Although the decision was made more than three months ago, Post Productions is finally able to reveal the winner of its 2024 Windsor-Essex Playwriting Contest. This year’s winner, submitted by Panos Kirby, is Copracorn — a darkly comedic fantasy about a man named Harris who finds himself meandering through life, feeling like a loser in his little apartment where he passes the time naming and chatting with cockroaches and hoping to finally find a job in the terrible post-pandemic economy. One day a strange figure appears in his life: Copracorn, a shape-shifting trickster who promises to help Harris get his life on track. Harris soon learns that hope can be deceptive and those offering it are often the last people you should trust. The script was a hit with the judging panel from the first round, but the story behind the script caught the judges completely off-guard.
To set the stage for this story it’s best to briefly summarize how the scoring and feedback process for the playwriting contest works. The scripts are anonymized by Fay Lynn when submitted so that she’s the only one who knows the names of the playwrights who have submitted them, even if those playwrights are using pseudonyms. Every judge receives access to the entire set of submitted scripts at the same time and has a month to read, score (using a unique rubric created specifically for the contest), and prepare feedback on all of the scripts before the entire panel meets to compare their scores and discuss their opinions. In the first-round finalists are chosen based on the results of that discussion and every playwright who submitted a script receives several pages of feedback compiled from the individual feedback received from each judge plus the panel discussion. Once finalists have been provided with their feedback, they have a month to revise and resubmit their scripts. The revised scripts undergo the same process used in round one and at the end of the final meeting of the judges panel a winner is decided. The decision must be unanimous – if the judges disagree, they continue discussing the relative merits of the contenders until a unanimous decision can be reached.
Both the first round and second round meetings are audio recorded, and copious notes are taken, so that feedback can be accurately summarized, and any disagreements quickly resolved.
So that’s the process. The end of the process is where the story of this year’s contest became weird. This year’s judging panel was comprised of contest coordinator Michael K. Potter and Post Productions Artistic Director Fay Lynn (both of whom have served as judges every year since the contest was founded), longtime judge Shana Thibert (Executive Director of Revolution Youth Theatre), and three new judges: Kieran Potter (an independent artist), plus Dan and April Savoie of 519 Magazine and South Detroit Films. At the final meeting, after roughly three-hours of intense discussion, finalists were whittled down to two contenders, both beloved by the judges. At that point a vote was called to discover whether the judges had reached unanimity or whether further discussion was needed. One by one, moving clockwise around the table, each judge stated the name of the play they believed should win. Each one voted for Copracorn until the circle reached the sixth and final judge: Kieran Potter. Noting his hesitation the other judges assured the neophyte judge it was acceptable for him to vote for the other play, in which case discussion would continue until the group had reached consensus. With great reluctance the new judge drew in a deep breath and stated, “I wrote Copracorn”.
A brief stunned silence followed, soon broken by chaotic shouts of surprise, shock, and confusion. The recording of this moment cannot, unfortunately, be shared with the public because it contains more dumfounded expletives in 10-minutes than the entirety of Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre – laced with praise, congratulations, and anxious questions about what could be done with this information and whether it was possible for the panel to select one of its own judges as the winning playwright. There was soul-searching. There was talk of removing Kieran Potter as a voting member and of removing the two members of the panel who are also members of his family (Michael K. Potter and Fay Lynn). Fortunately for the conflicted judge who had been anxious for several months about the fact that his pseudonymously written script was under consideration the results would be the same in any case.
