16 short-form playwrights to face off in Seoul Players' 10-Minute Play Festival

Seoul's international theater community prepares for battle once again, as the 10-Minute Play Festival (10MPF) takes to the stage to find this year's top playwright. This will mark the 13th year of the contest, brought to the stage at Dulwich College in southern Seoul by Seoul Players, a not-for-profit, volunteer-run English-language theater group founded in 2001. For this year's contest, they received 410 submissions sent in March and April from 354 playwrights based all over the world. The number of submissions has exploded in recent years, peaking at more than 500 for last year's festival in just two weeks, before submissions had to be closed early. "Last year, one of the board [members] felt that many of the hundreds of plays we got were AI-generated," said Lorne Oliver, a producer for Seoul Players. He didn't disagree with the assessment, but he explained why it didn't affect their final decisions: "I just thought most of them were not up to snuff." He added, "We did not bother to run them through an AI check; we just went with the assessment results, since cream floats." This year, th