Adaptive Playwrights Need Apply: City Lit's THE ART OF ADAPTATION

Chicago's City Lit Theater is big on adaptations of literary work. Their current show is adapted from Grace Metalious's "Peyton Place," that provocative piece of fiction from the 50s that sparked the American imagination and spawned a whole lot of soap operas. In their 30-year history, as their website tells us, City Lit has "explored fiction, non-fiction, biography, essays, and drama in performance while presenting a wide array of voices from classic writers such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Oliver Goldsmith, Mark Twain, Colette, and P.G. Wodehouse to such contemporary writers as Alice Walker, W.P. Kinsella, Douglas Post, Raymond Carver, Edward Albee and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala."

It's a noble aim, to try to put literature on stage -- there's a huge range of possibilities, from David Edgar and the Royal Shakespeare Company with Nicholas Nickleby to the big boffo musical Les Miserables to Steppenwolf making a mark with The Grapes of Wrath back in 1988 -- and City Lit is doing its best to encourage all of them.

City Lit is once again offering The Art of Adaptation, a contest and festival celebrating non-dramatic works adapted for the stage. Last year's winner was LIAR! a play by Jordan Mann based on one of the stories in the book "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov. Other pieces performed in 2012 included adaptations of work by F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, William Shakespeare and Neil Gaiman.

For this year's competition, the rules for would-be adaptor/playwrights include a time length (5-20 minutes in performances) and simple set requirements. City Lit is looking for six to eight plays, each adapted from a part of a novel, short story, essay, memoir, poem or any other kind of literary material that is not already a play, to perform on their stage in July. For all the submission details -- including info on the $500 prize -- you can check the League of Chicago Theatres Collective Leverage blog, which announced this year's contest. Note that they are looking for a proposal, including a one-page description of the work and ten pages of the script, and the deadline for those proposals is May 31, 2013. That gives you a little time to get that adaptation in order.

City Lit Theater Company Is Looking for Adaptations

Chicago's City Lit Theater Company is looking for plays. Not just any plays, but adaptations. Or, more specifically, "stage adaptations of non-dramatic literature." City Lit is planning a festival called "The Art of Adaptation," to run June 29 and 30 and July 1 at their theater at 1012 West Bryn Mawr Avenue in Chicago. They are hoping to offer performances of some 6 to 10 adapted pieces over the course of the festival. And there's a $500 cash prize, which is always good news to starving playwrights!

If your thing is adapting stage plays from short stories,books, poems, essays, diaries, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, the Bible, the Uniform Commercial Code, or anything else that isn't already a stage play, this may be the perfect assignment for you. Note that City Lit specifies that "Each adaptor is responsible for whatever royalties might be due on your piece." As a matter of good sense, you should know you can't dramatize a bunch of Adele's song lyrics without permission from Adele, or try to put something fun together based on a recent New Yorker piece without getting the rights first. And for the love of all that's holy, please do not think you can simply retype something you saw on Youtube or read at Wikipedia and pretend it's yours.

Much smarter to use material that's in the public domain or already belongs to you.

In any event, City Lit says they're looking for pieces that will play between 5 and 20 minutes in length (so, approximately 5-20 pages, depending on whether it includes long monologues, lots of stage action or snappy dialogue that goes quickly). The author is responsible for finding a director and actors and setting up rehearsals on their own. Other requirements and specifications are listed here.

The deadline to submit a proposal is April 30, 2012. For a better idea of what kind of material City Lit prefers, visit their website here to see current offerings.