How did this happen? Since I, the contest’s coordinator, became blind the process of script reading, whether for the contest or other purposes, has been fairly simple: Fay Lynn reads the scripts aloud, then we discuss them. For purposes of the contest, we then individually score each script and prepare our own feedback for the playwrights. Yet we also read many scripts outside of the playwriting contest. Since the fall of 2023 Kieran Potter has joined in this fun family activity, as it’s far more interesting to have two voices read a play rather than one, and he also enjoys participating in the discussion and analysis of the scripts. We found his insights about the scripts useful, especially since they came from a very different perspective as he is 20-years younger than we are. This year, shortly before Fay and I started reading the first-round entries, we invited Kieran to join the judge’s panel. He seemed surprised and a little anxious about the invitation, but thought he could learn a lot from the process and since he enjoyed participating in that kind of process anyway, he agreed to serve as a judge. What we didn’t know at the time was that one of the scripts we were about the read and pick apart and evaluate had been written by him under a pseudonym because he was looking for opportunities to get honest feedback.
So now this new judge found himself in a bind. Should he tell us that he was Panos Kirby? If he had, he reasoned, he wouldn’t be able to get honest feedback about his script as we’d be biased and perhaps even reluctant to tell him what we really thought of his writing. . . especially if we disliked it. But if he hadn’t told us, he worried that he might be setting himself up for a very awkward situation in the future if it turned out the judges actually liked his script. He decided the best course of action was to try to provide the most honest and unbiased feedback he could on every script, including his own, and do whatever he could to avoid influencing what other judges thought about Copracorn.
Unsurprisingly, I had the opportunity to sit down with the playwright to talk in-depth about Copracorn, his experience as a judge in the 2024 Windsor-Essex Playwriting Contest, and his development as a writer up to this point.
Kieran had originally intended to submit a draft of Copracorn to last year’s contest, “but I couldn’t get it finished in time and I’m glad I didn’t because it needed way more time to really cook”. Although he bought himself an extra year, he admits he still found himself frantically trying to complete the script before the deadline for this year’s contest. He recalls desperately trying to finish the script while sitting in the backseat of our van. “With no one looking at me I just sat huddled in the back of the car typing away the last few pages on my phone,” he says sheepishly. “I sent it at 11:57, I think. It was due by midnight.”
In fact, the rush to complete the script minutes before the deadline for entry nearly doomed its chances of moving on to the second round of the contest. Although Copracorn was chosen as one of the finalists in this year’s contest based on the strength of its first act the judges all agreed that the second act didn’t work and should probably be rewritten from scratch. “The second act was written in a mad dash over three days. It was rough,” he admits. Although every judge loved the first act of Copracorn, every judge also agreed that almost nothing in the second act worked. A decision had to be made: did we believe that giving the playwright a month to revise the second act would provide enough time for it to be adequately revised? If so, the script would move on to the second round and become a finalist. If not, it would not move on, and we would advise the playwright to keep working on it for resubmission to next year’s contest. Although the discussion made Kieran nervous, and although he didn’t add much to the debate at that meeting, he didn’t disagree with what the judges saw as a major issue. “The second act sucked. It really did suck. I had no idea how I wanted to end the story except for the very last scene. How to get there was a mystery to me and I had about eight different ways to get there.” He’s grateful the judges decided that “Panos Kirby” might be able to solve the problem within a month, a decision based primarily on the strength of the script’s first act. “If there had only been one round in the contest and I hadn’t had the chance to re-write the second act I had no chance of winning.”
Both Kieran’s decision to delay submitting Copracorn for a year plus the opportunity to become a finalist and spend a month revising the second act contributed greatly to his script’s ultimate success, in his view. Between 2023 and 2024, for example, the character of Copracorn itself underwent significant changes. “Originally Copracorn was going to be a much more sinister, evil entity that didn’t shapeshift,” he explains. “It was just a big green cow head that entered the room and ominously said things. Then the story was going to be about a burglar breaking into a poor man’s home and changing his life for the better. But then I kind of married the two concepts and that worked out after some time, and more real-life things happened to me in that time that became part of the play in really important ways.” Those later real-life events became essential to his revisions to the second act of Copracorn for round two of the contest. “I had a few eureka moments and eventually it just sort of came together that I needed to plot in more elements from my actual life, because there was only a bit of that at first in the second act. I realized how many things that had happened to me were actually useful to the story.” The key, he says, was realizing that what had seemed like random events in his life were actually part of a cohesive whole: his life. “Anything can by a story. Not everything should be a story, but it can be a story if you work at it.”
