Mill Mountain Theatre Conservatory is seeking submissions of short plays for Write? Stuff!, their fourth-annual festival of new works penned by local students. The playwriting contest will have categories for Middle School and High School playwrights, and winning plays will be selected by a panel of Mill Mountain Theatre professional artists. The? deadline for submissions is December 31st, 2019.?
The chosen plays will be performed as part of a festival of staged-readings on February 22nd, 2020 on the Waldron Stage. Mill Mountain Theatre Conservatory students will act in the staged-readings, which will be directed by Mill Mountain Theatre staff.
Write Stuff! ?serves to connect Mill Mountain Theatre’s expanding education programming with its historical and ongoing commitment to new play development. Ginger Poole, Mill Mountain Theatre’s Producing Artistic Director, expressed excitement about the newest addition to Mill Mountain Theatre’s Young Audiences programming.
“Beginning with the Norfolk Southern Festival of New Works and continuing through our partnership with the Hollins Playwrights Lab, new work has been an important element of Mill Mountain Theatre’s identity,” Poole said. “Expanding that vision to invest in the development of young writers had been a desire of mine for many years, and I am thrilled that our education department continues to have the capacity to take on this effort. Our inaugural festival was a success, as were the subsequent events, and I look forward to bringing the festival back for a fourth year and watching its growth and success continue to happen in the coming years.”
The mission to encourage student authors is also in alignment with Mill Mountain Theatre’s pedagogical goals. “Write Stuff is an incredible experience for young artists to work on a new play process. It isn’t often that young people get to be involved in brand new plays: learning how scripts change, how characters are developed, and how to work with a playwright in the room,” says Travis Kendrick, Mill Mountain Theatre’s Director of Education. “Throughout its three years, Mill Mountain Theatre has given this experience to three young playwrights, all of whom got to see their words come to life onstage as other young actors embodied the characters that they had created. The new plays are always performed to a full house, and each playwright participates in a talkback discussion with the audience afterward,” he added.
Scripts, 10-15 minutes in length, should be formatted as PDFs and emailed to [email protected] with the subject line “Write Stuff! Submission.” The deadline for script submissions is December 31st, 2019. Winners will be notified by January 10th, 2020. Performance and presentation of winning plays will be February 22nd, 2020, on MMT’s Waldron Stage.
