Audible, the digital audiobook giant, announced Tuesday that it would create a $5 million fund to commission new works from emerging playwrights — not for the stage, but for people’s headphones and speakers.

As audio fiction seems to be having a moment, in the realm of podcasts, Audible plans to draw from the vast pool of young writers to create one- or two-person plays. They will be available beginning late this year, the company said.

Playwrights can apply for grants to cover both “industry standards” for new commissions and the cost of production, said Donald R. Katz, Audible’s chief executive and a former journalist and author.

“I’m hoping that people just come out of the woodwork,” Mr. Katz said.

Grant recipients will be recommended by an advisory board made up of theater industry insiders: the actress Annette Bening (“20th Century Women”); the award-winning playwrights Lynn Nottage (“Sweat”), Tom Stoppard (“The Coast of Utopia”) and David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”); the directors Trip Cullman (“Six Degrees of Separation”) and Leigh Silverman (“Violet”); and two artistic directors of Off Broadway companies, Oskar Eustis of the Public Theater, and Mimi O’Donnell of Labyrinth Theater Company.

 

Mr. Katz said he hoped that Audible’s format would help widen the reach of emerging playwrights, who might otherwise be writing for Off (or even Off Off) Broadway theaters.

“To celebrate live performance in the theater is one thing, but think of professional sports,” Mr. Katz said. “There’s the game, but it’s also being projected to millions of other people in a really powerful way.”

There is a long history of theater writers, such as Bertolt Brecht and Harold Pinter, dipping their toes into audio fiction. Mr. Cullman said that the “chasm is not so wide” between theater and a platform like Audible.

“Theater is an art medium that is primarily driven by language,” he said, adding that he thought the one- or two-person play format would “spawn some really interesting material.”

Ms. Silverman, whose recent credits directing solo shows include Judith Light in Neil LaBute’s “All the Ways to Say I Love You” at MCC Theater last fall, said the format would also open up people’s minds to the style of one-character plays. “The conflict is between the storyteller and themselves,” she said. “The thing that makes it drama is in the telling of the story.”

Mr. Katz said that about a dozen playwrights would be chosen to start. Having that kind of revenue stream, Ms. Silverman said, “is always good for anybody in the arts.”

“They’re actually getting paid to write a play,” she said of the grant recipients. “That’s a rare thing, and it’s an important thing.”