The World Premiere of Goshen College Peace Play Contest Winners

1st place
Baby Boom
By Lia Romeo of New Brunswick, New Jersey
Directed by Talashia Keim Yoder
Stage Manager: Grace Magnan

2nd place
Acts of Contrition
By Patricia Montley
Directed by Fritz Hartman
Stage Manager: Ellen McCrae

Technical Director: Jerry Peters

Running time is about 1 hour. There will be a 15-20 minute talk-back session with Lia Romeo, our winning playwright, immediately following each performance. Plays not recommended for early elementary students or younger.

Quote from Producer and Play Selection Committee Chair, Doug Liechty Caskey:
More than 60 plays were submitted to the 2006 Peace Play Contest. An exciting aspect of our playwriting contest, now over 20 years in existence, is that the ideas of playwrights from all around North America challenge us to think in fresh ways about what it means to be compassionate peacemakers. This helps those of us in a peace college tradition to avoid the tendency toward complacency on such a timely and important calling.

Quote from BABY BOOM director, Talashia Keim Yoder:
On one level, Baby Boom is a play about a couple that tests their communitys idea of accepting diversity when they choose to adopt a machine gun as their baby. But it is also about people who choose their reality. It is about what happens when five peoples perceptions of reality collide. What happens when we each have a picture of the way we want our world to be, and the pictures others have dont match ours?

Quote from ACTS OF CONTRITION director, Fritz Hartman:
I think it is an inclination for many of us to strive to reduce friction in our relationships at all costs, so we are taught to seek forgiveness and to dole it out liberally. In Acts of Contrition, playwright Montley suggests that this approach works sometimes, but at other times, the friction is something that must be present -- something that must be studied and felt for a long time.

2008 Peace Play Contest Information
The next contest deadline for entering one act play scripts is December 31, 2007. The winning entry will be produced in 2008. Contact Goshen College Director of Theater, Doug Liechty Caskey, for contest rules and guidelines at douglc@goshen.edu, (574) 535-7393, or Goshen College, 1700 S. Main, Goshen, IN 46526.