NATIONAL TEN MINUTE PLAY AWARD

Submission deadline is November 1.   Plays are submitted to the Regional Playwriting Chair only. 

Please include with your submission the official cover sheet for ten minute plays.  

Regional Playwriting Chair’s email address:  jgilg@uoregon.edu

Ten Minute Plays are no more than 10 minutes long. And no more than 10 pages in a standard Times New Roman 12 pt font. You may find Gary Garrison’s guidelines on the national website  helpful. They are reprinted below.

The submitted plays will be read by at least two readers from a different region.  The top six selected plays will be invited to Region VII’s Festival.  Should you be one of the selected playwrights you must be able to attend the festival or your play will be disqualified.   Do not submit your play unless you are able to attend. 

At the festival, playwrights will work with assigned directors on a public reading of their work.  All casting and rehearsing of the reading will happen during the festival. Revising and rewriting your script if appropriate is also part of the process and will be mentored with your director. Three festival respondents will respond to your play at the festival. 

Two plays (out of the six) will be chosen at the regional festival to be National Semi-Finalists.  Those two plays will then be held in consideration for the National Festival in Washington DC, as potential National Finalists. 

A Ten-Minute Play is a play with at least two characters that is not a scene, skit or sketch. Structurally, it should have a beginning, middle and end--just like any good one-act or full-length play. Reaching beyond the surface, the text should be enriched with subtext. Since we only have ten minutes to bring the story full circle, a dramatic conflict should be posed as quickly as possible. The resolution of that conflict is what plays out across the remaining pages. The true success of a Ten-Minute Play is reliant on the writer's ability to bring an audience through the same cathartic/entertainment experience that a good one-act or full-length play accomplishes--i.e., sympathetic characters with recognizable needs encompassed within a resolvable dramatic conflict.

While not wanting to oppress anyone's creativity, recognize that a Ten-Minute Play will undoubtedly be presented in an evening of Ten-Minute Plays. Therefore, elaborate settings, multiple characters, extravagant productions values, etc., could conceivably eliminate your play from consideration.

Finally, do your readers a favor: ten minutes means eight or nine pages, but certainly no more than ten pages. READ YOUR PLAY OUT LOUD to see how it times out using standard playwriting format, 12 pt. Times New Roman font.