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Professional playwright Kent Stetson is here in Bermuda to judge the playwrights for Famous For Fifteen Minutes.

Stetson chooses the winner before he even watches the plays — the playwrights were judged on their writing before Stetson even arrived in Bermuda. Stetson said: “My first job as an adjudicator for the festival is to analyze the writing. So I get the scripts before I see the shows. I was given the top six, and it’s my job then to read and assess them before production so that really all you’re assessing is the text.

“You’re not assessing the acting or the directing or the production or the lighting. You’re actually making a judgment on the text itself and the writing itself.”

Stetson, recently wrote a short story on commission for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, something he says gave him new sympathy for the playwrights in Famous for Fifteen Minutes.

Stetson said, “Dialogue has to be really stripped, really bare. The other difference is when you’re writing a play, you’re actually writing the tip of the iceberg, but when you’re writing prose you’re writing the entire iceberg and the ocean it’s floating in.”

“Plays have to be very, very refined, they have to have the same sub-structure as a novel, but your only tool is dialogue, you don’t have description, you don’t have flashback, there’s a lot of literary elements that are not available to the playwright. It’s one of the more difficult crafts.” The winner will be announced at the Gala Night on April 1.

For tickets, the box office is open from 5.30-8pm on performance nights. Call 292-0848 or go to www.bmds.bm. Tickets are $20, and $75 for Gala night.

See page 24 for our review of the six plays.[[In-content Ad]]

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