CALL FOR SCRIPTS: EMOS Playwrights Festival 2022

Hosted by Emory University, Theatre Emory, and The Playwriting Center of Theater Emory, Atlanta, Georgia

First-Place Award: Cash prize and professional production

Second-Place Award: Cash prize and possible workshop production or concert reading

Honorable Mentions: Public reading

Deadline: August 31, 2021 at 11:59 pm EDT

UPDATE: Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, EMOS has been postponed to 2022. The deadline for script submissions has been extended from August 31, 2020 to August 31, 2021.

The Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) Ecodrama Playwrights Festival was founded in 2004 by Theresa May and Larry Fried in order to foster new dramatic works that respond to the ecological crisis, and explore new possibilities for being in relationship with the more-than-human world. EMOS calls for new plays that focus on current and historic environmental issues, and enliven and transform our experience of the world, inspiring us to listen better, and instilling a deeper or more complex sense of our ecological communities.

Thematic Guidelines

In general, we are looking for plays that do one or more of the following:

Engage the personal, local, regional and/or global implications of man-made climate change.
Put an ecological issue or environmental event/crisis at the center of the dramatic action or theme of the play.
Critique or satirize patterns of exploitation, consumption, or other ingrained values that are ecologically unsustainable.
Expose and illuminate issues of environmental justice.
Explore the relationship between sustainability, community, and cultural diversity.
Interpret community to include our ecological community; give voice to the land, or elements of the land; theatrically examine the reciprocal relationship between human, animal and plant communities, and/or the connection between people and place, human and non-human, culture and nature.
Grow out of the playwright’s personal relationship to the land and the ecology of a specific place.
Celebrate the joy of the ecological world in which humans participate.
Offer an imagined world view that illuminates our ecological condition or reflects on the ecological crisis from a unique cultural or philosophical perspective.
Are written specifically to be performed in an unorthodox venue such as a natural or environmental setting, where that setting is a not merely a backdrop but an integral part of the play.

EMOS 2022 specifically encourages submissions which also:

Engage with cultural and social impacts of man-made climate change.
Offer or complicate ideas of urban resilience.
Expose and/or grapple with ecological violence and/or “slow violence.”
Examine ecological/climate/environmental justice issues specific to the Southeast United States.

Evaluation Process

A Reading Committee composed of theatre professionals and Emory University students will read and evaluate each script blind in relation to the guidelines above, as well as theatricality, and overall quality. Each play will be read by at least two readers. Highly-scored plays from the first round will be read again until a short list of five finalists is created. Those five plays will then be read by a panel of distinguished theatre artists and the artistic director of Theatre Emory, who will select the winning plays.

Submission Specs

Entries must be original plays that have not received an Equity production (readings and workshops are okay) and have not been published. They should be written primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) in English and address the thematic guidelines listed above. We will not consider ten-minute plays, one-act plays (unless they are longer than 30 minutes), and musicals (though we love them, we cannot accommodate their production for this festival).

Submissions will be judged blind. Uploaded scripts should not include the author's name, representation, or any identifying information.

Your script should be saved as a PDF, use a 12pt font, have 1-inch margins minimum on every side, and numbered pages.

Include a brief synopsis and a cast breakdown.

Only one submission per entrant.

Submissions must be received by August 31, 2021 @ 11:59 pm EDT.

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