Rough Draft Success Stories: How LPAC Helps New Works Find Their Voice
- LPAC
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
At the heart of every finished production is a beginning. Before the sold-out runs, award nominations, critical recognition, and expanded productions, there is often a period of experimentation, uncertainty, and discovery. For more than a decade, the Rough Draft Festival at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (LPAC) has provided artists with a place for that process. Through readings, workshops, audience feedback, and artistic support, the festival gives playwrights and theater makers an opportunity to test ideas, hear their work aloud, and uncover what their pieces need next.
Many works that first appeared at Rough Draft have continued well beyond the festival, finding new audiences, productions, awards, and expanded life on stages across New York City and beyond. This year alone, Scout Davis's The Life and Times of Daisy Forbes, which was presented at Rough Draft Festival 2026, is continuing its development with a run at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club from May 22–24, while other festival alumni have gone on to earn major awards, professional productions, and new developmental opportunities. For artists, the value of the festival is not simply in presenting unfinished work. It is in having the space to listen, revise, and grow.
Three former Rough Draft artists, Scout Davis, Lauren Holmes and Jermaine Rowe, recently reflected on how the festival helped shape their projects and creative journeys. Their stories demonstrate how works in progress can evolve into impactful productions when artists are given the resources and support to develop their ideas.
Scout Davis and The Life and Times of Daisy Forbes
Just months after sharing The Life and Times of Daisy Forbes at Rough Draft Festival 2026, multidisciplinary artist Scout Davis began preparing the work for a run at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, one of New York City's most respected homes for experimental performance. The production marks an important next step for a piece that continued to evolve through the developmental support and audience engagement Davis received at LPAC.
The Life and Times of Daisy Forbes is a long form lip-sync performance that follows a showgirl abandoned at a bus stop before a major tour. Blending performance, storytelling, and transformation, the work explores what happens when someone is forced to confront an uncertain future and redefine themselves in the aftermath of loss.
For Davis, presenting the work at Rough Draft Festival became an opportunity to better understand the piece's emotional center and relationship with audiences. Through the festival process, they discovered that audience engagement was not simply a component of the performance, but a vital thread connecting its many narratives.
"Rough Draft Festival helped me find the heart of the piece and how it may resonate with audiences today."
Reflecting on the experience, Davis explained that sharing the work helped reveal the connective tissue holding the piece together while highlighting how audience interaction could guide viewers through its kaleidoscopic storytelling structure. The feedback and discoveries that emerged through Rough Draft have continued to inform the project's next phase of development as it prepares for new audiences.
Davis is also a familiar presence within the LPAC community. Previous appearances have included Doll Valley and FEVER DREAM: A Return Performance Ritual, works that exemplify their commitment to creating communal performance experiences that explore transformation, authorship, community, and identity. Their continued artistic relationship with LPAC reflects the center's long-term investment in artists whose work continues to grow well beyond a single festival appearance.
Lauren Holmes and ZEUS 4
When playwright Lauren Holmes brought ZEUS 4 to Rough Draft Festival in 2024, she was exploring a deceptively simple premise: a group of dog owners who gather in a Boston park and allow their pets to run off leash despite local regulations. Beneath the humor, however, the play examines how communities form, protect themselves, and respond to both external and internal threats. It also explores the ways people project their fears, desires, and identities onto the animals they love.
For Holmes, the Rough Draft process offered a rare opportunity to experience the script from a new perspective.
“Rough Draft Festival helped me work with a lot of new actors, which was a way to hear the script afresh and guide rewrites.”
Those rewrites proved significant. Following its appearance at LPAC, ZEUS 4 received a full production at Pace University in spring 2025 and a staged reading at Nantucket Performing Arts Center later that year. The revised script also helped Holmes earn the prestigious Princess Grace Award for 2024–2025 in Playwriting.
Today, Holmes continues to build a national profile as a playwright. A Resident Artist at The Cell Theatre and recipient of numerous fellowships and development opportunities, she remains part of a growing community of artists whose work benefited from the developmental environment Rough Draft provides.
Jermaine Rowe and The Children from the Blue Mountains
Few artists embody the long-term relationship between Rough Draft Festival and artistic development more clearly than Jermaine Rowe. A former Rough Draft artist who participated in both 2018 and the virtual 2021 festival, Rowe used the platform to develop The Children from the Blue Mountains, an original Afro-Caribbean musical rooted in folklore, music, and cultural traditions.
The musical follows the folkloric figures Anansi and Jack Mandora as they compete to capture the power hidden within stories. Through traditions including Kumina, Dinki-mini, dancehall, soca, and Pocomania, the work explores dreams, sacrifice, family, friendship, and the costs of pursuing one's ambitions.
For Rowe, the Rough Draft experience offered something deeply personal.
“Rough Draft Festival helped me learn and trust my voice as an artist.”
Since its festival appearances, the musical has continued to grow while maintaining the same artistic foundation that first inspired audiences. In 2026, the project reached a major milestone with its first staging workshop in Jamaica through the Jamaica Musical Theatre Company.
Rowe's broader career has flourished as well. He was named a 2025 Candela Fellow, developed original works through residencies with The TEAM and Mabou Mines, appeared as a featured artist in Lincoln Center’s Broadway Future Songbook Series, and continues to work as a performer, writer, director, and educator.
A Festival Built for Possibility
Every artist arrives at Rough Draft Festival with a different project, a different process, and different questions. Some discover what needs to be rewritten. Others uncover the emotional center of a work. Some gain the confidence to trust their artistic instincts. What unites these experiences is the opportunity to develop work within a supportive environment where experimentation is encouraged and audience response becomes part of the creative process.
The journeys of Lauren Holmes, Scout Fitzgerald, and Jermaine Rowe illustrate what can happen when artists are given the space to take creative risks. From award-winning scripts and professional productions to expanded performances and international collaborations, their projects demonstrate that works in progress are not unfinished ideas. They are the beginnings of something larger.
For more than a decade, Rough Draft Festival has served as a launchpad for artists at crucial moments in their creative development. As these projects continue to evolve beyond LPAC's stages, they carry with them traces of the conversations, discoveries, and revisions that began here.
Photos Credit - Ryan Prado
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