NEWvember is a festival of rehearsed readings of new plays that will take place over four days at Belvedere House in Dublin’s city centre. There is no fee for submissions and all plays are read blind of name or gender by our panel. The spirit of NEWvember is to provide a dynamic, interactive and comfortable place where writers can hear their plays read by professional actors and discuss their work and creative process. The first six festivals, co-produced with Tangent Theatre, took place in the historic village of Tivoli (in upstate New York).
- submitted plays should be previously unproduced (we will consider plays that have had readings before but are still in development)
- plays should have a cast size of 2-8
- plays should have a running time of 30 to 120 minutes
- we will only accept one submission per writer each year
- we are interested in plays from playwrights based in Ireland, and Irish playwrights around the world
- we ask that the writers of the chosen plays attend the reading of their play towards its further development and to be present for a post-reading Q&A with the audience
- there is no fee for submissions
- while we are open to all styles and subjects, we do have a preference for narrative and character-driven stories. Plays will be selected based on their originality, range, production potential, narrative quality and emotional resonance
- your play must be submitted as a PDF without the writer’s name, email or other identifying marks on any page throughout the script, and should include a character list. Please ensure the file name of your play matches the name of the play e.g. theweir.pdf
- The window for submissions opens Thursday June 1st 2017.
- The closing date for submissions is Friday June 23rd 2017 (12 midnight GMT).
Please note that these criteria will be applied strictly and any submissions made after the closing date or not following the submission guidelines will not be considered. In addition, our festival’s reading panel will not be able to provide feedback on specific plays or on the status of your application.
The writers of the plays that have been shortlisted will be contacted in early September and will be asked to send any updated version of their play, as this will be the final version considered and the version read at the festival if chosen.
The invited plays will be announced in October.
CASTING: Please note – the chosen plays will be read by an ensemble of actors, each performing roles in multiple plays in the festival. While we will endeavor to provide the best match of cast for each play that is read, in terms of characters’ listed ages/ethnicities, we also need to form an ensemble to best cover the entire range of the festival’s program. We appreciate our playwrights’ understanding of our ensemble-based casting.