The play writing program at Brooklyn College was started over thirty years ago by Jack Gelber, one of America's most important experimental writers. The current director of the program, Mac Wellman is endeavoring to continue that tradition, while seeking to embrace the widest definition of that concept.

The play writing program is dedicated to the proposition that writing for the theater is not a business of finished thought and dead rules. Rather, we endeavor to pursue kinds of writing that involve an ongoing conversation with theater of the past and (hopefully) the future. To this end we encourage our MFA playwrights to become students of the theater in every sense: to follow the current scene as well as studying the classics from as many traditions as possible; to study the techniques of making theater as well as theory; and lastly, to become as well read as possible in all the written arts, with special emphasis on what is most contemporary, most challenging, most alive. It is our conviction that each generation must reinvent a theater appropriate to the times; a theater the times deserves; a theater that refuses to settle for the merely tendencious, and the dreary dead hand of the already known.