Gearing Up for SiP 2025
For those who don’t know, work on Shakespeare in Paradise is a year-round thing. It starts in January with the opening of submissions for Short Tales. That’s a pretty low-key activity—writers excepted, or course—but it requires a few things and quite a bit of organization. First of all, there’s the call for new submissions. The window for new submissions opens on January 1, and closes mid-May, and this year for the first time we used an automated form for submissions instead of my Shakespeare in Paradise email. That meant that I didn’t lose any submissions, and that we could collect critical information—like bios—up front. This is important when we come to produce the book; our 2023 publication has been slowed down by the need to track down missing bios.
Then there’s the communicating with the judges. We have up to 11 regular readers for Short Tales. Here’s the process we follow:
Scripts are received and cleaned. This means all identifying marks are removed from the scripts so that the judges don’t know who wrote what. This allows the plays to be read on their own merit.
Judges make a simple judgement: YES, MAYBE, NO. These comments are scored. The plays with the highest average score are shortlisted, and then we select the 10 for the evening from that shortlist.
We make it a point to prioritize writers completely new to the process and to avoid including more than one play by the same person in an evening. Sometimes that’s not so easy—if the pool of submissions is relatively small, as it was in the years past COVID, we had a limited number of submitters; but this year, we had 30 separate writers whose plays did relatively well, so we were spoiled for choice in 2025!
Reading from Patrice Francis’ Die Empty
Short Tales is managed by a production team who oversees the process. This was a new experiment last year, and it worked so well I’ve firmed it up. I’m gonna post their faces here because they are troopers!! Shoutout to Julie Ritchie-Bingham, Leah Forbes, Jeremie Johnson and Edward Knowles for taking on this task! These will be the directors’ go-to people as they start to pull these plays together. And they are my advisors as we pull together the final evening—they are organizing the plays for the evening, they are deciding what goes where and when intermission happens and all that good stuff.
These are our plays:
The Wake - Jasmine Anderson
Pearls - J Ben Hepburn & Patrice Francis
Remembrance - Allie Costa
Die Empty - Patrice Francis
Divorce Papers - Inderia Green
Color Coded - Makayla Kerr
Curtain Call - Hakeeb A. Nandelal
Mother’s Dearest - Tyler Newbold-Chisholm
The Fly - Valicia Rolle & Bradley Worrell
The Witnesses - Deon Simms
We selected our directors just after the submission window closed. This year again we had some great applicants, and once again we had to prioritize. First choices were people who have never directed with us before. Then we went with people who have directed once in the past, but not last year. Then we went with people who directed once with us, last year. And then we selected someone who has worked with us a lot but who has not directed a play from beginning to end since 2018—who’s always worked in a secondary capacity, stepping in if and when necessary, but not going through the whole process for 8 years.
These are our directors:
Ty Bonaby
Orchid Burnside
renee caesar
Salem Cunningham
Olivia Dorsett
Tanricka Lightbourne
Anya Lockhart
Mariana Ortega
Beaumont Todd
Christine Wilson
On Thursday past we held our first reading for Short Tales. The purpose of that was to simply hear—and time—the plays. We had a great gathering and we held the reading out on the brand-new Treehouse Deck at sunset—almost idyllic, with a sweet breeze cooling us off, the lights in the trees coming on as darkness rolled in … the only challenge was the sandflies …
