Submissions Now Open For Red Bull Theater's Short New Play Festival 2024

Submissions are now open for Red Bull's ANNUAL SHORT NEW PLAY FESTIVAL. Six brand new 10-minute plays of heightened language and classic themes inspired by this year's theme: “Renewal” will be selected through an open submission process. These selections will premiere alongside commissions from Madeleine George  (“Only Murders in the Building,” The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence, Hurricane Diane) and Robert O'Hara (Bootycandy, Insurrection: Holding History, Barbecue). The deadline for submissions is 12 Noon on Monday March 18th.  Red Bull Theater's 14th annual Short New Play Festival is made possible by the leadership support of The Noël Coward Foundation.

The Short New Play Festival is scheduled to be held  on Monday June 24th. Off-Broadway Venue to be announced.  The premieres will be directed by Evan Yiounoulis and this year's Drama League Directing Fellow. 

"Happy New Year! Each year for our Short New Play Festival, we look for fresh and exhilarating work with classical inspiration. This year's theme is “renewal.” But that's just a jumping off point. We hope that playwrights from around the world will respond to our mission to revitalize the classics. Writers are encouraged to riff on a classical character, borrow a classical setting, or be inspired to create a brand new style of dramatic verse. Finding inspiration from classics beyond the traditional Western canon is welcome. Through this festival, we hope to cultivate dialogues with classical theater in a multitude of creative and surprising ways. It's a new year - time to write something new!,” explains Artistic Director Jesse Berger.

Over the Short New Play Festival's fourteen-year history, Red Bull Theater has cultivated over 4,000 new short plays of classic themes and heightened language, presenting 95 of them in a one-night-only Festival performance with some of New York's finest actors and directors. The commissioned playwrights have included Larissa FastHorse, Marcus Gardley, John Guare, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jeremy O. Harris, David Ives, Craig Lucas, Ellen McLaughlin, Dael Orlandersmith, Heather Raffo, Theresa Rebeck, José Rivera, Anne Washburn, Doug Wright, and winning entries by writers such as Anchuli Felicia King, Patricia Ione Lloyd, Lynn Rosen, and Jen Silverman. Stage Rights has published a 5-volume collection of the plays from the first 10 years of Red Bull Theater's annual Short New Play Festival as Red Bull Shorts. 
 

 

OPEN SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

 

Red Bull Theater is looking for work with classical inspiration. The word “Renewal” is just a jumping-off point for creative thematic juices. Review our mission and take a look through our history of Readings and Productions to see the kind of work we have done. Respond to a play we've produced or choose a classic of your own to adapt. You might riff on a classical character, borrow a classical setting, or be inspired to create a brand new style of dramatic verse. Finding inspiration from classics beyond the traditional Western canon is welcome. We hope you will be in dialogue with classical theater in a multitude of creative and surprising ways. Using the theme “Renewal” write a short play that: makes use of heightened language, and/or is in conversation with a classical theme, style, or story from any cultural tradition; is no more than 10 minutes in length; is self-contained with a beginning, middle and end; is an original, unpublished, and never previously produced new work. 

Plays will be selected based on: excellence of the work; relevance to Red Bull Theater's mission; incorporation of the theme “Renewal;” utilization of the classical conversation/heightened language guideline above.  There is a $10 submission fee. Submission fees partially offset open submission processing costs, commissioning fees, and other expenses.  Selected playwrights will receive a staged reading of their submission, performed by an ensemble company of some of New York City's finest actors as part of this year's festival, scheduled for Monday June 24th. Selected playwrights will also receive a commissioning fee of $400; travel reimbursement of up to $400 to attend the festival rehearsal and performance; will be consulted on choices for the shared ensemble cast; will have final script approval.

 

ABOUT THIS YEAR'S COMMISSIONED WRITERS:

 

Madeleine George's plays include The Sore Loser, Hurricane Diane (Obie Award), The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, Precious Little, and The Zero Hour.  Honors include a Lilly Award, the Hermitage Major Theater Award, the Princess Grace Award, and a Whiting Award.  Madeleine's translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters premiered at Two River Theater in 2022, and her audio adaptation of Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For was released by Audible Originals in 2023.  Madeleine has written on shows for FX and HBO, and she's been a writer/producer on all four seasons of the Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated mystery-comedy “Only Murders In The Building.”  Since 2006, she has worked with the Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College, where she currently serves as Director of Admissions.

ROBERT O'HARA has received the NAACP Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, 2 OBIE Awards and the Oppenheimer Award. He directed the World Premieres of Nikkole Salter and Dania Guiria's In the Continuum, Tarell McCraney's The Brother/Sister Plays (Part 2), Colman Domingo's Wild with Happy as well as his own plays, Bootycandy and Insurrection: Holding History. His new plays Zombie: The American and Barbecue recently world premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theater and New York Shakespeare Festival, respectively. He has been an Artist in Residence at the American Conservatory Theater, New York Shakespeare Festival, Theater/Emory, and the Mellon Playwright in Residence at Woolly Mammoth as well as a Visiting Professor at DePaul University School of the Arts and Adjunct at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. As a playwright, his work is produced all over the country and Mr. O'Hara has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, Steppenwolf, The Public Theatre, LaJolla Playhouse, McCarter Theater, Mark Taper Forum and Woolly Mammoth Theater. He is currently under commission from Lincoln Center and OSF. He has written screenplays for Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Jon Avnet, HBO, ABC, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, New Line/Fine Line Cinema and Artisan Entertainment. Mr. O'Hara has been awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, a TCG Extended Collaboration Grant, NEA/TCG Fellowship, and was a Van Lier Fellow at New Dramatists. He received the LAMBDA Literary Award for best LGBT Drama, the Mark Taper Forum's first Sherwood Award and the TANNE Award for Exceptional Body of Work. He is currently directing a new musical, Uni/Son inspired from the poetry of August Wilson at OSF, a new musical, Bella by Kirsten Childs at Playwrights Horizons and the Chicago premiere of Bootycandy. He received his Directing MFA from Columbia University.

