Annual Maine Playwrights Festival now open for submissions

Acorn Productions, producers of the annual Maine Playwrights Competition, broadcasts that they’ve begun accepting scripts for this yr’s twenty first version of the state’s long-running incubator for brand spanking new performs by native playwrights. Anyone residing in Maine is eligible to submit a brand new play between 8 and Half-hour in size for consideration within the pageant. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, Nov. 27. Submission info is on the market at www.acorn-productions.org.

“The Maine Playwrights Competition welcomes writers of all ranges of expertise, and we’re proud to be right here to assist them develop their writing and inform their tales,” says Daniel Burson, the pageant’s Inventive Director. “That may be a workshop or efficiency of scripts by highschool college students, a playwriting class led by an expert author, or a totally staged manufacturing of outstanding new performs: they’re all methods this annual occasion helps Maine’s playwrights at each stage of their lives as writers.”

The pageant is centered on creating and honing quick performs, from submission by way of staged readings, rewrites, and culminating in public performances. The 2023 Maine Playwrights Competition might be comprised of two weekends of totally staged performances of quick performs, to be carried out in Portland in April, 2023. The Competition anticipates choosing 5 or 6 quick performs for manufacturing this yr. The chosen playwrights will obtain in depth help revising their items throughout a workshop part earlier than the performs go into rehearsals. Along with the pageant productions, a number of playwrights not chosen for the total pageant will get the chance to workshop their performs with this yr’s skilled playwright-in-residence (to be introduced later this month).

All new performs submitted to the pageant should be 8-Half-hour in size, and haven’t obtained an expert manufacturing previous to submission.

The Maine Playwrights Competition has advanced by way of the years from a set of dramatic readings at Acorn’s previous studio on Congress Avenue to a full collection of performances by a few of Maine’s best-known playwrights. Annually, playwrights from throughout Maine submit between 50 and 70 scripts to the pageant, and a committee of native theater professionals reads them and selects a small group of performs for manufacturing at public performances within the late spring. Over time, the pageant has showcased over 100 Maine playwrights, lots of whom have subsequently had their work produced at theater festivals everywhere in the nation.