Play by Hughes named KCACTF national semi-finalist

BPT alum Colleen Hughes’ ten-minute play The Mouse has been named a national semi-finalist for the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival (KCACTF). 

Playwright Colleen Hughes

If selected as a national finalist, The Mouse will be one of four ten-minute plays presented at the national festival in April. National finalist plays are cast with professional actors from the Washington, D.C., area, and compete for a $1,000 cash prize.

Plays by Deirdre Girard (Delivery) and John Zakrosky, Jr. (Ten Hours of Sleep) were also presented in the ten-minute category at the regional festival last month in Fitchburg; Deirdre’s play The End of the Argument also competed there in the one-act category.

There are numerous KCACTF awards categories for all types of student theatre artists. For the uninitiated, here’s how the ten-minute competition works:

Playwrights submit their work each fall. Plays from each KCACTF region (ours, Region I, covers New England and Eastern New York) are read by at least two readers from a different region. The top six choices are invited to Region I’s festival in January. At the festival, each playwright works with an assigned director to rehearse a public reading of his/her play. Two festival respondents respond to each play. 

From those six plays, two are chosen as national semi-finalists; those plays are then held in consideration for the national festival in Washington D.C, as national finalists. 

More about KCACTF:

Started in 1969 by Roger L. Stevens, the Kennedy Center's founding chairman, the Kennedy Center American College Theater (KCACTF) is a national theater program involving 18,000 students from colleges and universities nationwide which has served as a catalyst in improving the quality of college theater in the United States.

The KCACTF has grown into a network of more than 600 academic institutions throughout the country, where theater departments and student artists showcase their work and receive outside assessment by KCACTF respondents. KCACTF is a year-round program in eight geographic regions in the United States.

Since its inception, KCACTF has given more than 400,000 college theater students the opportunity to have their work critiqued, improve their dramatic skills and receive national recognition for excellence. More than 16 million theatergoers have attended approximately 10,000 festival productions nationwide.