T he road to Valdez, Alaska, asks something of anyone who dares travel its invigorating roads. It winds past glaciers and through mountain passes, alongside dozens of waterfalls that feel too immediate to be real. The further the brave traveler goes, the more it feels like they are leaving something behind—urgency, noise, expectation, and the hustle-and-bustle of “the real world.” By the time they arrive at the edge of Prince William Sound, the question is no longer what they came for, but what they're willing to discover.
For some, that rediscovery begins before they even step into a rehearsal room. “Let’s talk for just a moment about the drive to Valdez,” says Schatzie Schaefers, Featured Artist and the conference’s Fringe Co-coordinator. “Though I grew up in Alaska, I had never been to this little end-of-the-road community. Matanuska and Worthington Glaciers, stunning Thompson Pass, the waterfalls of Keystone Canyon, and majestic peaks surrounding the city itself blew my mind. The journey itself never gets old.”
Schaefers first made that journey in 1994, just out of college, one of a group of students invited to attend the second year of what would become the Valdez Theatre Conference. At the time, she was there as an actor—running crew, listening, absorbing. The conference was smaller then, structured differently, but even in its earliest form, something about it lingered.
“Even in that form it was inspiring,” she says, “and may have planted the seed for the playwriting career that began nearly ten years later.” That is how Valdez tends to work, not as a single turning point, but as a place where something begins quietly, then returns, year after year, until it becomes undeniable. Today, the conference itself unfolds over the course of a week. There are readings—around 50 of them—along with workshops, panels, and late-night performances. What defines the experience for many of its attendees is not the programming so much as the density of it: the sense that at any given moment, something is being made, shared, created, edited, or being planted in a playwright’s mind, later to emerge and develop long after the conference.
Dawson Moore, a DG member who has coordinated the conference for over two decades, describes it in terms of intention: “The goal of our event is to create a community of around 200 theatre artists gathered around approximately 50 play readings in our Play Lab for a week-long immersion in dramaturgical thought. The environment is kept as non-competitive as possible, and beyond developing scripts, we are there to develop artists, giving a unique week in one of the most naturally beautiful places on earth.”
It appears as a simple premise but ultimately becomes a radical one in practice. There are no prizes, no physical awards, no marketplace, and no sense that one reading matters more than another. The work is taken seriously, but not competitively, where feedback is rigorous, but rooted in care, and people stay.
They stay in the rooms, in the conversations, in the discomfort of not knowing what a piece is yet. They stay for each other. They stay to soak up the creative energy of the rooms and halls where so many artists are bursting with ideas. For Fernando Buzhar Segall, New York City playwright and faithful DG member, the decision to go to Valdez came from a kind of curiosity that borders instinct. “I first heard about Valdez from a playwright friend in grad school who attended the 2023 conference,” he says. “She spoke [so] highly of it that I just felt like I had to apply the next year, which I did and was accepted into. She couldn’t have been more right, and I fell in love with the conference.”
He arrived as a playwright, carrying work that had been difficult to fully realize elsewhere. “I presented my play The Devil and The Candlemaker during my first time at the conference. It has eleven actors in it, and it was very hard to get a group together for a reading before Valdez. The reading was of immeasurable help…” The pattern continued the following year, when another piece found new life through the process. But when he talks about why he returns, the answer shifts away from the work itself. “The people. Hands down.” He pauses, then refines it: “I love NYC, and I’m very fortunate to have found my community here. But it’s very easy to get lost in the sauce of stress and doubts… easy to forget why we are doing theatre in the first place.” Valdez, for him, interrupts that forgetting.
“Someone in Valdez described the conference as ‘Theatre camp for grown-ups’... Well, we don’t have theatre camps back in Brazil, where I’m from, BUT, if what he meant by that is ‘the Conference is filled with people who love theatre, love being surrounded by it in all its forms, and practicing theatre in all possible capacities with great joy, kindness and generosity.’ Then yeah, Valdez is just like a theatre camp for grown-ups.”
Notably, there is a moment a few days into the conference when everyone boards a boat together. The details vary—the weather, the conversations, who you happen to sit next to—but the structure is the same: a shared pause, surrounded by water and ice and distance. For Segall, it became something more. “A few days into the conference, everyone gets into this ship ride for about [two hours]... and suddenly I found myself having the most in-depth, honest, and open conversation with this man I had just met… I remember thinking ‘Crazy how theatre can bring people together…’”
It is not an isolated experience. “This isn’t one of my favorite memories simply because of what it is,” he says, “but also because I had so many other experiences like that with people I met at the conference…” The pattern repeats: conversation, recognition, inspiration, and connection, again and again, until it begins to feel like the norm.
