We seek a new, full-length, original, unproduced and unpublished play in its final stages of development that would benefit from a week-long workshop at Coe. No musicals, adaptations, translations or collaborations will be considered.

This is an excellent development opportunity for emerging, professional playwrights. Spend a week in residence workshopping your play with a professional director, faculty, students and community theatre artists.

INTENT

• For the playwright: We want to provide you resources, time and space with which to develop and experiment with your work. In addition to helping you take your play to the next level, we also will give you some teaching experiences, as you will conduct master classes with our students. Finally, you'll have some networking opportunities to learn about and connect with theatre professionals in eastern Iowa.

• For our students: This is an opportunity for our students to meet and interact with a working playwright, and to observe how plays evolve. Our students will be involved with the workshop either directly as participants, or indirectly as observers.

AWARDS

• One new play will be selected for a week-long rehearsal and workshop that will culminate in a public staged reading by students, faculty members, or individuals from the community. The winning playwright will receive an award of $500 plus travel, room and board for a week-long residency at Coe.

GUIDELINES

Any playwright with U.S. citizenship is encouraged to submit plays for consideration. Only one entry per playwright, please. To submit, please send the following:

• One clean, bound script
• A resume
• The play's development history
• A statement of development goals for your play (one page)

DEADLINES

Scripts will be accepted between October 1, 2008 through November 1, 2008. Notification by January 10, 2008.

SEND ENTRIES TO:

Susan Wolverton, Chair, Dept. of Theatre Arts
Coe College
1220 First Avenue NE
Cedar Rapids, IA 52402

EM Lewis

Staged Reading: Saturday, March 31 - HEADS Poster (PDF)

EM Lewis' work has been read and produced around the country. She is the winner of University of Maryland's 2007 UMBC IN10 playwriting competition with The Edge of Ross Island. Her newest full-length play, HEADS - a hostage drama set against the war in Iraq - has been read in LA and New York, won Coe College's New Works for the Stage Competition and was part of NYU's hotINK Festival. It is a semi-finalist for the 2007 O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Infinite Black Suitcase was developed and received a workshop production at Moving Arts. The play was a semi-finalist for the 2006 O'Neill Playwrights Conference and a finalist in the HBTL "Diverse Voices" Playwriting Contest. Lewis is a writer-in-residence at Moving Arts Theatre Company in Los Angeles, CA, and a member of the Dramatists Guild, the International Centre for Women Playwrights and the Alliance of LA Playwrights. She lives in Santa Monica, California now - but she's originally from Oregon.

More information on EM Lewis can be found here.