(Above: A scene from Dirty Dishes, one of the 10-minute plays produced at Oregon Contemporary Theatre in the 2018 iteration of the annual NW10 Festival; photo by Paul Carter)

By Randi Bjornstad

It’s a numbers game that might seem confusing, but here’s the gist: Oregon Contemporary Theatre puts on the NW10 Festival each year. It’s a world premiere of never-before presented plays that take no longer than 10 minutes each to perform.

This year’s festival opens March 1 and runs through March 10. It’s the 11th year that OCT has done this festival, and this year’s version features eight plays in the production. All tickets are $20 for this show.

Tara Wibrew, associate producer at OCT, says she loves that the 10-minute play festival “is fresh and new every year.”

“These are new plays by playwrights from Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia,” Wibrew said. “These are stories told by different characters and in different styles. We have a judge who makes the final selection by reading scripts without knowing who the writers are, so it’s always fascinating to see what will end up on stage. Sometimes there are people who have had other plays in the festival before, sometimes not.”

This year’s judge is Andrew Hobgood, a playwright, director, actor, and founding artistic director of The New Colony in Chicago.

Similarly, directors apply for a spot on the roster several months before the festival comes together, “and the goal is to have a healthy mix of ages, genders, ethnicities, and backgrounds,” Wibrew said. “After we have the final scripts, we try to match them up with directors we think would do a good job with them, and we send them a script and ask if they would be interested.”

If a particular director does not feel an affinity for the script that has been offered, “we might not have another choice for them,” she said. “We try to identify the kind of script that we think each potential director would do well.”

Similarly, would-be actors are called to an audition where they play theater games “to see how people work within a community,” Wibrew said, “and directors can then send groups of actors out to read from the various scripts before the plays and the actors are matched up.”

More than 80 plays were submitted for this year’s festival, and the eight finalists that were chosen by the independent judge will involve 18 actors.

The lineup includes:

•   Torrid Taxes by Laurie Spector, directed by Chelsey Megli
•   Inertia by Rachael Caries, directed by Aaron Smart
•   Paint My Lips Pretty by Jeremy Urann, directed by Inga Wilson
•   Of Bots and Men by Sylvie Pederson, directed by Scott Frazier-Maskiell
•   Onion Ode by Matthew Weaver, directed by Kari Welch
•   Dhebba by Sravya Tadepalli, directed by Eric Braman
•   The Purple J and X-Ray Vision by Deborah Chava Singer, directed by Ty Potter
•   The News by Rebecca Blanchard, directed by Erica Towe

2019 NW10 Goes to 11! Festival

When: 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 28 (preview performance), March 1-2 and 7-9, and a 2 p.m. matinee and “talkback” on March 10

Where: Oregon Contemporary Theatre, 194 W. Broadway, Eugene

Tickets: $20, available from the box office, 541-465-1506, or online at octheatre.org

Additional activity: Half-day playwriting workshop, Writing the Perfect 10, taught by NW10 co-founders Connie Bennett and Paul Calandrino, from noon to 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 3 at OCT; enrollment details at 541-684-6988.