Theater Director Chip Lamb has authored an impressive portfolio of dozens of plays throughout his prolific career. He invites the Pomfret community to submit their own works for the upcoming Pomfret Playwright Festival, where their stories will be brought to life on stage.

Lamb has announced a call for the greater Pomfret community — students, faculty, staff, former faculty, parents, and alumni — to submit plays for production. If selected, the plays will be part of the Pomfret Playwright Festival on Thursday, May 8, and Friday, May 9. 

A small panel of judges will determine which submissions will be staged by Pomfret School Theater. The cast will rehearse multiple works throughout the spring term in preparation for the Playwright Festival. It will be a unique learning opportunity for the student playwrights who decide to submit their own works and the actors who have the chance to be among the first to stage a new body of work.

“Theater is an inclusive public and community enterprise. We want people to come together. We want them to use their imagination to generate a great creative energy,” says Lamb.

The actors will have a big responsibility to bring the original script and production to life for the first time. “There is something refreshing about performing a role no one has played before. It can be empowering,” says Lamb. “I’m excited for the actors to look over and see the playwright in the audience as they perform their work.”

Lamb has already begun to cast his net for creative submissions. He is hoping ​​​Sydney Dubitsky ’20 will submit a piece. A play she wrote was staged at the Providence Fringe Festival this past summer. New York Times Best Seller author Ridley Pearson ’71—  who Lamb collaborated with to write The Academy, loosely based upon Pearson’s book of the same name — is also excited by this opportunity. Lamb hopes that students who have taken or are taking his playwriting course will enter their work.

This project is a big undertaking, especially as he prepares to take his final bow as Pomfret's theater director. However, Lamb has done similar projects at Pomfret and other schools. During Project: Pomfret last year, he helped students stage a twenty-minute production written by Nathan Kikonyogo ’25. This year will be Lamb’s final opportunity to draft and stage an original production with a small project group in two weeks. During his tenure as theater director, Lamb himself has penned and staged three productions about life at Pomfret — Pearson’s The Academy, 70 lbs of Books (2013), which tells the story of Pomfret alumnus Loring “Ring” Bailey ’63, who died in the Vietnam War; and I’m a Master, I Believe (1994), about Pomfret’s founder William Peck. 

Scripts must be submitted by Saturday, March 15, 2025, to be considered and must be no more than thirty minutes in length. Play manuscripts and any questions may be sent electronically to 
clamb@pomfret.org with the subject line: “PPF.” 

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