We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Harrison Young a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Harrison, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

Next Rung Productions is here to support a Knoxville-area playwright for a year every year.

As a playwright for the past decade and a half, one thing that’s been clear is that it’s a lonely difficult process between writing your first words on a page and getting it presented to the public. Most opportunities for playwrights are for already-created scripts that seek being produced…but what if you’re seeking help before you have a completed story? Or seeking help from before you even begin creating the story? It’s hard to always ask people for help who are both qualified and interested with these earliest stages.

This is where Next Rung Productions comes in.

I’ve supported new plays and local playwrights for a long time. Since working with playwrights through Next Rung Productions starting in 2020, however, this is my most direct way to help a local playwright in the process of creation.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

Yeah, thank you Sarah!

So my name’s Harrison Young, and I do stuff with plays. I began as an actor and then a playwright, which has led me to different roles like the Tennessee Regional Rep for the Dramatists Guild of America and the Literary Manager for the Tennessee Stage Company. It’s taken me back and forth between living in Tennessee and New York City, with my plays being seen in other places too like Los Angeles and Phoenix.

I largely credit this playwright-direction in my life to the mentorships I’ve received from Kali Meister who taught my first playwriting class, Tom Parkhill who first gave me a chance on my full-length plays, and the late Vania Smrkovski for directing my first full-length play. As a young playwright, having local support like theirs — in both education and friendship — went far beyond my expectations and I grew so much from them.

A lot of my work in recent times has come from Next Rung Productions, where I do my best to offer expertise and support like Kali, Tom, and Vania did for me.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I support new plays and local writers!

More people deserve that level of support like I had in my early days from friends and mentors, but unfortunately not every writer gets access to such help and even the ones who do still have lots of hard lonely work ahead. One way I try to remedy this is Next Rung Productions. Selected playwrights get bi-weekly meetings, access in-between for questions, resources for things like special guests reading their drafts, advice on applying their scripts outside of the program, and a public reading within the program. They also get their work highlighted on our Facebook page, which keeps our fans informed on their progress like how quickly they’re writing and quotes from the development process. Basically I’m giving a playwright everything I got because I want it to be easier for playwrights!

I’ve gone into this hoping to support thirty playwrights in thirty years. Applications are now open for 2023 and this is the first year to consider potentially supporting a second playwright, however, so if this goes well maybe I can help thirty playwrights a little faster now.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

For these first three years, the structure of this program has made keeping up with playwrights pretty easy. Each playwright has me for the year where they see me helping their process in well-tailored ways. By the end of the program each year, I’ve had the great fortune of very kind testimonials from each playwright I’ve worked with. It feels good to have even made friends along the way too, so continuing to keep in touch has been very comfortable.

We still cross paths as writers in our own journeys anyway. For example, take Jeannette Brown — Next Rung Productions’s first playwright from 2020. She had never written a full-length play before taking my program when she created MUTATION, and now two years later I just finished acting in and leading the audience discussion for a table reading of her fourth full-length play called LANDSCAPE WITH COLOR. I’m so glad she still feels the rush of playwriting outside of Next Rung Productions!

One fun touch for ongoing brand loyalty here is to have the program’s previous playwrights come back and visit the next playwright as a special guest for one of their drafts, The sense of community and support continues through us all in that way. It’s also good for re-engaging our Facebook followers, Many of them first Liked the page when their friends like Jeannette or 2021’s playwright Deb Eberle were the playwrights for a year. Many of these same people may not otherwise have as much reason to follow future years with people they don’t know. However, by bringing back writers from the past, we’re also re-engaging those fans from the past. It’s reminding them the people they first cared about and supported also still care about and support this program. All this comes together in a way that connects to the current playwright each year for extra momentum.

This year the playwright is Sherridan Smee, and her reading of HOME BASE will be the program’s first in-person event since beginning three years ago. It’s a relatable dramedy about a high school class reunion, and it will be cool because her past high school theatre teacher Lea McMahan will be co-moderating the audience discussion with me afterward. Hopefully this will help people better see the work we’ve been doing in recent years.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nextrungproductions.wixsite.com/home
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NextRungProductions
• Other:
  Next event is the table reading for HOME BASE by Sherridan Smee — free event on Friday, October 28th at 7:00 PM: https://www.facebook.com/events/2324867274344378/?ref=newsfeed
  Playwright applications are open for 2023: https://forms.gle/eaURH8LqM2wfPQeH7
  Contact: [email protected]