Graduate Student Has Four Plays Entered in Regional Festival

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Adam E. Douglas, playwright

Adam E. Douglas, a third year graduate student at the University of Arkansas, wrote four of the 12 plays being judged at this year’s Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival regional competition. The regional festival takes place from Feb. 22-26 in Amarillo, Texas.

Douglas, who grew up in Bentonville, is a University of Arkansas graduate and is working on a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting in the drama department of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

He has two one-act plays entered in the regional competition: Oscar Goes to … and Hamlet.The first is a period piece featuring Oscar Wilde standing on his own grave; the second Douglas describes as an “absurdist piece” that has nothing to do with another play of the same title.

He also has two plays, in the Ten-Minute Play category: Forgotten Gifts and The Weird Sisters.

Douglas will work with directors at the festival and help choose the cast members from a pool of student actors, to produce performances of his two ten-minute plays. Judges will select two plays from each of the 8 regional festivals. A judging panel will read the semi-finalists and pick four playwrights to attend the national Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival in April. The four plays will be presented as staged readings in the Kennedy Center Theatre Lab with casts made up of professional actors from the Washington, D.C. area.

The one act plays in the regional competition are not performed but are judged based on their scripts. The three judge panel at each regional picks two plays as semi-finalists for the national festival. From this group four to six plays are chosen for readings by professional actors.

Douglas says he has been writing plays all his life, and no matter how his plays fare in the festival competition, he is already planning to direct a new, full length play he wrote. He says that Supermen, based on the lives of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of Superman, will be have its premiere performance in Fayetteville in the next few months.