Announcing the 2018 ScreenCraft Stage Play Competition Winners!

We are excited to announce the winner of the 2018 ScreenCraft Stage Play competition. Selected from nearly 700 entries, La Mujer Barbuda by Cristina Luzárraga has been named the winner and Ship by Douglas Williams has been named the runner-up.

La Mujer Barbuda explores the intersecting lives of two women, separated by time and space, and united in the struggle to thrive as a mother in a man’s world. Maggie is an American airline pilot and new mother. When she tries to pump breast milk in the cockpit, she almost perishes in a plane crash. Magdalena is a 17th-century Italian weaver and new mother. When she suddenly grows a beard and nurses a baby at age fifty-two, she sets off a domestic and civil crisis. The judges responded to the unique premises and gripping scenes as the parallels between the two lives unfurled.

Ship follows Nell, who has one passion in life: The Guinness Book of World Records. When a man who tried and failed to grow the longest fingernails in the world moves to her sleepy hometown, she becomes obsessed with tracking him down. The jury loved the strong motivation, as impractical as it was, that served as the motor for excellent character work.

In addition to the ScreenCraft team, the judges included: David Lindsay-Abaire, American playwright, lyricist and screenwriter, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 for his play Rabbit Hole; Donald Margulies, American playwright and a professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale University. In 2000, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Dinner with Friends; Chloe Hung, Recipient of the RBC Emerging Playwrights Award from Tarragon Theatre, on season three of Ava DuVernay’s television series, Queen Sugar on OWN; Alex Lerner, Manager at Kaplan/Perone Entertainment, the production and management company whose clients wrote such films as Captain America: Winter Soldier, The Happytime Murders, The Disaster Artist and Milk; Dan Knechtges, Artistic Director of the prestigious Theatre Under the Stars based in Houston, Texas; and Justin Littman, Manager at Gotham Group, the management company whose clients have written for such television shows as Boardwalk Empire, Billions, Fresh Off the Boat and Portlandia.

Grand Prize Winner Luzárraga will receive a cash prize, circulation of her material to managers and agents, and has the option to have the play produced with ScreenCraft at a local theater in Los Angeles, with an audience of writers and entertainment industry professionals. Runner-up Williams will also receive a cash prize and have his materials circulated to industry professionals.

Congratulations to these winning writers and finalists, and thank you to our judges and to everyone who submitted projects; we read a number of remarkable plays. View the quarterfinalists, semifinalists and finalists here.

If you’d like to receive a notification when this contest re-opens for entries in 2019, you can subscribe for updates via Coverfly here.

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