In addition to the high of his script unexpectedly winning the contest, Kieran, burdened by the anxiety he felt in the dual role in which he unexpectedly found himself, discovered that he enjoyed being a judge. “I learned a lot. It was a very interesting experience, and it was a lot of fun. I like reviewing and critiquing things. But there was a rock in my stomach the entire time – especially leading up to that final day, like I was swallowing more pebbles every night. It was rough.”
Anxiety aside, Kieran enjoys critiquing his own work and found hearing the critiques of others enlightening: “I can critique my own work. I knew what was wrong with what I did, especially after reading other people’s scripts. Then it was even more obvious what I did wrong. One thing that the whole judges’ panel agreed on, especially in the second round, that I didn’t expect and found hilarious was how much people hated one female character that I wrote. The vitriol people had against this character was hilarious and kind of horrifying.” One judge in particular hated the character so much that she ranted about her for at least 20-minutes at the second and final meeting – something that Kieran found “so funny. I was struggling not to giggle. I really wasn’t insulted. I don’t take things that personally. I knew it wasn’t a great character. I get it. But the amount of hatred that one judge had for her was, oh my god, so funny. It was great”.
Indeed, Kieran credits critique and feedback as essential to his development as a writer. “I wrote a bit when I was younger. But really not that much. I used to think I hated writing. I really didn’t write anything for, like, eight years and then I took a creative writing course at The Shadowbox Theatre, and I learned a lot from Joey Ouellette and my classmates there. It was just really good for me. It opened up my eyes a whole lot.” Kieran credits the focus in Ouellette’s creative writing course on providing and receiving constructive feedback as “vital” to his development and growing interest in writing. “It’s important to hear other people out and provide advice that focuses on things in their work. Noticing things in other people’s work helps you notice things in your own work – and the more you say these kinds of things out loud, the more they become ingrained in your brain, I think. That’s really vital. I also think it’s really important to see things and absorb things that aren’t good. Go see a play that is really terrible. Watch terrible movies made by people on a five-dollar budget. You might hate it, but afterwards you’ll know why you hate it. Also see things that you really love; you need that spectrum. Knowing what you like, knowing what you don’t like, helping people tear apart their work, and having them tear into yours… and not having a thin skin about it. That’s hard to teach.”
Aside from the benefits of providing and receiving constructive feedback, Kieran found that the expectation of writing and presenting new work to his classmates was beneficial in itself. As he explains, “The course made me put into action a lot of things I’d been thinking about for a long time and once I’d put them down on paper it showed me what I like about storytelling. The process of writing helped me see the things I like about writing and made me want to write more. It made me realize things like, I really like it when stories are kind of silly, I really like it when stories have naturalistic dialogue and shocking moments. It’s still really early for me and I’m still figuring things out.”
Among the benefits Kieran experienced through Ouellette’s course and the process of writing Copracorn in particular are opportunities to explore ideas from multiple perspectives – each of which, he believes, provides him with unexpected insights. “Even when I was writing this script, I had a lot of different interpretations in my head about what was going on. Copracorn is an otherworldly creature – a trickster-fairy in some ways, a God – but also a representation of the complications of life.” One of those complication is the concept and experience of hope. “Copracorn presents himself as hope, or a personification of hope, but although hope is one of the greatest forces in life, it’s so important for everyone to have hope, things are never that simple. Hope hides all sorts of things behind it. Hope is often misleading.” Kieran credits recent life experiences with providing him new perspectives on hope – and thus new ways to write the characters of Copracorn and Harris. “I went through a lot of experiences like that in the last couple years which is what inspired the play.,” he elaborates. “I almost fell for a scheme that threatened to take all my money. I got jobs that seemed really promising and turned out to be total garbage. Harris is the ups and downs of life personified.”
