GUIDELINES FOR PLAY COMPETITIONS

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > RUNNING COMPETITIONS > GUIDELINES

'The anger is there. But you can get your message across much stronger, I think, through humor and showing humanity. That's the only way an audience is going to come in. And if you're not going to get an audience, at the end of the day, your play is a dead duck.'

-- Ayub Khan-Din

Here's what most US regional theatres and sponsoring organizations include in Play Competition guidelines . . .

• Full-length plays only
  Most organizers only want to see full-length plays. That's where the market is and what works best in a theatre's season. But if you're after One-Acts, then say that's all you want to see.

• No musicals
  Musicals are almost impossible to judge based on scripts alone, cassettes take forever for readers to listen to, and most small to mid-sized theatres don't have the resources to mount new musicals. And the odds of finding a good one are so small that this is best left to the experts.

• No collaborations
  Here's a Rule with almost no exceptions: Good plays are not written by collaborative teams of playwrights. It just doesn't happen. That's why most competitions rule out collaborations. Where this does happen a lot is in film. And you'll have enough difficulties to work through with your winning playwright on a new script without having to add the dynamics of a partnership into the stew.

• No adaptations
  By saying No to this, you avoid any possibility of your winning play getting you tangled up in questions of potential copyright violations. If you still want to leave the door open to adaptations, then the safest approach is: don't accept anything based on a work published after 1900. And hire an entertainment lawyer or add one to your organization's board of trustees before you decide to go into production. Adaptations are never as simple as they seem.

• Include a manuscript-size SASE
  For return of scripts. You don't want to get stuck with the postage bill on this. And make clear that the script must fit in the envelope provided. All competitions that offer to return scripts add that they won't do so if the playwright doesn't include the SASE.

• Scripts must be bound and in standard manuscript format
  This lets you dump scripts that are held together with rubber bands or paper clips, are printed in 6-point type or on tissue paper, stuck together with coffee or Coke stains, with every other page upside down. Or any other of the horror stories competition organizers can tell. Serious playwrights don't need to be told any of this, but there's always the exception. On the other hand, most good Literary Managers -- out of sheer perverseness -- would probably confess to taking a quick look at the first few pages of those impossible submissions, hoping that they might conceal pure genius.

• Original work only
  This hardly seems worth saying, but you don't want some clown sending in Old Bill's THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET or Wendy Wasserstein's THE HEIDI CHRONICLES, neatly typed in format with their own name on it. And then demanding to know why the script didn't win. Besides the high bother value you'll avoid, you'll also side-step the pranksters who just want to "test" the literary taste and skill of your readers. Yes, these kinds of folks really do exist out there and nearly every major publisher of fiction can tell you about stubbing their toes on one.