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Fremont
Centre Theatre 1000 Fremont
Avenue e-mail: fct@fremontcentretheatre.com
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We accept plays of almost any genre and description. Recognizing that we are a small theatre, we tend to favor plays that are producible within our venue, though in judging the contest we never discount a fine play because its production requirements exceed our resources. General contact information and other contest data: Fremont Centre Theatre: New Playwright Contest Types of material: Full-length or one acts, including plays suitable for young audiences grades 6-12. Frequency: Annual. Remuneration: $350 1st prize; $250 2nd prize; $100 3rd prize; Though we do not promise a full production of the winning plays, there is always that possibility. In 2005 we opened a professional production of National Pastime by Bryan Harnetiaux which won second place in our first playwrights contest four years ago. In 2007 we will be producing Ravensridge by Thomas S. Cook, which won 1st prize in our 2006 contest. Plays produced by the Fremont Centre Theatre are eligible for all award categories in the Los Angeles theatre community, including but not limited to L.A. Weekly awards, BackStage West Garland awards, L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation awards, and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards. Guidelines: unpublished plays not produced professionally; all genres and age groups, especially plays based on historical events, persons or moments; plays exploring the African-American experience, modern and/or historical; and comedies. Maximum 10 characters. Submission procedure: script, 1-page synopsis, character breakdown, resume and $15 fee. 2007 Contest Deadline: 30 April 2007. 2007 Contest Notification: 1 October 2007. 2008 Contest Deadline: 30 April 2008. 2008 Contest Notification: 1 October 2008 Plays are judged by a panel of theatre professionals, including actors, directors, educators and dramaturgs. You may send your play with a $15 entry fee to Fremont Centre Theatre, attention Carol Doehring. Please make checks payable to the Fremont Centre Theatre. Please send a self-addressed, stamped 10x13 envelope if you wish your play returned. Fremont Centre Theatre New Playwrights Contest Prize Winners: 2005-2006 Contest: First Place: RAVENSRIDGE by T.S. Cook An American steelworker attempts to settle a lockout at his local steel mill with a desperate trip to Russia to reach the mill’s expatriate owner. Thrust into a struggle for his life when he accidentally kills one of the owner’s bodyguards, he faces an ex-Communist cop who has his own doubts about the new Russia. Two men, divided by history, spar with each other in a search for the truth in which “freedom” and “sacrifice” take on unexpected new meanings. To be produced by FCT in August, 2007. Second Place: OPALINE (A Delirium for a Parched Planet) by Mary Fengar Gail Seeking the identity of the newly-charred body of a 170 year old woman lying in a Derbyshire county morgue, a forensic anthropologist teams with a local veterinarian to surreptitiously probe the occupants of Wormwood, estate adjoining the vet’s country cottage. The estate’s three residents--a dissolute misogynist painter who channels the Impressionists, his elderly French housekeeper who is also his muse and a distiller of absinthe (and who bears an uncanny resemblance to the police sketch of the mysterious corpse), and a nubile young sculptress who channels Circe in her work—prove a stronger draw and greater threat to the order of their world than either of them can predict. Third Place: TOMORROW’S EYES by Patrick Nolan Women were not meant to be anything but wives and mothers in 1830, when Belva Ann Lockwood was born. Belva, however, had a will of iron and a vision of a different kind of life for women. Widowed at 22, with a 3 year old daughter, Belva fights cultural strictures to gain a law degree and become the first woman with the right to practice before the Supreme Court. In 1884 she challenges the country by running for President, though women do not yet have the right to vote. She breaks many barriers in her life but at great personal cost, outliving both of her children and both of her husbands. Honorable Mention: HUNTING SEASON by Mary W. Bruton Homecoming for a French ex-pat, returning with his fiancée and his 16 year old son after a self-imposed exile to America, is a collision of haunted memories and hunting memories. Challenging cultural vagaries and his mother’s implacable vision for his life, he finally confronts the ghost which drove him away in the first place. Honorable Mention: I KNOW I CAN FLY! by Duncan Othen In a surprise visit to a struggling high school student, Wilbur and Orville Wright bring a message about perseverance and cooperation to two warring siblings with opposing ways of dealing with the challenge of finding a creative solution to life. 2004-2005 Contest First Place: GERMINOUS SEEDS by David Rush An acerbic professor spars with his doctoral candidate who is investigating the strangely indefinable relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The emotional and philosophic resonances of the authorial relationship reverberate and distort in the academic one in the explorations of emotional parasitism, the seeds of ambition, creativity and inspiration. Second Place: Tie: GOOD HOPE by August Schulenburg South Africa in the mid-1850s a teenaged girl emerges from the Xhosa tribe as a prophet to the native tribes whose culture and identity as a people are being absorbed and dissipated by the inroads of British imperialism. Breaking with her mentor, the archdeacon of the Anglican church, and with her