(CRANFORD, NJ) -- The Theater Project's Playwrights' Workshop will launch its winter/spring series of New Play Readings series on Saturday, January 17, 2026 at Cranford Community Center's 110-seat theater. The script-in-hand staged readings are free to the public, and they include post-performance conversations with audience, author, cast and director. Showtime is 2:00pm.
The first play of the new year is Conshohocken McFaddens. In the play, Anna and George McFadden meet and marry in 1919 in a small mill town outside Philadelphia, as the country emerges from the devastation of the “war to end all wars” and history’s deadliest epidemic. They struggle to survive and stay true to their values as the Great Depression, another epidemic (polio) and a second world war endlessly thwart Anna's dreams.
Will Anna and George’s beliefs keep them afloat in a world of change and challenge, or sink them? The play invites audiences to re-visit the struggle between what's good for the family versus the hopes and dreams of its individual members, in an era -- 1919 to 1959-- that bears resemblance to the present one, with its existential and economic crises.
Author Lynn Aylward is an emerging playwright who recently moved from San Francisco via Scotland to New Jersey. She was a long-time member of the Writers Pool at Playground in San Francisco and her short plays have been produced in California, Florida and New York. Her full-length plays have been semi-finalists in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the City Lights Theatre (San Jose) Festival. She taught playwriting for Rising Voices, a theater group for incarcerated women in Oakland and is a co-founder of Same Boat Theater, an eco-justice performance group. Her play “Three Chords and the Truth” was in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2021. Lynn is delighted to be part of The Theater Project and have a third play presented in the New Play Reading Series.
The Friends of the Cranford Library host the series on the third Saturday of each month, January through May and September through November. It is made possible in part through a Union County Local Arts Grant. All presentations take place at the Cranford Community Center, located at 220 Walnut Avenue. Large-print programs and scripts will be available with advance request.
“The post-reading discussions are always exciting, not only for the audience, but for the playwrights,” said Mark Spina, artistic director of The Theater Project. “They provide audiences a rare opportunity to give feedback and contribute to the development of a new script. Likewise, the discussions give the playwrights immediate insight into how their work is received.”
Founded in 1994 and based in Union, The Theater Project introduces New Jersey audiences to new plays and supports rising playwrights and theater artists. It develops new audiences for theater by service to the community, providing programs for children, and using theater as a forum to address current issues.
