The O'Neill Announces Open Submissions for the Annual Young Playwrights Festival

The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center is pleased to announce its Sixth Annual Young Playwrights Festival, May 6-8, 2011, with a call for scripts by young writers. Following the festival's great success over the past five years, the O'Neill will again work with local high school and middle school students to develop and staged readings of selected original one-act plays.

Scripts will be accepted through February 24th, and the Festival begins the evening of Friday, May 6. Students will spend the weekend working with a creative team composed of a director, dramaturg and actors to develop and stage their scripts. The development process for each script will draw on the principles and techniques used during the O'Neill's renowned professional summer National Playwrights Conference. Through these methods, the students will take their creative writing project to the next step, by moving from the initial isolation of writing to the collaborative process involved in making their script into a living, breathing play.

"Our hope with the Young Playwrights Festival is to help foster the voices of the future by giving young writers the same nurturance and respect as our professional playwrights receive during the summer conferences," says Sophia Chapadjiev, Director of Education and of the Young Playwrights Festival, "We are here to create a supportive and fertile environment for these young playwrights to both, play - experiment and try new things - and write - and write and write and keep writing."

Selected students should expect a vibrant exploration of their work, professional and helpful artists with whom to work, full rehearsals with their artistic team, and opportunities to re-write their play. The Festival concludes in a script-in-hand public reading of the students' work on Sunday, May 8.

Plays will be selected on a competitive basis. Submission requirements are as follows:
- Students in middle & high school, grades six through twelve, are eligible for the Festival.
- Students must submit ten to fifteen pages of original work.
- An application with a completEd Checklist and two copies of the scripts must be received by February 24, 2011.
- Only the work of those able to attend the entire festival, May 6-8, 2011, will be considered for inclusion.
- Submissions should be sent to: Young Playwrights Festival
c/o Eugene O'Neill Theater Center
305 Great Neck Road
Waterford, CT 06385

To receive an application, or for more information about the Young Playwrights Festival, please visit www.theoneill.org or contact Sophia Chapadjiev, Festival Director, at sophia@theoneill.org.

The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, founded in 1964 in honor of Eugene O'Neill, four-time Pulitzer Prize Winner and America's only playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the recipient of two Tony Awards, in 2010 for Regional Theatre, and in 1979 for Theatrical Excellence.

The O'Neill is the country's preeminent organization dedicated to the development of new works and new voices for the American theater. The O'Neill has been home to more than 1,000 new works for the stage and 2,500 emerging artists. Scores of projects developed at the O'Neill have gone on to full production at other theaters around the world, including Broadway, Off-Broadway and major regional theaters.

O'Neill programs include the National Playwrights Conference, National Music Theater Conference, National Critics Institute, National Puppetry Conference, the Cabaret & Performance Conference, and National Theater Institute, which conducts semester-long intensive theater training programs, and Theatermakers - a six-week summer program.

In addition, the O'Neill owns and operates the Monte Cristo Cottage, boyhood summer home of Eugene O'Neill. The museum is a registered National Historic Landmark and is open to the public.

It addition to its Tony recognition, the O'Neill has received the National Opera Award, the Jujamcyn Award for Theatre Excellence, and the Arts and Business Council Encore Award. For more information, visit www.theoneill.org or email theaterlives@theoneill.org.

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