childhood friend, the bishop’s daughter, she sets forth to draw her people back to themselves with a message of such horrifying rigidity and nihilism that she very nearly destroys her entire nation. THE PRECEDENT by Richard Sewell The first trial for a capital crime under the new Constitution in the US grew out of a mutiny and murder for which the court convicted the wrong man. The convicted seaman, believing himself guilty, faces the gallows with pride, while the only witness to his innocence is a diminutive former African slave with a secret of his own. Third Place: ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL by Faye Sholiton Friends and colleagues for over a decade, two high school teachers--one African-American, one a Jew--see their friendship crumble when one of them loses her job after a school board decision based solely on race.The other finds everything she believes challenged by the fallout from her decision to file a reverse discrimination lawsuit, including her assumption that she is free of prejudice. Honorable Mention: VANISHED by Sheldon Wolf A French African museum curator faces political and philosophical pressure from her boss as she tries to convince the board to purchase a rare work by a German Bauhaus artist. To her chagrin, she finds that the struggles of an artist forced by war to hide his work and bury his creativity are not so distant from the challenges to her own aspirations and spirit in a world governed by Honorable Mention: HOW HIGH THE MOON by Timothy Jay Smith During the Nazi occupation of Warsaw in the winter of 1940, a Polish youth falls in love with a German soldier. Half s century later, a college student comes out during Gay Pride Week in a Midwest town. These interwoven stories explore the collision of love, hatred and sexuality. 2003-2004 Contest 2002-2003 Contest The first naval clash between the American colonists and the British took place in Machias, Maine in June, 1775. A Machias merchant is accompanied by a British warship as he returns with supplies to Machias ,which teeters on the brink of starvation. Learning that their lumber is to be used to build barracks for the British, the desperate townspeople refuse to sell and erect a Liberty Pole to commemorate the fighting at Lexington and Concord. When the British ship fires on the town, the townsfolk marshal their meager military resources and capture the ship—the first captured war vessel of the Revolution . Second Place: THE FOG OF WAR by Daniel N. Freudenberger A team of British and American agents in London pit a sophisticated Arab terrorist and his German wife against each other in a race against the clock to discover and stop an impending attack. Gender and bureaucratic rivalries vie as an old boy network gives the United States an excuse for challenging Iraq but a discounted colleague has his own ideals and agenda to address. 2001-2002 Contest Knowing Cairo explores the difficult relationship between an elderly German-Jewish New Yorker and her professional daughter who must repeatedly find caregivers for her as her mother’s trying behavior drives each one away. When the older woman unexpectedly becomes affectionately attached to and dependent upon a younger African-American caretaker, her daughter confronts issues of jealousy, love, historical family resentments and race in a solution in which no one wins and questions of culpability are left unanswered. Second Place: NATIONAL PASTIME by Bryan Harnetiaux The story of Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers and a time in history in which baseball broke barriers… Robinson, a young African-American ballplayer with an education and a hot temper makes a pact with Rickey to hold his tongue and temper for three years while challenging the color barrier in American major league baseball. The personal cost to Robinson is tremendous but his courage and superlative skill, with Rickey’s support and political doggedness, change history and open doors for African-American athletes. Produced by FCT March 2005. Third Place: MARTHA by Ellen Melaver At 74, following a performance in which her arthritis made her unable to rise from her knees during a performance of Clytemnestra, Martha Graham grapples with the question of whether her art can be passed to another generation of dancers. Insisting that she is her art, an art built on her body and her life, Martha resists the coaxing to give the roles to younger dancers and retire from the stage. She retraces moments of her life that shattered the conventions of the dance world as she developed a technique that was at once revolutionary, intuitive and reproducible. Honorable Mention: THE MARONI NOTEBOOKS by Richard Sewell In a love story set in 19th century Florence, an impoverished young poet learns through an encounter with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning that her own husband, whom she has come to believe is a charlatan and adventurer, is actually an heroic participant in an Italian revolutionary movement. Honorable Mention: RARE TIMES ALTOGETHER by Ted Enik and Kip Rosser Brilliant, mercurial, able to slip in and out of the stream of consciousness word patter for which James Joyce is so famous, Joyce's daughter Lucia is incarcerated in Ivry Sanatorium in Paris because of her violent and suicidal behavior. During her father's daily visits, Lucia and James work through their relationship in excursions to emotional places only the two of them can go together via their verbal jousts and bleeding of words and meanings in witty collisions of ideas.
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SEASON 2007
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©
2007 Fremont Centre Theatre
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