okay, so i lied about getting responding to all playwrights ... i found an errant submissions hidden under a pile of papers last night, so the *real* final submission will be replied to fairly quickly. hopefully.

have started reading through the round one survivors and now trying to make the really hard cuts. have my assurances that second round reading is NOT fun: there's something in every remaining submission that either i or one of the readers really likes, and though i'd love to do all 53 of them, we're looking to whittle that number down to 15. oh lordy!

and speaking of numbers, this comes from an e-mail i sent to a playwright asking for feedback and i thought it might prove interesting to any who might care about "numbers":

also, just to let you know, when i e-mailed that we had a lot of submissions and that it was a highly selective process, here are some numbers to back that up: we received 400 e-mail submissions and 10 snail mail submissions.  of the 400 e-mail submissions, only 52 passed through to round two. of the 10 snail mail, only 1 passed through. of those 53, only 11 (at most) will be produced. a LOT of pieces which were well-written (like yours) didn't pass through the first round here, but that doesn't mean it won't pass through for another festival. in fact, one playwright wrote me that her piece (which we passed on) was short-listed for another festival in Australia, so don't give up.

so basically, just about 1 in 8 submissions made it through to round two. and around 1 in 4 of the round 2 submissions will make it through to the final cut. i'm really not too sure how many submissions most other groups receive, but i'm amazed at the number we got and the overall quality. there's a lot of really good writers out there ...