Figueres a Escena

Curating a microtheatre night: how we choose the short plays

A microtheatre night at Teatre El Jardí packs dozens into a space barely larger than a lounge. Pieces run ten to fifteen minutes, scripts arrive in their hundreds, and the room expects to be surprised. None of that is accidental. The lineup emerges from a slow process that begins months before opening and continues right up to the show, shaped as much by conversations with regulars as by anything on the page.

The tradition of telling stories in compressed bursts is not unique to our town. In Australia, the Short+Sweet festival began in Sydney in 2002 and has since become a global brand, proving that audiences are willing to pay for the quick, sharp thrill of a well-made ten-minute piece. We take that same appetite seriously in Figueres, treating each evening as a small festival in its own right, with its own internal logic and emotional arc.

What follows is a walk through how a typical slate of six to eight short plays is built. It is part artistic judgement, part logistics, part listening exercise, and it rarely looks the way an outsider might imagine.

The open call and how submissions arrive

Every cycle starts with a call through our newsletter, social channels, and partner venues. We accept scripts in Catalan, Spanish, and increasingly English, French, and Portuguese, because the audience for microtheatre in the Alt Empordà is no longer purely local. Playwrights send polished drafts, fragments scrawled on trains, and everything in between.

The window stays open for six weeks. We charge no fee and encourage first-time writers. That openness produces around two hundred scripts per cycle, ranging from folkloric coastal tales to surrealist office dramas that could just as easily play out in Melbourne or Brisbane.

A reading committee of three takes the first pass. We divide the pile and meet over coffee at La Cate, reading aloud where a script benefits from being heard. Anything illegible or late is set aside. From this sift, perhaps forty pieces move forward.

First readings and gut reactions

The second round is where taste returns. We read each surviving script twice, silently to absorb structure, aloud to feel rhythm. A piece can look impressive on the page and fall flat when spoken, or the reverse. We watch for the moment readers go quiet, laugh at the wrong beat, or argue about a character's decision the next morning.

Three things tend to catch our attention at this stage:

Short plays live and die by those pauses, and they are surprisingly hard to judge from a desk. Some of the strongest pieces from our last season arrived as twelve pages dense with silence. What survives is about a fifth of the second-round pile, eight to ten pieces that feel alive on the page.

Voices, languages, and lived experience

A microtheatre night is not a single play. It is a sequence, and the variety of voices across that sequence is what makes the evening feel like a community event rather than a school showcase. We look for scripts from places we have not heard from before, including recent arrivals to the Empordà and writers based overseas who have heard about the venue through touring networks.

This is also where the Australian connection runs quietly underneath the work. Several recent directors trained in Adelaide or worked alongside companies like La Boite in Brisbane before returning to Catalonia. They bring a sensibility for ensemble work and for the satirical edge short play festivals on the other side of the world have made their own. We do not programme Australian pieces specifically, but the sensibility travels.

We ask each playwright for a short note about what drew them to the piece. Many mention a family story, a place they once lived, or a job they left. Those notes are not part of the criteria, but they help us read the script in a wider frame and occasionally save a piece we were about to set aside.

Working within the microtheatre format

Every short play has to fit our stage. Teatre El Jardí offers a performing area of roughly four by three metres for microtheatre nights, with limited fly space and a single entrance. That constraint is liberating rather than limiting. It pushes writers toward character, dialogue, and the small physical gestures an audience of forty can actually see.

We reject well-written scripts that cannot be staged within those limits. A piece requiring a moving car, running water, or a cast of seven is unlikely to make the slate, no matter how moving the text. The format also rules out anything that depends on darkness for long stretches, because our lighting rig is modest and our neighbours above are patient but not infinite.

The flip side is that the constraint rewards invention. Some of our most memorable pieces used nothing more than a chair, a coat, and a sharp change of light. When we read submissions we quietly ask whether this can be made real on our particular patch of floor, with our particular tools, by our particular company of performers.

Balancing tone across the evening

A lineup of short plays has to breathe. Too many comedies in a row and the room grows restless. Too much tragedy and the audience leaves heavy rather than energised. We aim for what one regular calls a textured evening, a sequence that moves between registers so no two adjacent pieces feel like cousins.

In practice this means alternating humour with something quieter, slipping a physical piece between two text-heavy dramas, and reserving the most emotionally demanding work for the final slot. We have learned this through trial and error and through conversations with venue managers in Adelaide whose Fringe programming follows similar logic across hundreds of short shows each year.

Ticket pricing enters the picture too, since audiences paying more for reserved seating tend to arrive expecting a curated experience rather than a lottery. Our approach to how we set prices reflects that expectation, with a structure that supports this kind of programming work.

Watching rehearsals and refining the slate

By the week of the performance, the slate is largely fixed but not carved in stone. We attend at least one rehearsal for each piece, partly to support directors and partly because a script that read beautifully can reveal a problem underfoot. A blocking choice that traps an actor in shadow, a sound cue that fights the venue's acoustics, a translation that needs another pass: these are things we can only see in the room.

We have dropped pieces at this stage, though rarely. When it happens we offer the writer a slot in the following season, because a piece that does not quite fit a particular night may be perfect for the next. We have also promoted pieces from the undercard into the headline slot when a rehearsal visit convinced us the work was stronger than initially judged.

The process ends with a technical run on the afternoon of the show, after which we step back. The work belongs to the performers, writers, and audience from that point on.

Listening to our regulars

The selection process does not really end on opening night. We collect feedback through short paper forms, conversations at the bar, and an annual survey to everyone who attended at least one microtheatre evening in the past year. We ask what they would like to see more of, less of, and which pieces they are still thinking about weeks later.

Three things consistently shape our subsequent calls:

These signals feed back into the next open call, into the language we use to publicise it, and into the criteria our reading committee applies. A microtheatre night is a long conversation between a venue and the people who keep showing up, and the slate is only ever the latest draft of that conversation.

If you have a script tucked away in a drawer, or a story you have been turning over for years, the next submission window opens in autumn. Send it our way. The committee reads everything, the stage is small but generous, and there is a good chance a roomful of strangers in Figueres will soon be laughing, crying, or sitting in stunned silence because of something you wrote.