PARTNERSHIPS
New in 2024, our partnerships with Los Angeles theater companies exemplify our commitment to help feed the CA theatrical ecosystem with new work, and create opportunities for inspiring theatrical story-tellers. OPC is dedicated to helping more new plays move from page… to stage.
2026 Partnerships
Ojai Playwrights Conference x Huron Station Playhouse
We are thrilled to announce an exciting new partnership between OPC and Huron Station Playhouse (HSP) in Los Angeles.
The partnership will launch with a co-produced staged reading at Huron Station Playhouse of burn for You by Regan Moro, featured in OPC’s 2025 Conference and Festival. This reading is just the first expression of OPC and HSP’s powerful mission alignment around developing exceptional new stories for the stage that bolster the LA theater community as a center for new play development and production.
OPC brings 30 years of deep expertise cultivating the next generation of great new plays and playwrights, primarily through our annual summer Conference and New Plays Festival. As OPC expands to support new play development efforts at LA-based theater companies, HSP emboldens that effort with its deep community roots, and powerful national reach. HSP’s historic Cypress Park home is an incredible environment to bring their growing community of artists, theater lovers, and neighbors together to witness the irreplaceable power of live theater–a perfect match for OPC’s vision. Together, we are helping to strengthen a community passionate about supporting new stories that can both move us, and move the world forward.
ABOUT burn for You
A blistering August in upstate New York. No rain in 3 months. And the little daughter of Lila, a young worship leader at a charismatic church, doesn’t wake up one morning. Lila’s estranged sister Franny returns home for what she thinks is a funeral; only to find that her sister and the church she left behind are determined to pray for the toddler’s resurrection—no matter how long it takes.
ABOUT REGAN MORO
Regan Moro is a playwright and actor from the North Country of upstate New York. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan, spent a year as an apprentice in the Professional Training Company at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and is currently a fellow in the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at The Juilliard School. Regan has developed plays with Tony Award-winning directors Rachel Chavkin and Danya Taymor, and was nominated for both the 2026 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the 2025 Ollie New Play Award from the Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation. Her play burn for You was a Finalist for the 2024 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, received developmental workshops at the 2025 Ojai Playwrights Conference and the 2024 Great Plains Theatre Conference, and was a finalist for the 2025 Theatre 503 International Playwriting Award. Her play Tremolo was a 2025 Irons in the Fire project for Fault Line Theatre, had a reading presented in Pride Plays 2025 at MCC in association with Rattlestick Theater and Woolly Mammoth Theater, was a Finalist for the 2025 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, and a semifinalist for the 2025 Princess Grace Award, the 2025 Parity Plays Development Award, and the 2025 Terrence McNally New Works Incubator. Her play Nazi Mind received a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Regan is a recipient of the 2024-2025 Vitality Playwrights Commission from the Appalachian Center for the Arts and a residency from Millay Arts. She is currently under commission from Manhattan Theatre Club, Audible Theatre, and the Lucille Lortel’s Alcove New Play Development Program. She was a member of the 2022-2023 Emerging Writer’s Group at Primary Stages, and has been a finalist for the New Roots Artist Residency and a semi finalist for Ars Nova’s PlayGroup and a residency at Colt Coeur. Regan is the middle of three sisters, and the funny gay aunt to four little boys. She's represented by Jamie Kaye-Phillips at Paradigm Talent Agency. More at www.reganmoro.com.
Ojai Playwrights Conference x Play On Shakespeare
Play On Shakespeare and Ojai Playwrights Conference have teamed up to commission contemporary playwrights as part of a rigorous translation process that engages Shakespeare’s works as new plays.
In the pursuit of expanding access to these timeless stories, Play On Shakespeare sets out to build deep and meaningful partnerships with mission-aligned organizations to produce contemporary modern-verse Shakespeare translations that offer the linguistic immediacy of a new play.
This project will build on Play On Shakespeare’s established ecosystem of modern-verse translations created by playwrights and dramaturgs aspiring to secure and sustain the continued production of Shakespeare. Additional commissions are in the works as Play On Shakespeare continues its effort to normalize Shakespeare in translation and bring living playwrights back into the Shakespeare production process.
About Play On Shakespeare
An artistic partner that funds and supports contemporary modern verse Shakespeare in theatrical practice, productions, and education. Through partnerships with artists and organizations worldwide, they deliver these translations via theatrical productions, workshops and trainings, podcasts, publications, and film. Play On Shakespeare is made possible through generous support of the Hitz Foundation.
Play On Shakespeare’s partnership with Ojai Playwrights Conference will commission four modern verse Shakespeare translations. Commissioned playwrights include:
Julia Izumi translating Winter's Tale
JuCoby Johnson translating Romeo & Juliet
MJ Kaufman translating Henry IV Pt 1
Anne Washburn translating Richard III
Playwright Biographies
Julia Izumi (she/her) is a writer, performer, translator, and educator who makes plays, musicals, theatrical nonsense, and everything in between. Her work has been developed at Manhattan Theatre Club, Clubbed Thumb, Bushwick Starr, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Portland Center Stage’s JAW New Play Festival, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Seattle Rep, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and the NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights' Workshop. She received the inaugural OPC Dr. Kerry English Award, KCACTF’s Darrell Ayers Playwriting Award, and Theater Masters’ Visionary Playwright Award. Former LMCC Workspace Resident, Civilians R&D Group Member, and Clubbed Thumb’s Early-Career Writers’ Group Member. Current New Dramatists Resident. Current commissions: True Love Productions, MTC/Sloan, Playwrights Horizons, Seattle Rep 20x30. MFA: Brown University. juliaizumi.com.
JuCoby Johnson (he/him) is a New York-based playwright, actor, and screenwriter originally from Jacksonville, Florida. Johnson is a second-year playwright in The Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. As an actor, he has performed at the Guthrie Theater, Theater Latté Da, Ten Thousand Things Theater, and many more. His plays have been featured in conferences and organizations such as IAMA Theater, the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils, the International Black Theater Festival, Ojai Playwrights Conference, and many more. His screenwriting credits include The Runarounds (Amazon). Johnson is the recipient of McKnight and Jerome Hill Artist Fellowships, is a member of the 2026 Page 73 Writers Group, was a member of the 2022 Sony Pictures Television Diverse Writers Program, and was part of the inaugural artist cohort at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis. jucobyjohnson.com.
MJ Kaufman’s (he/they) plays have been seen at the Mark Taper Forum, the Public Theater, WP Theater, NAATCO, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coeur, Williamstown Theater Festival, InterAct Theater and numerous other theaters and schools around the country as well as in Russian in Moscow and in Australia. MJ has received funding from The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre Fund, a Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award, Jane Chambers Prize in Feminist Theatre, and residencies at the New Museum, MacDowell Colony and New Dramatists. MJ’s film THERAPIST CRUSH won the Audience Choice Best Film Award at TRANSlationsfilm festival. MJ has also written for Netflix. MJ co-founded Trans Lab Fellowship, a program to support emerging transgender theater artists which ran from 2018-2022 and now serves on the core community of Breaking the Binary Theatre. MJ teaches in the Dramatic Writing Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. mjkaufman.com
Anne Washburn (she/her) is a New York-based playwright. Her work has been produced nationally and internationally, and has premiered with 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, the Almeida, American Repertory Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Fogler, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, Two River Theater Company, Vineyard Theater and Woolly Mammoth. Honors include an Alpert Award, a Guggenheim, a PEN/Laura Pels award for artist in mid-career, twice a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn, a Whiting, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo.