In SoHo, a number of actors took their seats on the stage, and then Carl Hancock Rux, a poet and playwright, read a commissioned poem in an almost unnervingly resonant voice.
The more the playwright read about drones, the more inspiration he had for a play.
To find the writers and new plays it presents, Playwrights reads up to 1,500 scripts a year.
They are here to raise awareness and perform a version of Letters Live, a spin-off of the cult book Letters of Note, in which actors, writers and playwrights read out famous correspondence.
Their conference concluded with playwright Alan Bissett reading the People's Vow.
Tennessee Williams's Spring Storm was written in 1937, when he was studying playwrighting and reading Beyond the Horizon.
The playwright Tony Kushner read Sendak's books as a child, and he told me, "I wanted to be Maurice Sendak".
"Wendy and the Lost Boys," Julie Salamon's biography of the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, reads like a 400-plus-page magazine piece.
Meanwhile, at Forest Fringe, playwright Chris Thorpe read an excellent half-hour short story and the Miniaturists staged several short plays.
A friend, the playwright Brendan Behan, read the manuscript and filled it with a profusion of mostly helpful editorial comments and corrections.
