Playwriting Contest
Note: , Director, New American Plays Festival and Playwriting Contest for more information.
Update - January 26, 2009! The votes are tallied, and the public has spoken!
Playwright Evan Guilford-Blake of Atlanta, GA is the winner of the 2009 Firehouse Theatre Project Festival of New American Plays for his play An Uncommon Language, edging out Caridad Svich of New York for the grand prize of $1,000 cash. Svich’s play, Magnificent Waste, takes the second place prize of $500. Congratulations to the winners! We look forward to hearing more about them.
The Firehouse Theatre also wishes to thank profusely the numerous volunteer judges, script readers, assistants, and casts and crew members - without whom the New Plays Contest and Festival would be just another good idea, instead of the excellent and growing incubator of new American talent that it has become.
The Firehouse Theatre Project Presents its Seventh Annual Festival of New American Plays - January 22-25, 2009
The finalists of the 2008 Firehouse Theatre Playwriting Contest have been announced!
Two finalists culled from among nearly 200 scripts received from across the country were selected by a professional panel of judges. They are:
Evan Guilford-Blake of Atlanta, GA, for his script An Uncommon Language; and
Caridad Svich of New York City, for her script Magnificent Waste.
Both winners explore women artists - their lives, their work, and their darkest secrets.
Veteran actor/director Bill Patton will direct staged readings of both plays, to be presented on alternating nights during the New Plays Festival; and members of the public who see both plays are eligble to vote for the Festival winner.
Event Dates/Times:
An Uncommon Language: Thursday, January 22; and Saturday, January 24.
Magnificent Waste: Friday, January 23, and Sunday, January 25.
All events, 7:30 p.m. Doors open a half-hour before showtime.
Tickets: Suggested donation $5 each play at the door; volunteer script readers and students with valid ID get in free.
New to the 2009 Play Festival! Two Special Workshops Added - Saturday, January 24, 2009
10 a.m.-1 p.m. Playwrighting workshop for high school students, with Festival finalist Evan Guilford- Blake. Open to all high school-age students wishing to learn or perfect the craft of playwrighting.
2-4 p.m. “The Business of Playwrighting: Developing and Marketing Your Play Without An Agent” with Festival Finalist Evan Guilford-Blake, hosted by the Richmond Playwrights Forum.
Location: Firehouse Theatre, 1609 W. Broad Street. For more information or to sign up for the workshops, call the Firehouse at 804-355-2001 or .
Both workshops are free and made possible due to the generous support of The Community Foundation Serving Richmond and Central Virginia, and The Richard and Caroline T. Gwathmey Memorial Trust.
About the Winning Plays and Playwrights:
An Uncommon Language, by Evan Guilford-Blake: Inspired by the controversy surrounding the contributions of Rodin’s lovers to his work, An Uncommon Language examines the life of Heloise Lacasse, a talented but unknown sculptor living in England in 1906. When she chooses to help her lover - the young and accomplished John Batiste - in crafting the heads for various pieces of his statuary, a tumultuous and dramatic series of events unfold. From the art studio to the asylum, the repression of women and the very nature of madness are explored in this riveting new drama.
Evan Guilford-Blake lives in the Atlanta, GA area, and has written about 40 plays which have received about 110 productions across the U.S., in Canada, Australia, England and Israel. He has won 26 playwriting competitions (including the 2005 Henrico Theatre Company contest) and awards for his short fiction and children’s material. He has short stories in various anthologies, a children’s book (Butterflies), and has contributed to two collections of monologues. He is a Resident Playwright emeritus at Chicago Dramatists and a member of the Dramatists Guild. Evan has served as Playwright-in-Residence at Utah State University and a presenter for ACTF.
Magnificent Waste, by Caridad Svich: Lizzie B. makes shock art. Arden buys beautiful things. A young man wants to be famous. How far will they go in their quest for fame and immortality? Set in a world addicted to excess and pleasure, Magnificent Waste is a glittering but brutal comedy about modern society’s surface, and the objectification of the human body.