One of the judges’ favourite scenes in Copracorn is a semi-montage of job interviews toward the end of the first act, in which Copracorn offers to help Harris land a new (and worthwhile) job, which he does by accompanying Harris to the interviews in the form of a fuzzy green hat that provides advice. “I had a lot of fun playing with that and exploring how weird the character of Harris could be and how I could represent my own failures at job hunting, thinking of the absolute worst outcomes of any job interview and how to make them comedic. Mostly I was trying to think of the worse case scenarios, and it was a joy to play around with those.”
This hilarious montage of job interviews wouldn’t have been possible if Kieran hadn’t also made the decision that Copracorn would be a shapeshifter, which is where the fantastical element of Copracorn is most evident. “I’m such a big fan of, and advocate for, non-human characters, non-standard characters. I think it really livens up any story to have things that deviate from the norm – an entire character that deviates from the norm. You don’t see a lot of shapeshifters in modern plays. I just thought it would be a fun sort of novelty. Making Copracorn a shapeshifter allows me to have him listen in on things normal characters wouldn’t be able to listen in on. It allows for strange comedic moments. It really does allow for a wide breadth of ideas.”
Kieran can vividly recall the moments leading up to the final decision at the end of a three-and-a-half hour meeting, by which point the judges had decided the winner would be one of two scripts. “It was a bit terrifying because I knew there was a 50/50 chance that I would have to reveal myself in the moment. They’re gonna know it was me. I had thought that maybe I wouldn’t reveal myself if Copracorn didn’t win. I also thought that maybe I wouldn’t reveal it even if Copracorn won. I didn’t really know what to do. It was a very weird sitcom-y situation – something that could be its own play. It was also pretty exciting because I though maybe I could win from the beginning, but probably not. But then to see, oh, I’m getting closer and closer to winning. This play got kicked out then this other play got kicked out and now we’re down to two. And the thing is I thought the other play was really good. I was thinking maybe the other script would make for a better play. And I really do want to see it put on at some point.” With only two scripts remaining in the contest, including his own, Kieran witnessed the judges – one after the other – vote for his play to become the winner of this year’s contest, until finally it was his turn to vote, and all eyes were on him to state his opinion. “That might have been the moment in my life where I felt the most terror. I was lost in that moment. It lasted a year. I was so dumbstruck. I must have been sitting in silence for a minute. I stammered. I thought ‘oh my god, do I reveal it? Do I not reveal it? What do I say?’ And then I just squeakily let out ‘I… wrote Copracorn’. And there was this resounding shock that was so interesting to witness. These faces of joy and confusion. It was a very interesting moment in my life. I’ll never forget that night.”
“I still don’t really know where I want to go with storytelling so I’m just trying to experiment.,” the novice writer muses. “Short stories are what I’ve been writing mostly. But then I wanted to try my hand at a play to see if I could actually do it because you don’t know until you just dive in and give it a shot. And I guess I kind of can! I think I learned a lot about myself while writing it. And that’s really the best thing about writing: figuring out who you are.”
To be clear, in the end Kieran Potter decided to abstain from voting on this year’s winner, which didn’t matter because everyone else had already voted for Copracorn. It was going to win regardless, on its own merits. But he thought it best, also, to kill his pseudonym and be open about the fact that he is the playwright behind it. “This is my first play. I’m really still quite new to writing. I just wanted to make something really different – a bit of a modern fairy tale with elements of my own life and the fantastical, blended together in a strange and fun way. I’m just glad that it resonated with people at all and I’m just full of pride. It’s very nice.” Although he’s glad his script delighted the judges, and pleased that it won the 2024 Windsor-Essex Playwriting Contest, he says he would have been content just to receive honest criticism. “Copracorn is a very special story to me,” he says. “And I’m glad I wrote it.”
