Schools
Simley Theatre Guild Announces First Annual Student Playwright Competition
Winning plays will be produced on stage as part of multiple one-act set in February 2012.
Arts programs suffering due to funding cuts is a familiar tune to many public schools—but Simley Theatre Guild Director Rudd Rayfield isn’t taking this challenge lying down. Instead, he’s hoping to both garner interest in the program and save money through a student playwright competition.
Rayfield describes his own participation in a student playwright contest in high school, which he won, as formative in his theatrical development and hopes this contest can provide a similar experience for students at Simley. The plays are to be original student work submitted by Dec. 1, and run 15 minutes to an hour long each.
“If we get three half-hour plays that are worthy, then we’ve got an evening’s worth of nice entertainment,” said Rayfield. Another motivation for the contest is to gain a new source of one-act plays with the added bonus of being royalty-free material.
Rayfield hopes to get five to ten submissions for the contest. The top plays will be produced on stage and directed by students in the guild. The winners will also receive five complimentary tickets to the show. Rayfield will judge the plays based on ease of production and how theatrically viable they are; he also intends to have English teachers Matt Corey and Dave Guenzel judge the submissions on literary merit.
Guenzel has implemented instruction on playwriting in his classroom, and had this to say about what he hopes students will gain from the experience: “Just knowing that they can possibly write something that can be on stage—that what they do could be seen by a big audience —that, I think, is kind of exciting.”
Ultimately, Rayfield hopes students will gain an understanding and appreciation for theater.
“I always say that theater is one of the strangest art forms," he said. "Novel writers and painters work all on their own. To do a play, you’ve got the playwright, the director, the designers, the technicians, all the actors, the costumers … and then when the play closes—it disappears, which you can’t say with something like the Mona Lisa or 'Moby Dick'. [It’s] this bizarre art form that I don’t think a lot of people understand.”