In 2023, The Václav Havel Library Foundation will continue with its Student Mini-Drama Contest, announcing the program both for Czech and American students. Two American students will travel to the Czech Republic and two Czech students will visit the universities in the United States.
Continuing in the same style as before, entries will be sent to a jury of acclaimed playwrights, critics, and actors. The winners will be announced sometime in the Spring of 2023. The foundation looks forward to reading submissions and announcing this year’s winner. Good luck to all entrants!
This Year’s Prompt:
In Vaclav Havel’s “Vanek Trilogy” (composed of Audience, Unveiling, and Protest), the semi-autobiographical character of Vanek is faced with the crushing constraint of being an artist and intellectual in a time of totalitarian regime. Through a series of absurd and comical interactions with his foreman at a brewery, friends in the city, and an old intellectual peer, he begins to see the psychological casualties the regime incurs.
This year’s Student Mini-Drama Contest’s theme pertains to Vanek’s Experiences — the retention of one’s personal and artistic values in the face of constricting familiar and distant authority — through the context of a quote from Havel’s most famous essay The Power of The Powerless: “Yet even in [totalitarian] societies, individuals and groups of people exist who do not abandon politics as a vocation and who, in one way or another, strive to think independently, to express themselves and in some cases even organize politically, because that is a part of their attempt to live within the truth”.
The submission deadline is February 28, 2023. See the foundation website for rules and more information.