
Exploration of revised material, scene work, and continued refinement following initial revisions
Public Staged Presentation
November
The culmination of the process: a staged presentation of a deeply developed draft brought to life through collaboration, experimentation, and artistic discovery.
Road Works Presents: Mathew 33:6
at Mountain Vista Unitarian Universalist
Mathew 33:6 begins with an impossible event: after a seemingly minor accident at home, 33-year-old Mathew unexpectedly dies, only to awaken in a morgue three days later.
As Mathew struggles to make sense of what has happened to him, he is forced to confront the life he left behind and the people who helped shape it. Family dynamics, fractured relationships, old regrets, unexpected joys, and long-buried truths all rise to the surface as he searches for meaning in a world that suddenly feels both heartbreakingly familiar and entirely new.
By turns funny, tender, and deeply moving, Mathew 33:6 is an exploration of identity, grief, forgiveness, and the complicated ways we love one another. It asks impossible questions about mortality, purpose, and what it truly means to live, all while unfolding amid the beautiful chaos of family gatherings, unresolved tensions, and the strange miracle that somehow everyone still ends up at Thanksgiving dinner with pie.
