Mike Rudez said the best plays in the country may not be in New York City, where he resided for seven years before returning home two years ago.
Instead, he said he thought, they might be found regionally, and a good place to find them just might be Chattanooga.
"It's been a brainchild in my head for two years," said Rudez, who has started Theatre for the New South for just such an end.
"There's been a void in Chattanooga," he said, "so that's what we're focusing on - developing and promoting new work from local playwrights."
Beginning next week, CreateHere will host Theatre for the New South to showcase plays that have been developed and refined over the past three months by six area playwrights. The event is called "Fresh Squeezed."
"We started with nothing," said Rudez, artistic director and producer of the production. "Now we have six completed plays."
The plan is to offer one play in a staged reading four nights and two on another night. Each playwright has chosen a director, who, in turn, has assembled and rehearsed a cast for the world premiere of his or her reading.
The playwrights are Lewis Oehmig, Jeremy Weber, Jennifer Manning, Dakota Brown, Madeleine Young and Hunter Rodgers.
The pieces they produce, said Rudez, range from one that is 20 pages to full, two-act plays. Among them, there is a dark comedy, one he describes as "lyrical and prose-like," one he calls quixotic, one with a theme of how long things last and one with a theme of death.
"They're all really different," he said.
Rudez said the writing laboratory experience that birthed the plays met weekly at CreateHere. There, the playwrights sat for a roundtable discussion. As the weeks went by, actors and directors were brought in for additional collaboration. The critiques, he said, helped the playwrights advance their work to the next week.
"It is ... very important that once the laboratory is completed, the pieces they create continue to carry out beyond Chattanooga," he said in a news release. "In this way, Chattanooga will surely see artistic dividends from these writers work in the future."
Theater for the New South will host an interactive audience feedback after each staged reading, and Lupi's pizza will be served the opening weekend.
Contact Clint Cooper at ccooper@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6497.
IF YOU GO
-What: "Fresh Squeezed."
-When: 7-10 p.m. Thursday-April 30, May 6-7.
-Where: CreateHere, 55 E. Main St., Suite 105.
-Admission: Free.
-Phone: 503-0589.