Prague Playhouse

2010 Playwriting Contest Comes to a Close

April 1st, 2010 at 11:29pm brian

Well, folks, the 2010 Expats.cz and Prague.tv Playwriting Contest is behind us now. As I said at the Awards Ceremony, it simply would not have happened without all of the folks that donated their time to acting or directing, working behind the scenes and out with the public, to the folks that came to see it and voted for the winner of the audience award. The sponsors really came through in a big way as well and helped us with everything from a place to play, to advertising, to props, to prizes for the participants.

There are simply too many people to thank, but I want everyone to know that there is no way that any of this would happen without you!

Without further ado, I would like to congratulate Cohen Ambrose, who won the jury prize for Best Play for his piece “Hole in the Wall”. The award was based on the revised script and not the realization of the play. Julek Neumann and company won the audience award for Josh Kaston’s play “The Great Indoors”. The judging was fierce and the three finalists were really really close. Any one of the plays could have won the final prize. We are really indebted to all of the writers who submitted their work to the contest and hope that whether you won or not, you take the opportunity to push your work to the next level.

After the break, I just wanted to put down a few words about why we do the contest in the first place: why it was started and whether we will continue to do it.

Over the past four years I have been involved with the Playwriting Contest (first with the Prague Post and now with Expats.cz and Prague.tv), I have been amazed at the dedication and creativity of the writers. The contest itself came about after a discussion following the 24 hour play festival with Anne McDonough. She mentioned that there were tons of writers in Prague who were yearning to get their work out there into the public. There was some discussion as to whether that was still true (this was back in 2006) or whether the idea was a holdover from the mid-90s.

I didn’t think much of it until talking with my then-girlfriend who worked at the Prague Post about doing something that would really be an anchor in the Prague artistic community. She was looking for an opportunity for the Prague Post to get involved in the community, something that would bring it front and center within the expat calendar. So we hatched a plan: the Prague Post would do the organization and marketing of a contest and we (the Prague Playhouse) would take care of the production and artistic end. The whole goal from both sides was getting people involved.

The response was fantastic. Writers opened up their drawers, dusted off that old copy of the play they were working on and got to work. Quite a few folks who had always wanted to write a play but never had a reason sat down and put something on paper. A lot of the submissions were obviously green attempts. Quite a few of them had a germ of something but didn’t have the dramatic or theatrical bent that would make them good theater, and some of them were obviously written by people who knew exactly what they were doing. We opened up the eligibility to people from all over the world as long as they had lived in the Czech Republic at some point. And we got a lot of submissions.

That first year, the best thing about the contest for me was going around and meeting with writers. They were people that were in the community, they were a part of the community, but I, who had been in the acting/producing side of things for a few years at that point, had no idea that they were there. The writers had something to shoot for. It was a fantastic feeling when Rich Byrne, who would eventually win the contest, came over from Washington, D.C. to take part in the process. He has been a strong supporter ever since and a very strong voice for the writers community. He has repeatedly said that the cash prize was nice, but that the real benefit to him as a writer was being able to work with a director and actors on his script, was watching the script take shape on the stage and being there when an audience takes it in and makes it their own.

And every subsequent year has been like that. The real pleasure in doing this work is watching a dispirit group of artists come together and work to bring a local writer’s words to life and to watch what that process does to the writer. Sure there are disappointments along the way. There are arguments and there is drama. There is always a moment when the whole project is teetering on the edge of collapse. But we push through it and make it work.

The contest has not been without criticism. The first year, the judging process was not perfect and the work that went into the plays during rehearsal was not recognized: a change that we made in subsequent years. Often the winner of the audience award, which is voted on by the attendees, is different to the play that wins the jury prize, which is based solely on the written script. This leads to surprise in the audience when a play that they didn’t like wins the big prize. But, again, as I said on Tuesday night after the contest: the biggest prize is that the work is produced.

So. What is going to happen next year? I’m not sure. We are talking about changing the format of the contest so that instead of three half-hour plays, we produce only one full length play. The half-hour format is problematic as plays of that length don’t have much of a possibility to go on to other venues. We are also concerned as the number of writers submitting is going down. Whether that is due to writers not wanting to write and submit when they feel the process is not fair or whether they blew their wad on one year and don’t have another play, we need to have enough submissions to make the contest viable. We would also like the quality of the submitted plays to be improving over time. We love that there are first time playwrights that submit and we want to encourage that, but we also want to foster authors to use better dramatic structure, more imaginative situations, more truthful dialog, more expressiveness of themselves. In short, if the contest is to continue, we want it to be a way for the authors who submit to really work on their writing and use it as a tool to learn and improve.

We are having a meeting soon to talk about the future season and what changes need to happen. I will let you know the outcome!

General