About the Festival
Each year, KTA celebrates the stellar work of KY area playwrights during the annual Roots of the Bluegrass New Play Festival. This festival is an exciting opportunity for Kentucky playwrights to submit their work to a panel of readers tasked with recognizing outstanding 10-minute, One-act, and Full-length playwriting. This year we are including monologues for 6th-12th grades.
Plays are submitted and adjudicated each summer into early fall. In October, three finalists in each category will be announced. These finalists will be invited to attend the annual State Theatre Conference and will present a selection of their work as a staged reading to an audience of theatre artists and producers. Following the reading, awards will be presented to the competitors and the winners will be announced. The winner in each category will win a cash prize. All finalists will be offered free registration to the conference.
To submit your work to the Roots of the Bluegrass New Play Festival, click register (to the right on this page) and fill out the registration form to enter.
Participant Qualifications
- Eligible playwrights must be 2025 KY residents.
- To be considered, plays should have received no previous full production.
- Playwrights may submit no more than one play per category.
- Original work - AI discouraged and detected use of it for creating a play may impact scores negatively.
- Monologues - open to any Kentucky school students grades 6-12 (public, private, or homeschooled).
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KTA reserves the right to inquire in depth about your association with the state of Kentucky if necessary and has the right to deny any play submitted if the aforementioned criteria are not met. We further reserve the right to consider works that don’t fit strictly into the criteria.
Categories of Entry
- 10-minute Plays (June 1-30) - 10 page max
- One-act Plays (July 1-31) - 45 page max
- Full-length Plays (Aug 1-31) - 46 page minimum
- Monologues (Sept 1-30) - 250 word max - grades 6-12
- Please only submit during specified slot per category. If you are submitting in 2 or more categories, follow the timeline for each submission.
Required Formatting
- All submissions must be in .pdf format. Other formats will not be accepted.
- Title Page – Separate from the body of the work. No page number included. Title of the play, Name of the playwright, contact information, a list of characters in the order they appear
- Script – Beginning with page one
- Files should be saved as TITLEOFPLAY-TP.pdf and TITLEOFPLAY.pdf respectively.
- Author name should not appear anywhere other than the title page.
Suggested Formatting
- Font– 12pt either Courier or New Times Roman fonts only.
- Margins – Left margin at 1.5” All others at 1”.
- Action – Inset consistently at between 1.5 inches and 2.5 inches. No parentheses.
- Character’s Name – Each character’s named centered over their dialogue.
- Dialogue – Directly below the character’s name with no space between. No inset.
- Parentheticals – (Action of a single character set inside parentheses, just before or during the character’s dialogue.) Inset consistently at between 1.5 or 2.5 inches to both the right and the left. Use parentheses. No space between.
Adjudication
Plays will be read by a minimum of two adjudicators. The ten plays receiving the highest points will move on to the next round of judging. The third round will consist of the top five plays in each category. The top three plays in each category will be selected for a reading of attending playwrights at the Roots of the Bluegrass New Play Festival either in conjunction with KTA's Fall Festival or virtually.
