In 1983, he established Teatro Meta, a bilingual playwriting program involving thousands of San Diego young people.

Then in 1999 Mr. Rapp was accepted to the prestigious two-year playwriting program at Juilliard.

As it happens, the Powerhouse dramaturge, Len Berkman, heads Smith College's graduate playwriting program.

"We are all looking for Utopia," in the words of Mark Bly, associate artistic director of Yale Rep and chairman of the drama school's playwriting program.

It was a decision that Mr. Machado, the head of the graduate playwriting program at Columbia University's School of the Arts, has questioned and resented all his life.

As Mac Wellman, the director of Brooklyn College's graduate playwriting program, said, Beckett's plays have a strain of cruelty in them, and without it, his work becomes "saccharine and faintly sentimental."

Other Voices is the only professional playwriting program for writers with disabilities in regional theater, Mr. Davidson said.

He currently serves as Head of the graduate playwriting program at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

The head of the well-respected playwriting program at Brown University, Ms. Vogel, who is 45, was born in Washington and grew up in suburban Maryland.

In a special after-school playwriting program, she was part of a group of 10 students who created a Russian version of Huckleberry Finn for children's theater, which, she believes is still being performed in Russia.