Best-Mini Drama Contest: Call for Submissions

The 2020 Best Mini-Drama Student Contest is open to submissions - original mini-dramas, one-act plays - inspired by Vaclav Havel’s iconic play The Memorandum. In The Memorandum, a new language, designed with the apparent goal of streamlining communication, actually makes it harder for people to understand one another. The theme of alienation brought on by technologies designed to enhance communication echoes throughout the play.

The 2020 contest is inspired by this quote:

“We’re living in a strange, complex epoch. As Hamlet says, ‘our time is out of joint.’ Just think, we’re reaching for the moon and yet it’s increasingly hard for us to reach ourselves; we’re able to split the atom, but unable to prevent the splitting of our personality; we build superb communications between the continents, and yet between man and man is increasingly difficult. In other words…we are irresistibly falling apart, more and more profoundly alienated from the world, from others, from ourselves…”

The Best-Mini Drama Student Contest is organized by the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU)

Deadline: May 15, 2020.

Award
A two-week residency in Prague with classes at different DAMU departments; visits to Prague theaters; a round-trip air ticket to Prague and accommodation. The schedule at DAMU will be prepared individually according to the winner’s study focus and interests.

Contest Rules
The contest is open to undergraduate students of Drama, Dramatic Writing and Slavic studies who submit an original mini-drama, a one-act play, that has not been published and will not be published before the announcement of the contest results. The contest is anonymous. Undergraduate students of other fields are welcome to apply as well. Play should be sent as a pdf without the author’s name on the script to info@vhlf.org. The subject line should be “The Memorandum.” Authors should submit a separate sheet with all contact information.

The winner will be announced in June 2020.

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) was a playwright, political dissident, and the former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. He became well-known as a dramatist in the 1960s when his plays The Garden Party and The Memorandum were seen on world theatre stages. In the 1970s, he was one of the founders of Charter 77 – a manifesto calling for the Czechoslovak government to adhere to the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Agreement. In 1989, he became the leader of the two-month long Velvet Revolution, which culminated in his ascension to the Presidency of the re-established democratic Czechoslovakia.