January is a really magical time around the Young Playwrights Inc. office. Instead of the usual stack of utility bills , catalogs, and generous gifts from our donors, our mailbox starts to burst at the seams with envelope after envelope full of plays! Once everything was sorted and logged, we counted up 694 plays entered into our National Playwriting Competition. So, while our winners won’t be notified for a few more weeks, let’s count down some of the facts about this year’s competition!
- This year, we received plays from 33 states and the District of Columbia, as well as from students on Osun Air Force Base in South Korea! Military families represent!
- Playwrights submitted from Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin!
- New York playwrights submitted 360 plays, the most of any state. Woot!
- The states with the next highest three turnouts were Texas (36 plays), Virginia (32 plays), and Illinois and New Jersey (25 plays each). Nice work guys!
- We’d like to make a special shout out to the lone playwrights from Wisconsin and Kansas for putting their states on the map! Keep them coming!
- Compared to the 2012 competition when we received 528 plays, we received 166 more plays this year! Oof!
We’d love to start seeing plays from playwrights in Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Alaska, and Hawaii! We know there are budding writers out there with some fascinating stories to tell so step up and send them in!
Moving on to facts about the playwrights themselves, you might be interested to know that:
- The youngest entrant to this year’s competition was six years old when she submitted her play. So adorable!
- The birth year with the most entrants in this year’s competition is 1995 - 111 playwrights were born that year - was there something creative in the water?
- In freak occurrence news: The oldest entrant and the youngest entrant in this year’s competition have the same birthday - January 11th - but twelve years apart, in 1994 and 2006 respectively. Weird, huh?
- Roughly two-thirds of the playwrights who entered the competition were girls and one-third were boys.
Thank you to everyone who submitted to the 2013 Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition and helped make this year such a great success! We were hugely impressed by the talent demonstrated in the plays we received, and you’ll all be receiving your evaluations very soon! All of you are well on your ways to being fantastic playwrights.
Winners of the 2013 Competition will be announced by June 1.
Next year’s deadline is January 2nd, 2014 - it’s never too early to start working on your next play!
