Carolina New Works Play Festival Premier At Charlotte In July
Three high schoolers on the last day of senior year. A gay man returning to his small Southern hometown and aging parents. Ambitious Los Angeles creatives tempted by ChatGPT.
These characters will breathe their first when the Carolina New Works Play Festival presents its inaugural cohort of plays in two sets of public staged readings July 24-26 and July 31-Aug. 2.
Founded by the UNC Charlotte Department of Theatre and Three Bone Theatre, the Carolina New Works Play Festival showcases plays from North and South Carolina playwrights, selected through a rigorous juried process. This year’s winning plays are “TRE,” by T.J. Lewis; “How I Got Forgotten,” by Glenn Rawls; and “You Can’t Smoke in Burbank,” by Skylar Schock.
In “TRE,” Tay, Rey and Bree find themselves on the last day of senior year, fumbling through life and contemplating what comes next. What are they doing with their lives? Where should they go to college? Who do they want to be as grown-ups? And why do they keep kissing each other?
In “How I Got Forgotten,” a newly single gay man returns to his small Southern hometown after his mother’s heart attack. As he sees his mother slip toward dementia, he realizes she has been covering for his father, a retired history professor who is in the grips of Alzheimer’s.
“You Can’t Smoke in Burbank” takes on the art versus AI dilemma, as three Los Angeles-based creatives use ChatGPT to finish an assignment. That decision thrusts them into unexpected circumstances that challenge their ideas about success, entertainment and making something matter.
Following two weeks of rehearsals with local directors, actors and dramaturgs, each play will receive two professional staged readings: July 24-26 at Rowe Recital Hall on the campus of UNC Charlotte and July 31-Aug. 2 at The Arts Factory on West Trade Street. Admission is free.
After each reading playwrights and artists will host post-show discussions with the audience. Audiences will witness the creative process, and their feedback will become part of the plays’ development.
For more information about the 2026 festival performances, including showtimes, and the guidelines for future play submissions, visit the CNWPF webpage.
About the Playwrights
Originally from North Carolina, T.J. Lewis (T.J.L) is a playwright, actor, producer and administrator based in New York City. He received his B.A. in Theatre from Appalachian State University and has worked with various regional theatre companies along the East Coast. He has been a finalist and semifinalist in selection for programs such as Ars Nova’s Play Group, Fault Line Theatre’s Irons in the Fire, Pipeline Theatre’s PlayLab group, SPACE on Rydar’s Farm’s BLCKSPACE Residency, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood group, and the Movement Theatre Company x The Black List Ladder Commission for 2025. T.J.L was a member of the COOP’s 2022-23 and 2025-26 Clusterf*ck cohort and the 2023-24 SOUL Reading Series cohort at the National Black Theatre. He was also a 2023-24 playwriting fellow for the Playwrights Realm and was a 2021 playwriting fellow for The Gate Keepers Collective’s “Learning to Love” fellowship. He was named a finalist for the 2023 Founders Award from New York Stage and Film and a finalist in the 50th Annual Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short New Play Festival Competition. His work has been developed and performed in New York, Los Angeles, Massachusetts and the United Kingdom.
Glenn Rawls (“How I Got Forgotten) is based in Columbia, South Carolina. He has had his plays performed in cities across the United States, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Omaha and off-off Broadway in New York City. He has worked professionally as an actor and had a decades-long career as a producer, writer and artist for public television in South Carolina.
Skylar Schock (“You Can’t Smoke in Burbank”) is a Charlotte-based playwright, performer and comedian originally from San Diego, California. She holds a B.A. in Communication from the University of California San Diego and an M.F.A. in Theatre Performance from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She is also an alumna of the University of California Los Angeles Professional Program in Acting for the Camera and the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. Her solo show, “It’s My Fault, I’m The Problem,” was performance workshopped with Daz Weller at Vegas Theatre Company. Her short play “Pageant Material” was recently produced by Arachne Theatre as part of the Boom Fringe Festival. Her pilot script “The Truth About [True] Crime” was a semifinalist for the Filmmatic Comedy Screenplay Awards, and she received an award from UCLA for her pitch of the single-camera sitcom, “American Swiper.”