A big thank you to the nearly 600 playwrights who submitted their work to our playwriting prize call in January and February. We know there has been delay after delay in sharing our selection, but we hope you all understand! We are pleased to finally share that the winner of the 2020 Talk Back Theatre Playwriting Prize is Karen Saari for her play 'RAIN ON FIRE. 

Check out the Playwriting Prize page to learn more about our latest opportunity: plays featuring inter-generational relationships.

​Happy December, everyone! We want to take a moment to thank you all for your love and support of Talk Back Theatre. This project has been an incredible experience, and it's been a joy working with artists to bring new stories to the stage and explore them as a community.

Talk Back Theatre is undergoing some major changes in 2020. Our Literary & Managing Director, Emily Anne Tkaczibson, has moved out of state, and costs associated with fairly paying the playwrights, directors, and actors who share their talents with our audience are rising. Because of these and and other reasons, Talk Back Theatre is saddened to announce that we will no longer be staging readings of plays and hosting post-show discussions in Orange County at this time.

But we aren't going away! Starting in January 2020, TBT will still be celebrating playwrights and highlighting social, political, and environmental issues by transitioning our bi-annual open call for staged readings into a quarterly playwriting prize. We'll share more details about the prize and our selection process in January, but each quarterly call will seek plays centered on specific timely topics. The winning play's writer will receive a cash prize, along with an endorsement from TBT on New Play Exchange (and/or for use on personal websites).

We hope you will continue to follow TBT as we grow in this new direction, and we still need your support! If you are feeling generous this Giving Tuesday, please visit talkbacktheatre.org/donate/ to support our work. We thank you again for engaging with us and with each other on the issues that matter -- it's more important than ever.

Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in our October open call. Due to some major changes coming to the Talk Back Theatre program, we were unable to open a call last month. Keep an eye out for an announcement about these changes in late November or early December 2019!

If you've been following TBT for a while, you know that we typically hold our open calls for submissions in April and October. We are working on restructuring our season, and as such we will not be holding an open call this month. While we will still produce a staged reading event in the fall, that play will be pre-selected.
We will resume open calls in October on an annual cycle, using one call to solicit both plays for a calendar year season. This will help our small team be able to better plan for the year ahead and manage the submission process.

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by Rachel Lynett
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“A family of black women mourning the death of a young black man.
It’s almost like some Greek tragedy.”
 
When I’m feeling particularly clever, I like to say that Good Bad People is an adaptation of a Greek tragedy. Ask me which one and I would love for that answer to be all of them. What draws me to the tragedies is probably the same thing that drove me to write this play: how can you mourn someone with dignity and simultaneously fight for justice at the same time? What does justice look like when even “grief time” slows you down? And more importantly, why do we ask those who are mourning to carry the first torch in the revolution? As empowering as it is to see, why does Lezley McSpadden[i] have to run for mayor to get justice for her son and the young men that look like him? Like Antigone carrying the body of her dead brother and demanding justice, June and Audre have to choose: fight for justice for a brother who was wrongfully killed or bury their brother in peace without the world watching. I hope one day no family has to make that choice.

[i] Lezley McSpadden is the mother of Michael Brown. Her son was wrongfully murdered by a white police officer on August 9, 2014. Four years later, almost to the day, McSpadden announced her run. 

The "theme" of our April call for submissions was "public safety." This category was intentionally broad, and Rachel's play Good Bad People touches on it in a couple of different ways. First and foremost, it deals with systematic racism and police brutality. Alone, these are issues that directly impact the safety of our citizenry -- especially citizens of color, who are disproportionately affected. But the play also touches on gun violence. The characters in the play are grappling with the death of Amiri, who was shot to death by an officer. Guns cannot be taken out of the equation.
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Talk Back Theatre aims to share a playwright's work and use it as a jumping-off point for conversation. Our post-show conversation will center around these public safety issues. TBT is forming the panel now, and we know that in addition to providing a platform to talk about racial justice, we will be discussing grief and loss and the nature of storytelling -- and why it's so important.

​After reading through over 150 submissions and making some tough calls, we are pleased to announce our next playwright! Meet Rachel Lynett below, and stay tuned for a post tomorrow to learn about her powerful play we'll be bringing to Orange County in September: GOOD BAD PEOPLE!
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Rachel Lynett is an Arkansas-based playwright and theatre artist. Her recent playwriting credits include HE DID IT as part of UCF's inaugural Pegasus PlayLab (June 2018); GOOD BAD PEOPLE as a finalist for Artemisia, A Chicago Theatre (2018), a finalist for Henley Rose Award (2018), part of American Stage Theatre Company's 21st Century New Voices New Play Festival (2018), part of Jackalope Theatre's CIRCLE UP series (2017) and a finalist for Unicorn Theatre Plays In Progess (2018); WELL-INTENTIONED WHITE PEOPLE as the Downstage Left Residency with Stage Left (2017), part of Orlando Shakespeare New Play Festival (2017), and receiving honorable mention for the 2017 Kilroys for her play (2017. Her play, ABORTION ROAD TRIP received a workshop production produced by Theatre Prometheus as part of Capital Fringe where it won Best Comedy (2017) and then was later presented by Theatre Prometheus, as a part of the 2017 Kennedy Center Page to Stage Festival. Other recent credits include her play ABORTION ROAD TRIP credited as a semifinalist for The Bridge Initiative 2017, CHOOSING YOU as part of the CulturalDC Source Festival 2016, BREATHE ME IN as a semi-finalist for the O’Neill Playwright’s Conference 2016, and BREATHE ME IN as a finalist for the Kernodle Play Award (2016). WELL-INTENTIONED WHITE PEOPLE will have its world premiere with Barrington Stage Company in August 2018.