If the Play Lab is where the work is held up to the light, the Fringe is where it spills over, but it didn’t begin as an official program. As Schaefers recounts, “a few playwrights whose short plays were not included in the Lab decided they wanted to hear them read. They recruited some actors and gathered on sofas in the college’s student commons and read the plays aloud.” Over time, it grew—into bars, into larger spaces, into something rowdier and less contained. “[It] took on an irreverent tone that it still maintains today,” she says. Schaefers has helped guide its evolution without losing that original spirit. “We just wanted to showcase good short plays.” That simplicity allowed for expansion, and the Fringe now includes “short plays, the Story Relay, and what we now call, ‘Something Different.’” Stand-up. Dance. Clown shows. Work that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else, and therefore belongs perfectly.
“Our goals for the Fringe are to create more opportunities for writers and actors to showcase their work, to be as diverse as possible in the material we present and artists we include, and to give everyone a chance to blow off some steam and laugh out loud at the conclusion of each day.” By the time the Fringe begins each night, the analytical work of the day has softened into something looser, more communal. People are still making theatre—but at that point, they are also releasing it.
For Alaskan playwright and actor, Katy Laurance, the conference exists as both structure and abundance. She first heard about it while performing in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, newly returned to Alaska and looking for connection. Castmates urged her to go, she did, and years later, she has become a regular presence as an actor, playwright, and volunteer helping to build the infrastructure that supports the week.
Her list of experiences reads almost like a catalogue of possibility: “As an actor, I have performed in 11+ Play Lab readings, six monologue workshop presentations, a puppeteering act for the 10 Minute Play Slam, and numerous cold-reads, improv scenes, musical numbers, even a tap routine for the after-hours Fringe shows.” The pace can feel demanding, but it remains deeply enriching. “As an actor, it’s a unique gift to be able to perform in so many pieces in such a short time; new plays, funny or experimental fringe scenes, monologues, voiceover.”
And the learning is constant, even when she’s not the one onstage. “Seeing and engaging with other artists’ work; playing with and learning from cast mates, observing great performances from the audience, listening to feedback sessions for other plays in the lab, are all just as inspiring and instructive as the personal opportunities the conference provides.” Over time, what has stayed with her is not just the volume of work, but the continuity of it. “One of my favorite things is seeing how others returning have grown and changed in their work; seeing their craft evolve, and hearing it speak to each other and over time.”
Outside of Valdez, the theatre industry as a whole often feels defined by scarcity—of resources, of opportunity, of risk. Segall names that tension directly: “I personally don’t feel like the people on top have ever been more afraid to take risks in the American theatre industry, which has less and less fully original works onstage. In NYC, like many writers, I feel threatened and creatively limited by the importance of money in the theatre world today.”
At the conference, that pressure recedes—not because it disappears entirely, but because it is no longer the organizing principle. “Valdez, when I first came in 2024, was my first time since I got to NYC in 2016 where none of that seemed to exist. People were doing theatre because they loved it, often bold theatre, often theatre they simply had to write.” The effect is not escapism, but recalibration. “I came back from both of my summers in Valdez a lot more inspired to face some of the harsher aspects of the NYC theatre industry.”
What emerges over the course of the week is not just a body of work, but a network of relationships—some fleeting, some lasting, but all rooted in this shared experience. “Tons of collaborations and a few weddings have come for people who met at the VTC,” Moore says. Segall describes the afterlife of those connections: “I made many friends in Valdez, some from all over the country, many from Alaska, who I keep in touch through text, and some who are NYC. We regularly get together in little Valdez reunions in the city.”
Even the smallest moments echo. Laurance recalls one in particular: “Back in 2022, I wrote the opening scene of a five-writer story relay for the fringe… ‘Clown Royale’ was born. Every conference since, ‘REVENGE FOR TEACUP!’ has been shouted out at a nightly fringe show… I giggle every time I hear it.” It is a joke, a callback, a shared language. But it is also something else: proof that the work—and the people—continue.
Hope, here, does not arrive as a conclusion; it accumulates in the willingness to share unfinished work, in the patience to sit through feedback, and in the act of returning—again and again—to a place that asks you to be present, to be generous, to be open to change. Moore puts it in broader terms: “I had questions about whether the world we’re living in still has time for the kind of communal happiness we create, but 2025 convinced me more than ever that the community we create is important, and that developing artists to confront our ever more depressing world matters.” Laurance finds it in momentum: “Being a part of the Valdez conference community makes me feel like I’m part of a wave of creativity, making art with momentum on my side.” And Segall, in the simplest terms, stated, “Theatre in the end simply must be about community. Valdez reminds me of that more than any other place I’ve ever been to.”
At the end of the week, people leave the way they arrived—by boat, by plane, by that same long road through the mountains, but something has shifted. The work is different, the conversations linger, or the sense of isolation—so often part of trying to make theatre right now—has been interrupted, if only temporarily. Somewhere along the drive, or the flight, or the quiet return to daily life, a thought begins to take hold: the possibility that the work still matters—and that there are others, scattered across cities and states and countries, who are doing it alongside one another.
At the end of the road, that is what Valdez offers; not answers, but a reason to keep going. To learn more about the conference and submit your work during the next open call for submissions, visit www.theatreconference.org.
