Open Wardrobes

In the past week, with NaNoWriMo over, I've been in the midst of my own personal submission binge. Last Monday I finally sent off my submission to the STAGE Script Competition for plays about science and/or technology, which was an achievement in and of itself due to all the additional materials required. I also sent off a few submissions by email to various competitions and festivals. But mostly I have been engaged in a new wave of queries and submissions for The Princess and the Moon. Last fall I sent out a wave of submissions to theaters and contests. I took second place in East Valley Children's Theatre's Aspiring Playwrights contest so it was not without its success, but on the production front I received not a nibble. And it has been my goal to find a first production before really hitting the publishers.


And so a week or so ago I had an idea. Why not look up all the community and smaller children's theaters in Minnesota I could find and send them an email? No script, just a "letter" and synopsis, and offer to send the full script in they're interested. So I started scouring the web to find appropriate theaters, ones which put on family-friendly shows, and started sending emails. When I exhausted Minnesota, as best I could tell, I moved on to Wisconsin. The result? In the past week I have sent out around 80 emails plus about a dozen letters (for those with no email address). And already I have had a number of theaters respond. Several said that the show wouldn't work for them, based on the length or cast size they normally look for in a children's theater production, but a handful of others wanted to see the whole script. One theater even mentioned they would be looking at the one-acts on my website as well to see if any of those might work for their annual evening of one-acts.


So while it's too early to tell if any full-fledged productions come out of this (I'd be happy even with a staged reading!) so far the approach seems to be working. And it feels good to get more submissions out there. I try to participate in the submission binges in March and September through the Playwrights Binge mailing list, though often due to other things going on in life I've only reached the 30 submissions in 30 days a couple of times. But now, in less than a week and a half, I'm pushing 100 submissions! In the end a lot of it comes down to statistics: send out enough submissions and you will eventually find that one person who falls in love with your script and wants to put it on stage.