Chopsticks. The popular tool is part of the prompt for Kumu Kahua Theatre’s monthly playwriting contest, Go Try Playwrite, which asks writers to describe someone’s first experience using them, which can end “with either success or failure.”
Winners of the monthly contest, which is run by Kumu Kahua Theatre in partnership with Bamboo Ridge Press, receive $100 and a free subscription to Bamboo Ridge Press. The contest started in 2021 as a way to keep artists working during the Covid-19 pandemic, explained Donna Blanchard, the managing director of Kumu Kahua Theatre. Since then, 658 scripts have been submitted, she said.
Kumu Kahua Theatre was started in 1971 by a group of graduate students at the University of Hawaiʻi who wanted to produce locally written plays, according to the nonprofit’s website.
“There were all these hungry students who all had a play or two in their back pockets, and the group pretty quickly realized ‘If we're going to produce a season of five locally written shows every year, we better get to writing,’ ” Blanchard said.
Blanchard spoke with Aloha State Daily about the monthly contest and how the theater works with playwrights to help them grow.
How did the pandemic contribute to the start of a monthly playwriting contest? We had always had this annual contest. We decided to also have a monthly contest, and this one is in partnership with Bamboo Ridge. We already had a lot of writers in common, and they were looking for ways to keep writers busy, as well. Everybody wanted to maintain a profile. In Hawaiʻi, we went through: ʻOK, you can gather. No, you can't gather.’ … There have been some months when we've only gotten a small handful of scripts. Harry [Wong III, our artistic director] writes the prompts every month. Most of them are kind of light hearted. There'll be a maximum of five pages for a monologue, 10 pages for a scene, and he usually limits it to a two-person scene.
What other opportunities do writers get if they enter? We decided to attach a few other things to the monthly contest, and one of them is there's a play-reading group, led by Justina Mattos of University of Hawaii at Hilo. She started a weekly zoom and invited her students — she teaches theater — as well as playwrights and just people involved in theater, like myself. We get together weekly and read scripts together. We divy up the roles. Someone reads stage directions, and then we talk about them. There's a lot of knowledge in that room, a lot of theater teachers, as well as a lot of knowledge for the playwrights [which] comes out of feedback from the actors reading the script. All of the scripts that come in each month, we offer them an opportunity to be read in that play-reading hui. The play-reading hui is quite far behind in time. We're reading scripts that were submitted last year. But we read them as a whole, so all the scripts written from this prompt — those playwrights are all offered the opportunity to hear their work read and discussed by theater professionals. We have people in New York who are staying up well past midnight to get this feedback. That's been a really wonderful growing experience for those playwrights.
Tell us about one of the theater’s other programs, “The Work,” which is a competition for directors. One script is used. The actors are chosen. Nobody knows who the actors are. The actors memorize the scripts. … The second director is sent to the office, where they can't hear what's going on stage. The first director directs them, and then they perform. It's only a 10-minute script, because we're using scripts from the monthly playwriting [contest]. And then the second director comes out, and they do theirs, and the audience votes on who wins. It’s fun for the audience. It’s a great workout for the directors and the actors, and yet another opportunity for burgeoning playwrights to get these different perspectives on their work.
Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.
