Last year marked the inaugural run of the Longwood Ten-Minute Play Festival. Over four hundred submissions reviewed, five winners picked, and three packed performances later, I can honestly say producing a ten-minute play festival is easier than you would probably think. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lot of planning, a whole lot of reading, and just as much work as any theatrical endeavor, but ten-minute play festivals are a great way to cheaply produce a lot of new work.
When I started talking out the idea, for a play festival with fellow co-founders Mary Carroll-Hackett and Brett Hursey, I had some reservations. I wondered how we would get the money to build sets. I worried about the quality of the scripts we would receive, and I really wasn’t sure anyone would send anything in. We had a good idea, no money and endless reservations, but we did it anyway.
Now that the air has settled and plans are being made for the next festival, a number of people have approached me about starting their own festivals. My response has been the same: it’s easier than you think. So I’ve put together a plan for producing a ten-minute play festival.
- Hone the details of the festival. Will you have a special topic or theme? Will you offer a prize for the finalists? Will you charge a submission fee? With our festival we decided not to have a theme. We offered a DVD as a prize for the winners, and we did not charge a submission fee.
A note about submission fees: Many playwrights will not submit to your festival if you charge a fee, and many forums will not post a call for submissions with a fee attached.
- Write up a call for submissions. For an example go here:
http://www.stageplays-forum.com/view_topic.php?id=1847&forum_id=10&highlight=Longwood
http://www.stageplays-forum.com/
http://enavantplaywrights.yuku.com/
http://www.aact.org/cgi-bin/webdata_contests.pl?cgifunction=Search
- Make a list of the plays you receive and the dates they are received. Should a playwright call wondering if their script arrived, you can say “yes, it came on this date.”
- Establish readers who will reject or accept the scripts. This process is called slushing. The readers will eventually narrow the choices down to the best fifteen or twenty scripts. Give yourself at least a month to do this.
- A final judge narrows down the set number of winners. (In our case we choose five.)
- Cast the plays accordingly and rehearse them.
The Longwood Ten-Minute Play Festival ran all five plays back to back for three evenings. The production was a huge success. Some of the playwrights involved were extremely grateful, and many of the audience members commented that they did not know theatre like that existed.
In the end it took us four months, and three hundred dollars to produce five new plays – three of which were world premiers – and we filled roughly ninety percent of our seating capacity.
July 23, 2008 at 1:46 pm |
Really like this, but I’d love to hear what you, as a young playwright, think of the short form in theatre, how it might reflect the current state of theatre, and whether you think it’s a good form for beginning playwrights.