“Sometimes a play calls out for a staged reading,” said Carla Milarch, Theatre Nova’s founding artistic director.

This is precisely why the Ann Arbor-based company — which specializes in producing new work and is located in the Yellow Barn on Huron St. — is hosting its Michigan Playwrights Festival for a third year.

“We’ve configured it differently over the years,” said Milarch. “At first, we crammed all the plays into one big week. But we tend to find a lot of plays we really like and want to see read, so we decided to break it down into two installments. … We pick 10 plays and space the festival out so we have one week in the fall and one in the spring. This [July 25-29] will be the second installment of last year’s submissions.”

To gather scripts for consideration, Theatre Nova puts out a general call for plays by Michigan-based playwrights, but the company also reaches out to more established writers to see if they have a new or in-progress project that might benefit from a reading.

“We have a good blend of veteran playwrights and writers who may be new to playwriting,” said Milarch. READ THE REST HERE