March 12, 2018

Racquet Club before dawn: weights, and, to my astonishment, a half mile on the cross-trainer, breathless for a few seconds, then evening out.

Email from Yale:

Dear DH,

We are writing today to update you on the status of your application to the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. It’s good news: your play Washington Place has been selected as a finalist! This group will be around 60 scripts, out of an original pool of over fourteen hundred.

While this is wonderful news, we do have a couple business items to take care of today. Firstly, we need you to confirm your interest and availability for the summer. The conference begins June 27th and runs through July 29th. If you are invited to participate in the conference, your presence on campus will be requested for the entire term. Of course, we understand the need to leave for a family wedding or brief business trip, and Mondays are campus-wide days off, but the balance of the term should be available for your residency and workshop in Waterford. Please confirm your interest and availability, and let us know now of any immovable objects in your schedule.

We need to be sure that your play is still eligible for the conference. The conference requires that your work remains unproduced through July 31st, 2018. If your play has had (or will have) a professional production prior to this date, please let us know immediately. Your work cannot be part of the conference, but we sincerely congratulate you on the success.

Given that you are interested, available, and eligible, you are welcome to submit for consideration an updated draft of Washington Place. Please send this updated draft within 24hrs of receiving this email. We are working on a tight selection timeline, and we believe our having as much time with the scripts as possible is to everyone’s benefit. You may also submit a career update to let us know of any news. Both of these can simply be sent as a response to this email.

In order to speedily announce conference selections once decisions are made, we are asking for additional material from you for publicity purposes. If you already have a profile on the New Play Exchange and a listing for Washington Place, please email us the link, as well as a high-resolution headshot (Headshot should be 300-500KB min, 3-5MB max). If you do not have a profile and listing, we encourage you to consider making one. If you’d rather not, you can fill out this simple form to give us the necessary publicity information. Please get us this information within a week.

Additionally, should you wish, we will use your New Play Exchange listings and other provided publicity materials to create a listing of our finalists and their work. (For an example, visit the 2017 Finalist site). We will share this listing with our script readers, artistic council, and friends and colleagues in the theater community. If you would prefer no not to be listed, please simply let us know, and we’ll use your materials only if you’re selected for inclusion in the summer conference.

 We know that many of our finalists may be under consideration for other summer opportunities.  If you are offered another opportunity that conflicts with the conference, please get in touch with us before accepting or declining.   We will do our best to come to a swift conclusion regarding your work, so that you know your options before cementing your summer plans. 

 Finally, we ask for your discretion in disseminating your finalist status.  We have yet to select all our finalists and notify those not selected. While we understand your need to tell collaborators, agents, and the ilk, know that by broadcasting this information now you may cause some needless panic in other applicants.  We are then likely to have to spend time responding to their concerns, when our time is better spent working on coming to final decisions.  Please help us keep our focus on the work at hand.  We will notify all in the next month, and will be sure to let you know when you can assuredly shout your accomplishment from the proverbial mountain top! 

Many thanks and congratulations!

Wendy C. Goldberg                                                                 Lexy Leuszler

Artistic Director                                                                       Literary Manager

National Playwrights Conference

Eugene O’Neill Theater Center

Bought a Montmorency cherry, but it was too cold to get it into the ground.