Charles M. Getchell New Play Contest

Submission Period

Entries are accepted between March 1 and June 1, annually. Please review the guidelines before filling out and submitting your application.

About the Award

SETC’s Charles M. Getchell New Play Contest is dedicated to the discovery, development and publicizing of worthy new plays and playwrights. Submissions are accepted between March 1 and June 1, annually. One winning playwright receives a $1,000 cash award and an all-expense paid trip to the annual SETC Convention, where both a critique and staged reading of the winning play are held. The winning play is also considered for online publication and a feature in Southern Theatre magazine.

Click Here to read about the history of the award in an article by Chip Egan in the Winter-Spring 1999 Southern Theatre.

Click Here to learn more about Charles M. Getchell.

2021 Winner

AGATHE by Angela J. Davis

In the spring of 1994, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were brutally murdered in a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing that the world would later recognize as the Rwandan genocide. The genocide began on April 6, 1994, with the assassination of the country’s president. As a result of a fragile coalition government, the person who was next in line for the country’s presidency – and who was, in fact, the country’s head of state for less than a day – was Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a university professor by training and an advocate for women and girls’ education.

Although she is often omitted or mentioned only in passing in accounts of the Rwandan genocide, and although her voice was literally silenced by the extremists’ takeover of the central radio towers in the hours before her assassination, Agathe Uwilingiyimana was the country’s true president during the first 14 hours of the Rwandan genocide and accomplished a miracle during one of the darkest moments in modern history: the survival of her five children as well as her spirit.

Past Winners