Earth Matters on Stage Playwright Festival and Symposium 2025
Hosted by the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at The Ohio State University
Submission Deadline
September 18, 2024. Submissions must be entered before the deadline in order to be considered for the competition. Please see the submission guidelines below for additional information.
First Place Award: $1250 prize, travel accommodations to the festival, and a fully realized production (the show will be part of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Art’s mainstage season for the 2025-2026 academic year).
Second Place Award: $750 prize and a public reading during the festival week.
Honorable Mentions: Possible public readings during the festival week.
About the Festival
The Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) Ecodrama Playwrights Festival was founded in 2004 by Theresa May and Larry Fried to foster new dramatic works that respond to ecological crises and explore new possibilities for being in relationship with the more-than-human world. EMOS seeks plays that focus on contemporary and historical environmental issues, enliven and transform our experience of the world around us, inspire us to listen better, and instill a more profound sense of our ecological communities. If you think your play does any of these things, we encourage you to submit it!
The EMOS Festival includes a production of the winning script, play readings, and talkback sessions as part of the playwriting competition. The concurrent symposium also includes lectures, panels, practice-based workshops, and discussions that advance scholarship in the arts, ecology, and climate change.
Thematic Guidelines
EMOS is looking for plays that do one or more of the following:
- Engage the personal, local, regional and/or global implications of man-made climate change.
- Put an ecological issue or environmental event/crisis at the center of the dramatic action or theme of the play.
- Critique or satirize patterns of exploitation, consumption, or other ingrained values that are ecologically unsustainable.
- Expose and illuminate issues of environmental justice.
- Explore the relationship between sustainability, community, and cultural diversity.
- Interpret community to include our ecological community; give voice to the land, or elements of the land; theatrically examine the reciprocal relationship between human, animal and plant communities, and/or the connection between people and place, human and non-human, culture and nature.
- Grow out of the playwright’s personal relationship to the land and the ecology of a specific place.
- Celebrate the joy of the ecological world in which humans participate.
- Offer an imagined world view that illuminates our ecological condition or reflects on the ecological crisis from a unique cultural or philosophical perspective.
- Are written specifically to be performed in an unorthodox venue such as a natural or environmental setting, where that setting is a not merely a backdrop but an integral part of the play.
- Engage with cultural and social impacts of man-made climate change.
- Offer or complicate ideas of urban resilience.
- Expose and/or grapple with ecological violence and/or “slow violence.”
Additionally, as this EMOS Festival will be hosted in Ohio, we encourage admissions that also:
- Examine ecological issues specific to Ohio and the Great Lakes Region. For instance, plays could explore the historically devasting pollution of the Great Lakes or the effects of recent train derailments (and the discharge of hazardous chemicals).
- Center the stories of marginalized communities (e.g., African American, Latinx, and Indigenous people), who are often disproportionately impacted by habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change.
Evaluation Process
A committee of readers will review all submissions and evaluate them based on their quality of writing, creativity, and how well they address environmental themes. The committee will be composed of theatre professionals and students from The Ohio State University. At least two readers will review and score each submission. Plays that receive high marks during the initial round will be reread and further assessed until a shortlist is determined.
A panel of distinguished theatre artists will choose the winning plays from the shortlist. Our 2025 judges will be announced soon.
Submission Specs
Entries must be original plays that have yet to receive an Equity production (readings and workshops are okay) and are currently unpublished. They should be written primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) in English and address the thematic guidelines listed above. Please limit one submission per entrant. Because the winning play will be part of The Ohio State University’s mainstage season, we cannot consider:
- Ten-minute plays
- One-act plays (unless they are longer than 30 minutes)
- Musicals (although we love them, we cannot accommodate their production for this particular festival)
Submissions will be judged blind. Uploaded scripts should not include the author’s name, representation, or any identifying information.
Please review the submission guidelines below:
Email submissions to eartmatters25@gmail.com with the following in the body of the email:
- Play title
- The name of the author(s). Note, please do not include this on the script itself.
- Author(s) contact information: email and phone number
- A brief synopsis and casting expectations
Your script should be saved as a PDF and sent as an attachment. If you have an especially large file, you may alternatively send a link to a Dropbox, Google Drive, or other filesharing site so we can download the file.
Additionally, ensure that your play has the following format:
- Use a 12pt font
- Have 1-inch margins minimum on every side
- Include numbered pages
Using playwriting software, such as Final Draft 13, is helpful as it will automatically implement this format.
If you have any questions, please email either of the Co-Conference Chairs: Paitton Lewis (lewis.3374@osu.edu) or Joshua Lewis (lewis.3262@osu.edu).
Previous Winning Scripts and Host Institutions:
2022: Transmissions in Advance of the Great Second Dying by Jessica Huang, produced by Lydia Fort at Emory University, EMOS’22
2018: Rain and Zoe Save the World by Crystal Skillman, produced by Brian Cook at University of Alaska Anchorage, EMOS ‘18
2015: thirst by MEH Lewis and Anita Chandwaney, produced by Johnathan Taylor at University of Nevada – Reno, EMOS ‘15
2012: Sila (the first play in The Artic Cycle) by Chantal Bilodeau, produced by Dr. Wendy Arons at Carnegie Mellon University, EMOS ‘12
2008: Song of Extinction by E.M. Lewis, produced by Theresa May and Larry Fried at Oregon University, EMOS ‘08
2004: Odin’s Horse by Rob Koon, produced by Theresa May and Larry Fried at Humboldt State University, EMOS ‘04