In her new play Small Mouths, Small Sounds, writer Bess Wohl follows six city dwellers as they embark on a five-day spiritual retreat to heal their lives in upstate New York.

The idea came to Ms. Wohl after a meditation retreat she and a friend went on several years ago. Though she and her friend had a hard time keeping the retreat’s pact of silence, Ms. Wohl remained receptive.

“I felt that everyone had come to this place really in need of an answer,” said Ms. Wohl, reflecting on her experience. “That need is something I find really compelling on stage, so I thought it was a really great opportunity for a play.”

Ms. Wohl is preparing to launch Small Mouths, Small Sounds on its “maiden voyage” on Thursday, July 10, at 9 p.m. The play will be read to an audience for the first time as part of the Vineyard Arts Project’s New Writers New Plays festival.

The New Writers New Plays festival has been held annually for the past five years. The event, which takes place on July 10 and July 11, will feature Ms. Wohl’s play along with two other theatrical pieces. There’s a House was written by Kim Rosenstock and Shaina Taub, and Slant Theater Project’s Naperville was written by Mat Smart. Each piece will be performed once each day.

The festival will take place at the Vineyard Arts Project’s 215 Upper Main street property in Edgartown. Ashley Melone, founder and artistic director of Vineyard Arts Project, said the purpose of the festival is to highlight works by younger, lesser-known writers. She founded the Vineyard Arts Project in 2008 as “a place for artists to make new work in dance and theatre” after noting the challenges artists go through to find time, money and studio space to rehearse their works.

Leading up to the performances, the writers, directors and performers involved in New Writers New Plays take up residence for nearly two weeks at the Vineyard Arts Project’s two buildings in Edgartown. The program is similar to the spiritual retreat Ms. Wohl explores in her play. Writers come with partial or completed drafts of their work and search for “answers” as they develop and tweak their pieces during their time on the Island. They can even participate in on-site yoga classes on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. This year’s New Writers New Plays residency began when writers arrived on June 29, and will end on July 13.

The housing structures are strategically designed, and feature a kitchen in a central location to foster relationships between members of different performing groups who are living together.

“You kind of have to pass through [the kitchen] to get from work to where you’re living,” said Ms. Melone. “I think as a result of that, people congregate in the kitchen and end up talking and having a glass of wine after rehearsal and eating together to charter the community that we’ve created.”

By providing a retreat where artists can incubate their work, Ms. Melone hopes to reconnect the writers to their original inspiration.

“What we feel like we can do here in Vineyard Arts Project’s model is to take away all the excess things in life,” Ms. Melone said. “Like in New York, you have to commute to get there and you have your whole life and your family and all the things that distract you. . . . So we kind of take away all the rest of the noise that can complicate the creative process.”

As a writer, Ms. Wohl agreed. She felt an “immediate massive energy shift” upon coming to the Island from New York city.

“I feel like I’ve had a bazillion ideas just in the first two days because there’s just space for them to occur,” she said.

New Writers New Plays also provides a rich experience for audience members, enabling them to witness the creative process and interact with the performers in a more intimate setting.

“Often when you see a show, it’s already done, it’s already been frozen. Nobody’s working on it anymore,” Ms. Melone said. “When you see a show here, it’s still in process. A choreographer could come in and be like ‘Oh, wait, I want to change that moment.’ So much is still happening in front of you, 10 feet from the audience. You’ll get sweat on by the performers, even.”

After the performance, the audience is often invited to participate in formal talk-backs or casual mingling with the performers, writers and directors.

The experience is mutually beneficial for both the audience member and the artist. Ms. Wohl is looking forward to observing people’s reactions to the words she has written when her play debuts this Thursday.

“[Getting a sense of] the energy in the room and the way the audience listens is so incredibly helpful,” said Ms. Wohl. “I’m watching their body language. I’m watching where they find something funny, where they start getting restless, where they sit up, where they sit back. All of that is a huge, huge help to me. Sometimes that’s more honest than even what people say. You can’t fake being interested and it’s sort of this very visceral, primal response.”

On Saturday, July 5, at 5 p.m. Vineyard Arts Project hosts its annual Art4Art benefit, featuring cocktails, music and a silent auction. For tickets and a complete list of summer offerings, visit vineyardartsproject.org.