Programs and Events

AJT Bake-Off: A Short Plays Experience

Borrowing from Paula Vogel’s Bake-Off, a bake-off is a quickly written exercise on an assigned theme with assigned elements that folks do within a short period of time. 

April 18th, 7 pm EST/4 pm PST: Bake-off Short Plays Workshop for All: How to write a short play. Led by Rachel Carnes (Read more about Rachel below). RSVP Required. For Members only. Or $18 for nonmembers.

April 19th: Prompt/ ‘ingredients’ go out for Bake-Off, plus actor and director sign-up sheet.

Please Note: To act or direct, you must be a AJT member or Theatremacher and be available for the entire day on May 19th, 10am-10pm EST/ 7am PST/7pm PST.

Bake-Off Submission Requirements Are Found Here

April 25th: Bake-off piece due.
The Chef comes up with a theme and 5 ingredients that each playwright must use in their play.
(Examples: Each play takes place during a Jewish holiday, each play has a food fight, etc.) 

Thursday, May 2nd: Announcements go out for Bake-off.

Monday, May 6th: Casting/Directors announcement.

May 19th, 8 pm EST/ 5 pm PST: Bake-Off Performance!

About our Workshop Leader, Rachel Carnes: 

Playwright Rachael Carnes received a 2020 Oregon Literary Fellowship, a 2021 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Advanced Dramatic Writing Fellowship, and has had more than 250 readings, development workshops and full productions, across the U.S., U.K., the Middle East, Canada and Asia, with recent invitations to develop work at the William Inge Theatre Festival, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Playwriting Intensive, the Midwestern Dramatists Center Conference, the Mid-America Theater Conference, the American Association for Theatre in Higher Education New Play Development Series, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ivoryton Playhouse Women Playwrights Initiative, the Parson’s Nose Theatre’s Women Playwright Series, the Cambridge U.K. WriteON Festival and the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival and the Great Plains Theatre Conference, with her play selected for full production at Great Plains. Her work is seen in many literary journals, including the Coachella Review, the Silk Road Review, Feels Blind Literary, the Extinction Rebellion, Some Scripts, the StoneCoast Review, Quince Magazine, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Smith & Kraus Best Plays and Best Monologues anthologies, the Hominum Journal, the Canyon Voices Literary Magazine, the Ponder Review and more. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Rachael is the founder of Code Red Playwrights, a consortium of writers across the country, responding to gun violence. She served for three years as regional representative for the Dramatists Guild of America, is the coordinator of New Play Development for KDC Theatre, London, and is a festival reader for the Athena Project, the Blank Theatre Living Room Series, the American Association of Theatre in Higher Education and the Great Plains Theatre Commons. Rachael lives in Oregon with her beautiful family. Find her work on New Play Exchange.