Dramahound Wins a Prize

That is me, the Dramahound, not the Glamorous Life of the Theatre. I recently won second prize (and a nice check, which went into the coffers of Dramahound Productions) in the Irish Diaspora One-Act Playwriting Contest. The criteria was the play had to run an hour, and had to be called "The Search for Eileen Sullivan." I don't think I've ever written that many pages so quickly in my life. I took a character from an old play, Maura and Katinka, and transformed her into Eileen Sullivan. The play is set in Boston in the summer of 1900. She's been sent on a mission by her employer to pick up an envelope from the administrator of a trust company, George P. Bancroft. That name is my little joke- Bancroft was a famous nineteenth century US historian. Eileen ran away from her former job, where she worked with her sister. It seems that her brother-in-law was harassing her, and rather than create tension in the marriage, she disappeared. By the end of the play, she has learned that Bancroft is not intrinsically evil because he's a wealthy, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and she's taught him something about the famine-ravaged Ireland that she escaped. The prize was awarded by Byron Toben of Montreal, where there will be a reading of the play in the future.