NEWvember brings four nights of new theatre to The Civic

THE NEWvember Festival returns to The Civic, a fast-moving week of rehearsed readings of exciting new plays by Irish writers, plus post-show Q&As with the playwrights.

Be the first to see a new work-in-progress, and get involved in providing crucial feedback to the writer.

Past plays developed at NEWvember have gone on to Off-Broadway, international and award-winning productions, including recent hits at The Civic, ‘Looking at the Sun’ and ‘The Gods of the Ozarks’.

This festival has been organised in association with AboutFACE Theatre, with three full-length plays and one performance of five ten-minute plays being performed across three days.

The full-length plays include ‘Ashes to Ashes Water to Water’ by Clodagh Healy, ‘The Uncertainty Principle’ by Niall McKay, and ‘Mourne’ by Abbe Tanenbaum.

Finally, ‘5×10’ consists of five new ten-minute plays by Aoife Cronin, David Edward Keenan, Elaine Maguire O’Connor, Sinéad Mooney and Paula Rodríguez Caballero, with a cast of fifteen actors.

This week, we sat down with AboutFACE Theatre’s Paul Nugent to talk about the 2026 NEWvember Festival, with a play being performed each evening between November 4 and 7 in the Civic’s Studio Space at 7pm.

Tickets are free, but booking is essential. For more information, visit civictheatre.ie.

What can you tell us about NEWvember?

NEWvember is our theatre company AboutFACE’s festival of rehearsed readings of new plays taking place at the Civic on November 4-7, whose spirit is to provide a dynamic, interactive and comfortable place where writers can hear their plays read by professional actors and discuss their work and creative process with the audience.

This year we’ll be featuring three super new full-length plays: ‘Ashes to Ashes Water to Water’ by Clodagh Healy (conceptualised by Clodagh, Friederike Karpf & Zia Basbaum), a beautiful tale of two siblings handling their mum’s passing amidst the mysterious ghosts of the drowned; ‘The Uncertainty Principle’ by Emmy-winner Niall McKay, a delirious dark comedy about a rocket scientist hallucinating in hospital and her donors deciding if she should live; and ‘Mourne’ by Abbe Tanenbaum, a tender, funny drama about a New Yorker trying to rebuild her life in the Irish mountains, coping with her old-fashioned in-laws and her driven Irish husband, and finding family.

Plus, the playwrights will all be present for the performances and to take part in post-show Q&As, where the audience share what they thought. We can’t wait!

What inspired the organisation of this festival of plays?

NEWvember was actually started back when we lived in New York.

Our friends Andrea and Michael Rhodes had just opened a new theatre space in a converted carpenter shop space in the village of Tivoli in upstate New York in 2011 and invited us up to check it out. Walking around the space, I said, “This would be a great place to do a play reading festival”.

And Michael bravely said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

We did the festival there for five years, where it grew in success – we actually broke the box office record for the venue with play readings, which is unheard of, and several plays developed at the festival have gone on to Off-Broadway and American and European productions and to win awards.

When we moved back to Dublin, we decided to bring NEWvember back with us and have been doing it here annually since 2017.

This year marks our 13th festival! And plays that we read at NEWvember have gone on to be hits at The Civic, including Looking at the Sun and The Gods of the Ozarks.

What are usually the highlights of working on this festival, and why?

It’s so exciting to get to bring so many different artists together and feel the buzz of watching them work together, bounce off each other, and make new creative discoveries.

I mean, this year NEWvember features eight writers, seventeen actors, two dramaturgs, four directors, and not to mention all the backstage team, so that’s twenty to thirty artists all convening on The Civic for four days!

You can feel the creative buzz around the building, with rehearsals all day, artists popping in and out, talking about the plays they’re working on. It’s so fun to be part of.

What would usually be some of the biggest challenges involved, and how do you navigate them?

Deciding on the plays. Once we choose, we’re pretty confident of being able to bring them to life in a vibrant, exciting and helpful way for audiences to see, with top-class actors and directors, but picking the plays we present is really hard.

We only have space to present three readings of full plays, and we get twenty times that many applications, and the standard is so high.

Each year, we boil it down to a shortlist of maybe a dozen plays, which is hard enough, but then choosing three from those is super-tough (and often leads to heated discussions!).

Luckily, we’ve been able to bring in some super people, on both sides of the Atlantic, to help read the plays and give feedback, and those objective, thoughtful responses really help in making the choices about which play is the most relevant, the most moving, and has the most potential.

We also use a blind submission process, so when the panel are reading, they don’t have the name, gender or any other identifiers of the writer on the script – so we can’t be biased if a good friend (or a celebrity!) sends in a play.

We don’t discover the names of the writers we’ve chosen until the plays are already selected.

Also, we’ve given ourselves a little more leeway in the last couple of years by introducing the 5×10 programme.

So as well as the three full-length readings we do, we also select another five writers who are commissioned to write a new 10-minute play – they’re randomly assigned three actors to write for – which we share on the final night of the festival.

That way we get to encourage and learn about five more writers. And it’s really fun to see what they come up with!

What are you hoping will be theatregoers’ biggest takeaway from these festivals and why?

I’m hoping theatregoers will discover two things – what amazing emerging playwrights we have here in Dublin.

Everyone talks about our famous writers – people like Conor McPherson and Marina Carr and Tallaght’s own Mark O’Rowe – but we get the delicious pleasure of getting to showcase brilliant writers early in their careers.

And also that theatregoers see they can be part of the process of creating new plays – the only way a playwright can discover whether a play works, is funny, is moving, is relevant, is too long, is in front of an audience, so a reading of their play at NEWvember is a crucial part of that development.

And with the Q&As we do with writers after each of the readings, they get to ask the audience questions about what they liked, what confused them, and what they connected to. So if you’re in the audience, you’re potentially a key part of the next great play.

What is next for AboutFACE Theatre? Do they have any other projects planned for the rest of 2026 or beyond?

We have a new play with music, what we’re calling a “rock n’roll rom-com”, that we have been developing over the last 12 months that we’re very excited about and are planning for its world premiere production in 2027.

Watch this space!

Who would you like to thank for helping to make this festival possible?

First, thanks have to go to The Civic, who have been so supportive of NEWvember over the last few years and have been an artistic home for our company AboutFACE going back more than twenty years!

All the team there are fabulous, with special shout outs to director Donal, marketing star Niamh, tech maestro Dermot and Civic legend Sandra, as well as the box office lovelies Louise and Barbara.

Also to our reading panel who spent the summer reading through all the submitted plays with such care and thoughtfulness.

And the Civic audience, who are always so good at coming to see these new plays – and are not afraid of sharing their opinion!