Festival of Northwest Plays has a lot going for it during its first staging of the event. It is already the largest festival celebrating plays written solely by playwrights from the Pacific Northwest.



It will feature three full-length plays and almost three dozen 10-minute plays and performances by more than 150 actors from as far away as Bellingham. All of the plays worked their way through the Northwest Playwrights Alliance farm systems by being critiqued, stage read, and retooled each step of the way. The plays were selected for workshopping after being selected from 1,500 play submissions over the years.



Those on the short list were then published in the NPA’s anthology, “NorthNorthwest.” That’s a lot of success for an effort that is only 4 years old. Even though it is only a toddler by age, NPA is already the oldest active organization devoted to developing Northwest plays, following the demise of the South Sound Playwrights Festival a few years ago. But that shoestring playwrights’ effort provided the seed to what is now the heart of this group. This effort could not have happened without the groundwork laid into place by those volunteers, says NPA festival founder and Olympia-based playwright Bryan Willis.



“I’ve been thinking about that group quite a bit,” he says. “For starters, how on earth did (SSPF organizer) George Kuniyoshi do all that work year after year.  He and many others were amazingly dedicated. Also, as I look at the people who are helping with this festival, I see many of those actors, directors and writers I met back in the early 1990s when the festival began. Marcus Walker, Tim Hoban, Abby Dylan, Karen Havner, Chris Stancich and many more.  Whatever you want to say about the festival — and there’s so much to say — it provided an annual forum for local theater artists to work on new plays. I’ve been working with many of those people ever since.”



The current festival feeds from NPA’s alliances with other efforts, including a high school contest, playwrights’ forum co-sponsored by the Dramatists Guild and Seattle University, a writing workshop with Steven Dietz, the Double Shot Festival at University of Puget Sound, the New Play Buffet, and monthly staged readings of locally generated plays.  Some of the works that started their lives in those efforts already have won major awards, including In the Sawtooths, which was chosen as the best full-length script in the United States last year by the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.



The Festival of Northwest Plays runs Feb. 21 to March 2 at Tacoma’s Broadway Center for the Performing Arts. The festival includes performances of works by C. Rosalind Bell, Brent Hartinger, Dano Madden, Ki Gottberg, John Longenbaugh, Elena Hartwell, Gregory Hischak, Kamarie Chapman, Paul Mullin, Bryan Willis, Vince Delaney, Marcy Rodenborn, Beth Amsbary, Phillip Atlakson, Sol Olmstead, Eva Suter, Glenn Hergenhahn, Dan Erickson, Sean Walbeck, C.P. Stancich, Emily Freece, Michael Gaiuranos, Lindsey Newman, Ryan Dowler, Randall Colburn, Gregory Youtz, Adam Quesnell, Gregory Fletcher, Jon Haller, Ryan Clemens, Nadescha Bunje, and Arlitia Jones.



The effort has not only been featured in all of the media outlets of note in the South Sound, but two national theater publications have featured its educational efforts to keep playwrights doing that thing they do so well. On the other hand, not much coverage about the festival has found its way into media based in the Emerald City.



“At some point the Seattle papers are bound to take notice,” Willis says. “Sometimes, I think we’ll be well known on the planet Saturn before any of the big boys in Seattle take note.  But we keep trying! In truth, I find it amusing — and very provincial.”



Visit www.northwestplaywrights.org for more information.



[Theatre on the Square, Feb. 21-March 2, $9-$12, buy an NPA pass for $50 and see every show by e-mailing willis@olynet.com, 915 Broadway, Tacoma, 206.325.6500, www.ticketwindowonline.com]