Northwest Drama Conference/NPA playwriting contest

NWDC & NPA announce a new play competition for students of NWDC affiliated Colleges and Universities.

Unpublished short plays (ten minute or one act) written by students.

All plays will be read by the professional playwrights who are members of the Northwest Playwrights Alliance.

The winning play will be given a reading at the NWDC/KCACTF regional festival at the University of Idaho in February 2009 and one presented as a reading NPA at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in Seattle.

The play must connect to the theme: "The West" in the geography of the world, mind or spirit

NPA has the option to publish the winning play

A $100 prize plus $400 towards travel to Seattle WA, if the playwright can attend the reading, will be awarded the winning playwright.

Deadline for all play submissions is December 5.

Plays to be submitted to :

Northwest Drama Conference
NWDC/NPA Playwriting
Tammi Doyle
Bellevue Community College
3000 Landerholm Circle SE
Bellevue, WA 98007

Live Girls! Submission Update

Shortly after the Dramatist magazine came out, a friendly playwright sent this email to Meghan Arnette of Live Girls!

Greetings, Live Girls!

Do you have any idea how many playwrights are gnashing our teeth
right now, having just read Dennis Schebetta's column devoted to you
in The Dramatist--and then having gone to your Web page and
discovered that the deadline for submitting scripts passed two weeks
ago?

Meghan knew she would get some interested female playwrights responding but due to the magazine's delay in shipping in some areas, it didn't leave a lot of time to check out their website and send some stuff in.

So Meghan wants everyone to know that she has extended the deadline to October 12th for Guild members who read about the company in the magazine.

If you haven't sent her a script (or heck, seen one of their shows), then I urge you do to so!

What are you waiting for?

Driftwood Players "FIRST DRAFT" program

Driftwood Playwers in Edmonds is now developing plays with actors and looking for playwrights to be involved.

For more info, check out their webiste here.

They will be having a staged reading of the play "Single Mother, Abe Lincoln" by Angela Ziska this Wednesday the 17th at 7pm at the Wade James Theatre at 950 Main Street, Edmonds, WA.

It's FREE so come check it out!

Flower City Theatre Co. Submission

Flower City Theatre Co.
Rochester, New York

Flower City Theatre Co. seeks short plays (5-8 min, standard format) for
winter production.. No fee. Previous production
fine. Irreverent, staid, edgy, solemn - we'll read
it all. No sketches please. Small honorarium for
playwrights. May submit up to 2 scripts.

email submissions to: flowercitytheatre@yahoo.com


Submission deadline: October 31, 2008.

Ecodrama Playwrights Festival & Symposium

Earth Matters On Stage:
>
>
> Ecodrama Playwrights Festival & Symposium
>
>
> May 21~ 31, 2009 ~ University of Oregon
>
>
> CALL FOR SCRIPTS
>
> First place Award: $2,000 and workshop production
> Second place Award: $500 and workshop production
> Honorable mentions: public staged reading
>
> The mission of this Festival is to call forth and
> foster new dramatic works that respond to the
> ecological crisis, and that explore new
> possibilities of being in relationship with the
> more-than-human world. The Festival is ten days of
> readings, workshop performance/s, and discussions of
> the scripts that are finalists in the Playwrights'
> Contest. Some readings and workshops will be
> followed by facilitated talk-backs with the
> playwrights. In addition, a symposium of speakers,
> panels and discussions will advance scholarship in
> the area of arts and ecology, and help foster
> development of new works.
>
> Play Contest: At the core of the Festival is a
> playwright's competition carrying a cash award and
> workshop production. The Guidelines attached
> describe the kinds of new plays that may be
> submitted. Plays will be accepted from February
> through October 2008. The winning plays will be
> chosen by a panel of distinguished theatre artists
> from the USA andCanada, including:
>
>
> * Martha Lavey, Artistic Director, Steppenwolf
> Theatre Co., Chicago
> * Timothy Bond, Artistic Dir. Syracuse Stage; former
> Assoc. Artistic Dir. Oregon Shakespeare; faculty
> Syracuse University, NY.
> * Olga Sanchez, Artistic Director, Teatro Milagro,
> Portland
> * Diane Glancy, Playwright, Native Voices Award,
> faculty Macallister College
> * Jose Cruz González, Playwright, Cornerstone
> Theatre; founder Hispanic Playwrights Project;
> faculty Cal State LA
> * David Diamond, Headlines Theater Co, Vancouver BC
> * Marie Clements, playwright, founder Urban Ink, BC
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Guidelines for Playwrights
>
>
> What kind of theatre comes to mind when you read the
> term "ecodrama"? Political plays that advocate for
> environmentalism, or educational theatre about
> recycling? While these examples would fit, please
> let your imagination soar beyond them.
>
> Ecodrama stages the reciprocal connection between
> humans and the more-than-human world. It
> encompasses not only works that take environmental
> issues as their topic, hoping to raise consciousness
> or press for change, but also work that explores the
> relation of a "sense of place" to identity and
> community.
>
> Help us create an inclusive ecodrama that
> illuminates the complex connection between people
> and place, an ecodrama that makes us all more aware
> of our ecological identities as a people and
> communities; ecodrama that brings focus to an
> ecological concerns of a particular place, or that
> takes writer and audience to a deeper exploration of
> issue that may not be easily resolved.
>
> While many plays might be open to an ecological
> interpretation, others might be called "ecodrama,"
> Examples are diverse in form and topic: Ibsen's An
> Enemy of the People, in which the town's waters have
> become polluted and a lone whistle blower clashes
> with powerful vested interests; Schenkkan's The
> Kentucky Cycle, the epic tale of a land and its
> people - Indigenous, European, African - over seven
> generations; August Wilson's Two Trains Running that
> bears witness to the loss of inner city
> sustainability; Moraga's Heroes and Saints, about
> the embodied impact of industrial agriculture; Marie
> Clements' Burning Vision, which documents the impact
> of Canadian uranium mining on first nations
> communities and land; Giljour's Alligator Tales, a
> one-woman play by a Louisiana Cajun native about her
> relationship to her neighbors, the weather, the oil
> rigs off the coast and the alligators on her porch;
> Norman's Secret Garden that consoles a child's
> grief; Albee's The Goat, or who is Sylvia, that
> confounds human species taboos; or Murray Schaffer's
> Patria Project, in which the landscape becomes a
> player.
>
> When we leave the theater are things around us more
> alive, do we listen better, have a deeper or more
> complex sense of our own ecological identity?
>
>
>
> We need your voice, so does the theatre, so does our
> world. Imagine! Write! Submit!
>
> The Ecodrama Festival encourages submissions of
> full-length plays (30min. minimum, no max.) in
> English that do one or more of the following:
>
>
> * Put an ecological issue or environmental
> event/crisis at the center of the dramatic action or
> theme of the play.
> * Explore issues of environmental justice.
> * Interpret "community" to include our ecological
> community, and/or give voice or "character" to the
> land, or elements of the land.
> * Theatrically explore the connection between people
> and place, human and non-human, and/or between
> culture and nature.
> * Grow out of the playwright's personal relationship
> to the land and the ecology of a specific place.
> * Theatrically examine the reciprocal relationship
> between human, animal and plant communities.
> * Offer an imagined world where the characters'
> society is one that is more in harmony with
> principles

