The Mad River Valley's Community Theater
Waitsfield, Vermont
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The Vermont Playwrights Award

Past Winners (Page still being updated)

2006   2002    2001 

2006 Winner "The Writing Room"
by Clare Melley Smith
About The Author

Bitten by the theatre bug at age 9 (Dormouse, Alice in Wonderland), Clare played the great roles at Boston Children’s Theatre (Gretel!, Dorothy!). She earned a BA at Tufts University and an MA at  Catholic University . 

She has performed at Olney Theatre, Totem Pole Theatre, Harvard Summer Theatre, Poet’s Theatre, Tufts Arena Theater, Provincetown Playhouse, Irish Bronx Theatre Co., and the  Irish Arts Center , NYC. Clare’s adaptation of John B. Keane’s Christmas Stories was performed by The Irish Bronx Theatre  Co. 

Her short pieces have won awards at Lamia Ink!, and her one act play, Looking for Nadia, was a finalist in the 2005 Henrico Competition (Virginia). Looking for Nadia, was given a staged reading by the Schoodic Arts Festival (Maine ). 

She is currently a member of Charles Maryan’s Playwrights’/Directors’ Workshop in NYC. Clare did a playwriting residency with E.S.T.,  Lexington Center for the Arts, and was a member of Curt Dempster’s Playwriting Lab at E.S.T. in  New York City. She is currently a member of Charles Maryan’s Playwrights’/ Directors’ Workshop in NYC. A short play, Sunday Sonata, was presented in an evening of short plays from the Maryan Workshop, at the Neighborhood Playhouse and is scheduled to be performed by American Irish Repertory Ensemble in Portland , Maine  in January. Another short play, A Turn for the Worse, was performed at Baruch Performing Arts Center as part of a benefit evening for Animal Haven in New York City .  

A member of The Dramatists Guild, Clare has written three full-length plays, a one act play, and several shorter pieces. Two new full-length plays are currently in development in the Maryan workshop. 

Clare lives in Downeast Maine with her husband, poet and publisher Harry Smith, two cats, and two dogs.
About The Play

...by Clare Melley Smith

The play’s plot is constructed in the form of a Celtic loop, a four-petaled design typical in Irish decorative arts: each of the four main characters is involved with all of the others, in an intricate and individual way. At the center of the pattern are the central issues of the play: loyalty vs. betrayal, and self-realization vs. self-destruction.

Two writers (Larry and Joe), chums since graduate school, have a monthly roundtable to discuss their current projects. When Larry invites Mitch, who is largely unsuccessful, to join the circle, the relationships are thrown off balance. Mitch learns that Joe enjoys world-wide renown under a pseudonym. The news renders Mitch catatonic, devoured by jealousy, to the extent that his marriage to Annie is in jeopardy. Larry, who has always been in love with Annie, participates in rehabilitating Mitch, although not with the purest motives. Annie is torn between loyalty and self-preservation, with the welfare of her child complicating the mix.

Joe also turns out to be helpful to Mitch, thereby displacing Larry as Mitch’s advisor. Just as Mitch pulls himself together and seems to have some real chance at success, Joe complicates matters by offering Mitch work and by becoming personally closer, perhaps too close. (…or is it only Mitch’s imagination?) Mitch’s relationship with Annie disintegrates further due to an ironic misunderstanding, and Mitch winds up living with Joe, also perhaps not with the purest motives. Larry finishes as odd-man-out in this theatrical game of Musical Chairs.

2002 Winner   "In My Wildest Dreams" 
by John Callahan
About the Play

“In My Wildest Dreams” takes place in a small New England town. Recently retired after thirty years of service to St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Ashton , Massachusetts , the Rector and his wife of many years confront their new lives with alternating dread and elation. They buy a home within the same town and busy themselves with volunteer activities, plans for travel and time to be spent with friends and family. But a hammer blow falls when he learns that he has been accused of serious impropriety. At first he does not know specifically what he is accused of, or by whom and under what circumstances. But gradually the story unfolds in the Bishop’s telling. Three women, two of whom are clergy and one of whom is a Senior Vestry Member, have accused him of sexual harassment, a charge that is at first vague but grows more clear as each person tells her own story with allegations differing in each case. Reputedly the result of actions over a fifteen-year period, the charges explode across the lives of all who are touched by them. They are by turns dramatic, poignant, humorous, sad, tender, cutting and absurd; the mystery is in whether or not these charges are true, and if true, by what standard and to what degree.  

About the Author

Author, John Callahan, a native Philadelphian whose family was involved in theatrical organizations for years, is a graduate of Dartmouth and an alumnus of the Yale School of Drama. Not yet fully retired from a career in the organization and development of charitably supported organizations, he has served in senior administrative positions with the University of Chicago , Amherst College , Winterthur Museum and Gardens and the American Philosophical Society. Currently he is President of Carpenter, Shepherd and Warden, an institutional consulting firm.

Married for nearly forty-four years to his high school sweetheart, Virginia, they live in New London , New Hampshire , and seasonally in Martha’s Vineyard , where by his own account he “hikes frequently, plays tennis badly, writes daily and takes on entirely too many volunteer activities.”

 In addition to acting in, directing and producing a number of plays in college and community theaters over the years, he has written several plays But only recently has he begun to do so in earnest. “In My Wildest Dreams” is both the first fruit of this new effort and the outgrowth of a succession of events of which he has first hand knowledge. His next play, “A Clear Blue Sky” has just been completed and is now in the final editing process.

2001 Winner "The Linden Tree"
by Lois Roisman
About the Play

"The Linden Tree"  takes place in the 1940’s during the German occupation of The Netherlands. In the midst of this, Letta, a young student, risks herself repeatedly to relocate Jewish babies whose parents have been sent to Westerbork. She is asked to care for two Jewish children and hide their father, Franz, from the Nazis. Unaware of the German plans for Dutch Jewry, they all believe that the war and the danger will end soon and they can then pick up the lives they left behind. But as the war drags on, Letta and Franz develop a love for one another that grows deeper as they confront the obstacles and dangers of war together. He has awakened in her a mature woman and she has offered him a love he has not experienced in his marriage. This bond sustains them as they endure Nazi searches, the death of loved ones and tests of their will to survive. In a desperate act, Letta kills a Nazi who is about to discover Franz’s hiding place. Franz and Letta determine to make a life together when the war is over.

 On St. Nicholas Eve of 1944, when their resources and energies are close to depleted, they discover that the Nazis have destroyed most of the Jews of Holland, and that Franz’s little family will be one of the few remaining intact Jewish families in the country. Franz refuses to accept this information, understanding its implications for his future with Letta. She is forced to decide whether to follow her heart and in so doing destroy one of these families, or to go her own way and let Franz and his wife rebuild the fragile Jewish community that she has risked her young life to preserve. Through her struggle, we are asked to contemplate the complex nature of goodness and the forces that drive it. 

The play was inspired by incidents in the life of Marion Pritchard, a rescuer of Jewish children during WWII and a resident of Vershire, Vermont. 

Judges found this story “powerful and moving” with “excellent character development, tight dialogue and highly original presentation” of a difficult and dangerous time.  

The play was performed by the Valley Players March 9 - 18, 2001.

About the Author

As well as being a playwright, Ms Roisman is also an essayist whose work has been heard on New Hampshire Public Radio. Her award-winning plays, which have been seen nationwide and in Canada, include "Nobody's Gilgul," "Scenes from a Seder," and "Changing Room." "Nobody's Gilgul" may be found in the anthology, "Making a Scene" and is taught in courses on Jewish drama.
2000 Winner: "Chasin' Night Birds" by Jeri Pitcher