Instead of having playwrights bear the burden of printing and mailing scripts for a short play contest/festival, I suggest these easy steps to save time, money, gasoline and distribute the burden of printing...
1. Get a free G-Mail account, which includes Blogspot.
2. Set up a blog to be utterly and completely private (this takes literally five minutes). Assure playwrights that only the directors/actors/judges for the festival will have access to the blog. Note: if the blog is not private, playwrights will see their plays on routine Google alerts that they make with their names and the names of their plays.
4. Invite judges/directors/actors, etc. to the blog via Blogspot. The program by sends them a link to the blog and requires them to sign in with Google (a small catch but a LOT of people have Google accounts for purposes just like this).
3. Have playwrights submit their plays in Rich Text Format (rtf) attached to an e-mail. It is possible to have all e-mails become blog posts but it's probably better to load them manually.
4. Load the plays onto the blog. Each play's title is the blog title. This way people can read/choose/browse plays on the blogroll that it usually on a panel to the right. If you need to strip contact information, you may do this or ask the playwrights to but make sure you get that information on the body of the e-mails from playwrights.
5. Save all incoming e-mails as a group so you may respond to everyone. You may also set up a reply that thanks e-mailers for their submission and gives them information about when final decisions will be made.
5. Choose the plays that made the final cut and delete the rest from the blog. This way, you can invite directors/technicians/actors to become blog readers (readers may not post to the blog) so they can read, print and comment on plays.
6. The festival is half-produced.
