New Play Festival

Kitchen Dog is one of the rare theater companies that has a new play competition - and a festival afterwards to celebrate the winners with readings and a main stage production.  Very successful.  Each year we get more and more submittals: at this point it's hundreds of scripts.  The whole company reads in the first round, helping to short-list to a more manageable number of manuscripts for further consideration.

It's been very interesting, reading my share.  (A very small sample this year, I feel guilty, just too many other deadlines.)  Good plays can be very good, bad ones pretty amazingly bad.  Actually, I learn a lot as a writer from the not so great ones...  I've closed several scripts over the last few years thinking, hmmmm, that thing I was trying on page 3?  Bad idea.  But that prize goes to the one that left me thinking, "Wow! What a libel suit that'd be!"