 

ABOUT THIS YEAR'S DIRECTORS:

 

Evan Yionoulis, an Obie award-winning director and nationally recognized teacher of acting, is Juilliard's Richard Rodgers dean and director of the Drama Division. She came to Juilliard after 20 years on the faculty of Yale School of Drama, where she was a professor in the practice of acting and directing and Lloyd Richards chair of the department of acting from 1998 to 2003. She has directed new plays and classics in New York, across the country, and internationally, including Adrienne Kennedy's He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box (world premiere) and Ohio State Murders (Lortel Award, best revival) for Theatre for a New Audience, Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour (Broadway), Three Days of Rain (Obie for direction, Manhattan Theatre Club), and Everett Beekin (Lincoln Center Theater), and, during her 20 years as a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre, productions including Shakespeare's Richard II and Cymbeline, Brecht's Galileo, Ibsen's The Master Builder, and Guillermo Calderón's Kiss. With composer/lyricist Mike Yionoulis, she is developing the multi platform project Redhand Guitar, about five generations of musicians across an American century, and The Dread Pirate Project, about identity and anonymity across the digital and natural worlds. She is a Princess Grace Award recipient and serves as president of the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.  

Four of the  premieres will be directed by a new Drama League Stage Directing Fellow to be named  later this winter. Participation in our annual Short New Play Festival is made possible by the Drama League Directors Project. Red Bull Theater is pleased to continue its ongoing partnership with the Drama League Directors Project 

 
ABOUT THE NOËL COWARD FOUNDATION
 

The Noël Coward Foundation was set up as a charitable trust in 2000 by Graham Payn and Dany Dasto. Its aim is to award grants to educational and development projects across the Arts and to continue the keen interest Coward himself took in charitable work during his lifetime. The Foundation is proud to support a diverse range of outstanding organizations working in theatre, music, playwriting, technical training, academic research and many other areas.
 

ABOUT THE DRAMA LEAGUE DIRECTORS PROJECT

The Drama League Stage Directing Fellowships provide a wide range of opportunities for emerging and rising directors, creating multiple avenues for future success in the theater industry.  Providing significant financial support and health insurance reimbursement, creative retreats, network development, and residencies at multiple theater companies, The Drama League Stage Directing Fellowships also offer opportunities to direct readings and productions throughout the two-year experience. The Drama League is a creative and career development home for directors, and a platform for dialogue with, and between, the audiences they inspire in theater, television, film, opera, online, and anywhere live performance is found.  Launched in 1916, the organization is one of the longest continuously-operating arts service organizations in the United States.  

ABOUT RED BULL THEATER

Red Bull Theater, hailed as “the city's gutsiest classical theater” by Time Out New York, brings rarely seen classic plays to dynamic new life for contemporary audiences, uniting a respect for tradition with a modern sensibility. Named for the rowdy Jacobean playhouse that illegally performed plays in England during the years of Puritan rule, Red Bull Theater is New York City's home for dynamic performances of great plays that stand the test of time. With the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as its cornerstone, the company also produces new works that are in conversation with the classics. A home for artists, scholars, and students, Red Bull Theater delights and engages the intellect and imagination of audiences, and strives to make its work accessible, diverse, and welcoming to all. We value and practice inclusiveness, equity, and diversity in all of our activities, and are committed to antiracist action. Red Bull Theater believes in the power of great classic stories and plays of heightened language to deepen our understanding of the human condition, in the special ability of live theater to create unique, collective experiences, and in the timeless capacity of classical theater to illuminate the events of our times. Variety agreed, hailing Red Bull's work as: “Proof that classical theater can still be surprising after hundreds of years.”

Since its debut in 2003 with a production of Shakespeare's Pericles starring Daniel Breaker, Red Bull Theater has served adventurous theatergoers with Off-Broadway productions, Revelation Readings, and the annual Short New Play Festival. The company also offers outreach programs including Shakespeare in Schools bringing professional actors and teaching artists into public school classrooms; Bull Sessions, free post-play discussions with top scholars; and Classical Acting Intensives led by veteran theater professionals. During the pandemic, Red Bull created several new and ongoing programs to serve audiences and artists with our mission: the Red Bull Theater Podcast, Online Readings, Seminars, and more.

"The classics-shaking Red Bull Theater,” as Time Out NY has called it, has produced 24 Off-Broadway productions and over 200 Revelation Readings of rarely seen classics, serving a community of more than 5,000 artists and providing quality artistic programming to an audience of over 65,000. The company's unique programming has received ongoing critical acclaim and has been recognized with Lortel, Drama Desk, Drama League, Callaway, Off-Broadway Alliance, and OBIE nominations and Awards.

For more information about the Short New Play Festival, or any of Red Bull Theater's programs, visit www.redbulltheater.com.

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