Live Girls! Theater in Seattle looking for plays by women

Live Girls! theater in Seattle Washington is seeking plays by women for our 2009 season.

All submissions must be submitted by Sept 15th, 2008 to be considered for 2009.


WE ARE SEEKING:

* 10-minute plays for our annual festival of shorts, Quickies (Plays submitted for Quickies may have had previous productions but new works are encouraged).

* Un-produced plays seeking development for The Bakery Plays submitted for the The Bakery series will receive a public reading. We are interested in both one-act and full-length plays and will accept proposals for plays currently in development.

* Additionally, if you are submitting one of the above and you also have a full-length, completed script that you would like us to consider for full production, you may send a short synopsis for our perusal. If it seems like it might fit our season, will request the full script. Please note that we only produce two full-length scripts a year and make an effort to prioritize local playwrights, so opportunities for full production are limited.



THE FINE PRINT!

* Please send all submissions to submissions@livegirlstheater.org

* In the body of your email please introduce yourself! We are always excited about meeting new playwrights! You may also include: your bio as a playwright or resume, and any previous production history for plays submitted

* Playwrights may submit up to 3 plays total, or 2 plays and one synopsis

* Plays submitted should be sent as attachments in MS Word or PDF format

* Keep in mind we are a small theater taking the risk to produce new works; and probably can't accommodate large casts or long lists of tech requirements.

* If you are submitting a proposal for The Bakery, please include another writing sample of your work along with your proposal.

* All submissions will receive a reply within 3 months of the date submitted

Looking forward to reading your work!

For more info, contact: Joy Brooke Fairfield, Literary Manager

The Waiting Game

So you’ve waited six months to hear from the theater and no response.

What do you do?

a) Write a hateful email saying how disrespectful they are and hope someone drops a piano on their mom
b) Write a nice email reminding them about the script they requested and asking where it might be in the process
c) Call up the theater and start yelling at whoever answers the phone

Okay, so the obvious answer is b.

And actually, maybe that isn’t so obvious (as someone who’s worked in a literary office, I’ve actually had hate mail addressed to me…you haven’t lived till you’ve been personally lambasted by a frustrated playwright…).

NEVER ever send any emails or call anybody with any kind of emotional response, like anger (crying isn’t good either—just makes you seem unstable).

A DG member recently asked me a great question about handling response times from theaters. He’d recently been requested to send some scripts out to some big places and was wondering, among a host of other things, if it would be appropriate to contact the Literary Manager or Associate about the play at the end of the response time (which is typically anywhere from 4 to 8 months).

My response is that it’s perfectly reasonable to contact the name of that person on that letter or email.

I had actually said, you can call them.

Now, some Lit. Mgrs probably may not prefer that. They’d rather deal with you only via email. Sure. But if they’ve requested the script from you, they’ve obviously shown an interest and I think it’s only fair, professional and business-like that someone can tell you what the status is of your play. So call them and see if even an intern can spare five minutes to let you know if its been read or what.

But remember, BE NICE.

Everyone in a the literary office is overworked and underpaid and they do want to find a brilliant script that’s right for their theater. It just may not be yours at that place in time. So respect that.

And also, they may love your script but it just doesn't fit. So they'll ask to see what else you have...if they do, congratulations! Like I said, they're overworked and no one will ask to add more to their reading pile unless they really mean it.

What you want to do is establish a relationship with the Literary office. And like all relationships, they take time.

So be patient.

For more about submissions, go to this great link at Playwrights Center.