Inaugural festival to be held November 6-7, 2015, at Waterloo Arts
(Cleveland, OH; October 7, 2015) — Playwrights Local 4181 announces its debut as Northeast Ohio’s first playwrights’ development and production center, marking its launch with a free festival on November 6 & 7, 2015. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Playwrights Local presents new plays written exclusively by area dramatists. It also offers classes and engages the community through site-specific projects. Playwrights Local is a home for novice and experienced dramatic writers to learn, create, and share their work.
“This type of organization has already succeeded in Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Cincinnati,” said David Todd, Artistic Director of Playwrights Local. “We see this as a way of putting our under-recognized playwrights on the map, and of making their plays a bigger part of the arts conversation.”
Literary Manager Arwen Mitchell seconds the need for a space in Greater Cleveland dedicated to dramatic writing. “Other theaters support local playwrights to the extent that they can, but there’s no place focused on them exclusively,” Mitchell said. “Having an outlet like Playwrights Local is both amazing and essential.”
Playwrights Local 4181 welcomes the Northeast Ohio community to its inaugural Cleveland Playwrights Festival on November 6 & 7, 2015. All sessions in this event are free. (Online registration is recommended.) Dramatic writers of all skill levels can participate in workshops and discussions. Fans of live theater can attend staged readings of local works and take part in a recording of Mike Geither’s podcast play, Flame Puppy. Other offerings include a luncheon and post-show reception. The festival will be held at Waterloo Arts in Collinwood (15605 Waterloo Road, Cleveland, OH 44110).
Information on festival sessions and registration is available at www.playwrightslocal.org. Tax-deductible donations in support of this new, locally focused arts organization also may be made at the site.
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Picked up Final Draft and now I feel sort of spoiled. The grind of manually managing all the character names, centering, parenthetical aspects, stage directions, continueds, etc, through Word and tabs settings wore me down. And then you get those that want it “Samuel French” with character names centered and those that want it in the “Acting Edition” or published format with the space saving left-aligned character names–and the hassle of formatting and re-formatting your script ad infinitum. So, yeah, Final Draft.
Of course, I knew there would be more features, but I didn’t expect some of them. For instance, you can assign voices to your characters and have the script read to you! Sure, it’s a computerized voice and they all sound pretty much the same, and there’s no intonation, etc.; but it’s still pretty fucking cool. There’s a ton of templates: stage play templates from Dramatists Guild, telescript formats with examples from a slew of television shows, three camera setups, query letter templates, treatment templates, etc. The built in “elements” and formatting tools are nice, a quick key stroke and your text is aligned properly and one key tap of an existing character’s name and… up it pops from the list. You can format your script’s scene headings as index cards, hell you can even type on the index cards directly the scene headings and so outline your screen play. You can somewhat automate treatment creation with the scene view option, as well as outline creation. It handles the always tricky problem of script revision–so you can freeze the script and then any changes to a page that exceed the page length are added to A/B pages, as are changes to scenes or scene arrangement. In the index card view you can grab scenes and slide them around to wherever you want them. You can print your drafts and revisions in different colors. You can register your script directly from the program. It has collaboration tools, a split view, name database, built in reference tools, and tutorials, which I’m working my way through now.
There’s a contest that Final Draft offers. The deadline is June 15, so now I’ve got my deadline. I have three or so screenplay ideas and I just picked out the one that most inspires me and that is most developed. I’ll hit that deadline and be done with my first screenplay. Then, working with Illiterite Theatre we’ll start the television script productions…
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