For the 39th year in a row, the Bryan Wade Brave New Play Rites Festival (BNPR), produced by the UBC School of Creative Writing, will take place at the Dorothy Somerset Studios on the UBC Campus in Vancouver from March 11 to 15, 2025.

Named in honour of UBC’s Professor Bryan Wade (who passed away in 2022), BNPR is an annual event to recognize the amazing work done by the school’s student playwrights. Professor Wade believed that the best way for emerging playwrights to learn was to see their plays in front of a live audience.

With 15-minute staged readings that are the culmination of a year of writing and development, we have aligned the festival with current play development practices throughout North America. In this model, writers have a chance to go deeper into the writing process, initiate works of scale and ambition, and explore those works with the input of actors (recruited from UBC Theatre & Film and beyond) led by some of Vancouver’s finest theatre artists.

We have eighteen plays by talented emerging playwrights, with student and professional directors from the Vancouver area at the helm.

In the past, second and third productions of BNPR scripts have been staged in New York, Toronto and Scotland. Many of the festival’s alumni have gone on to become prominent members of Vancouver’s artistic community.