2020 Playwriting Competition – 22 March 2020

The Week’s Challenge Inspired By…

BEING & BIOLOGY: Is Consciousness the Life Force?
Edited by: Brenda Dunne
and Robert Jahn
Is consciousness actually the Life Force, the animating principle which underlies and unifies mind, body, and spirit in all living things, and which philosopher Henri Bergson termed the élan vital? This book offers a compendium of empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives from a broad range of scholarly disciplines, which suggest that there is an unbroken, non-local, collective aspect of consciousness that links distant individuals and events—a kind of resonant connectedness that defies separation in space and time.

The Challenge:
  • Some (or all) characters are highlighted as having both unique individuality and a shared facet of personality / psyche.
  • Characters are inherently either a) drawn to their environment for a specific purpose, and/or b) integrally bound to their environment.
  • Incorporate the principle of “honor” as both a motivation and a constraint.
  • Make appropriate reference to the concept of élan vital within the dialog.
Winning Submission:

The winner of this challenge was Taryn Yoneda for her script, First Week on the Floor, a story about that time when Doug, the one responsible for the Earth, accidentally adds too many drops of green and causes a plague.  Fortunately, Jupiter’s Gladys is in the next office and comes to give him a hand while he gets a little shut-eye.

The play was read by Ally Ibach, Allison McAlister, Brian Cedric Jones, Morgan Wenerick, and Kelli Barfield.  The moderator is ICRL’s Jeff Dunne.  You can listen to the recording here: