The nonprofit Writopia Lab is hosting the 2011 Best Playwrights’ Festival this week.

Attendees can view 40 plays and eight monologues written by kids from grade school through high school. The kids will work with adult directors, including Terry Berlinger (resident director on The Lion King) and  Kevin R. Free.

Here’s more from the site: “The plays presented in the first five days of the Festival were developed in workshops at Writopia Lab. Sunday’s plays, though, went through an entirely different process. Thanks to the grant we received from Worldwide Pants, we were able to launch the playwriting competition we had long dreamed of. Our competition was open to playwrights in grades one through 12 from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. With only six weeks’ notice, young writers submitted 115 plays, screenplays, and monologues.” (Via NYT)