Caridad Svich lives in New York and is a playwright-translator-lyricist and editor of Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian descent. Key works include 12 Ophelias; Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues; Iphigenia...a rave fable; and The Booth Variations. Spring 2009 premieres: Svich’s stage adaptation of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (Spanish Rep/NY); Instructions for Breathing (Passage Theater/NJ) and Wreckage (Crowded Fire/CA). She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists; founder of theatre alliance & press coalition NoPassport; associate editor of Routledge’s Contemporary Theatre Review; and a member of PEN American Center and The Dramatists Guild. She holds an MFA from University of California-San Diego.
The Playwriting Contest’s Eight Semi-finalists:
In addition to Mr. Guilford-Blake and Ms. Svich, six other works merited the judges’ acclaim (listed in alphabetical order by playwright):
Storm Surge by Hubert Grissom
Play Nice! by Robin Rice Lichtig
Inside the Coma of Wayne Morse by Steven A. Lyons
Assisted Living by Rich Rubin
Gone Astray by Jennie Staniloff-Redling
House Rules by Staci Swedeen
The semi-finalists hail from the states of Georgia, New York, Florida, California, Nebraska, and New Mexico.
About the Judges:
The 2008 Playwriting Contest panel of distinguished Judges are:
Richmond-based playwright and writing instructor Doug Jones
Writer and Theater Critics Circle Member Susan Haubenstock
Actor and former Firehouse Theatre Project Board Member Bob Double
The Firehouse acknowleges with grateful thanks its illustrious panel of judges, as well as the numerous and dedicated volunteer community members who read through each script multiple times.
About the New Plays Festival and Playwriting Contest:
In keeping with the Firehouse Theatre’s mission of promoting new work by American artists, the Festival of New American Plays began in 2002 as a way to encourage and incubate new plays by established and emerging playwrights in the USA. It has become a grass-roots event with substantial involvement from the community, as hundreds of scripts submitted to the Playwriting Contest from all over the country are read by volunteer readers from the Greater-Richmond area. Each script is read twice (more if it needs a tiebreaker), and scripts with “two thumbs up” are passed on for further evaluation to an expert panel of judges, who then pick two finalists for a four-night Festival “showdown.” Members of the festival audience who have seen staged readings of both finalists’ works cast a vote for their favorite play, and the winner of the festival is chosen by the public. Festival winners receive cash prizes.
Previous Festivals:
2008: The winner of the Sixth Annual Festival of New American Plays was Richard Willett, for his script Tiny Bubbles.
2007: Fifth Annual Festival’s surprise ending - a Tie! Sharing the joint honor of first place were One Fine Day by David Rush from Chicago, Illinois; and Grace by Sharon Sharth of Pasadena, California.
2006: Fourth Annual Festival winner achieves auccess in New York! Winner Frawley Becker’s play Tiger by the Tail made the great leap from the Firehouse Stage straight to Off Broadway! Tiger by the Tail opened at the Wings Theatre in New York City on March 24th, 2006.
Get Involved in This Year’s Contest/Next Year’s Festival!
Get in on the act of creating the next new sensation for the stage, and sign up now to be a reader for the next contest. Readers needed starting Summer 2009.
OR: Get busy writing those winning scripts!
The Firehouse Theatre Project is taking submissions for its 2009 Playwriting Contest!
Festival Guidelines:
• Full length scripts only.
• Plays must not have been previously produced. Readings are acceptable if no admission was charged and actors read from the script.
• Submissions should be made in standard manuscript form. This means no discs, no e-mails. All author information must be on a title page
separate from the body of the manuscript and no reference to the author is permitted in the body of the script.
• Scripts must be accompanied by a letter of recommendation from a theater company or individual familiar with your work. Letters of recommendation do not need to be specific to the play submitted; they may be general recommendations of the playwrights work. All letters must be received with the script, not under separate cover. Scripts received without a letter will not be considered.
• Entries must be postmarked no later than June 30, 2009.
Due to volume of mail, manuscripts cannot be returned.
• Send submissions to:
Firehouse Theatre Project
Festival of New American Plays
1609 W. Broad St.
Richmond, VA 23220
• Two winners receive staged readings and prizes of $1,000 and $500. In the case of a tie, each winner will receive $750.
• Winners will be announced January 1, 2010.