Deadline: July 26, 2023 at 11:59pm EDT
First presented in 2022, the R5 Playhouse Series is R5 Productions’ annual festival of new one act plays — all presented virtually in R5’s signature radio play format. The Series creates space for playwrights to premiere new works and aims to grow the R5 artist community at large. Festival selections are chosen by a committee of readers, which includes R5 leadership.
About the 2023 Festival:
This year’s Playhouse Series theme is haunted, and R5 is looking for your haunted short plays — whatever that means to you! Thrillers and ghost stories have been favored fodder for stories for centuries, but so few find their way onto the stage. R5 wants to celebrate the macabre and the mysterious, the unseen and the unexplained, the eerie feelings that linger, the ghostly menaces that dance about the edges of the darkness, the places in the mind where the likes of Poe and King reside and revel. Take us to those places. Share with us those stories, between this world and the next.
The 2023 festival will take place virtually on Tuesday evenings in October 2023. Festival selections will be announced in late August or early September 2023, with playwrights and artists rehearsing throughout September. This is an unpaid opportunity.
Submission Guidelines:
Plays should be non-musical one acts at 20-30 pages in length, requiring no more than 5 actors.
Play should engage with the theme “haunted.” (See “About the 2023 Festival” section above.) We are particularly interested in subtle, surprising, and non-obvious interpretations of the theme.
Plays submitted should fit a radio play (audio only) format.
Playwrights may only submit 1 script.
We welcome submissions from all artists and strongly encourage submissions from writers who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, people with disabilities, gender-nonconforming, LGBTQIA+, women, and members of other marginalized communities.
Submissions will be capped at 50.
What to Submit:
PDF of your play (other file formats will not be accepted)
Synopsis of your play (100 words or less)
Explanation of why your play fits the “haunted” theme (500 words or less)
Your headshot and bio (150 words or less)
Names of directors and cast members (if known)
Send submissions to rproductions2020@gmail.com with the subject line “Playhouse 2023: [Name of Play] by [Name of Playwright].” Submissions are due no later than 11:59pm EST on July 26, 2023.