Playwrights Caleen Sinnette Jennings and Sheri Wilner will get their fifteen minutes, or rather their ten minutes, as Kentucky's Actors Theatre of Louisville have honored the scribes with the Heideman Award for their entries in the 2001 National ten-Minute Play Contest.

Jennings' play, Classyass and Wilner's Bake Off will receive a production April 7 as part of the company's annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. Classyass takes place at 3:47 a.m. at a college radio station and focuses on a wise-guy freshman disk jockey named Amadeus. Bake Off finds the ruthless entrant Rita determined to take home the largest prize in Bake-Off history.

The winners receive the $1000 prize made possible by a grant left by the late Ted Heideman of Louisville.

Jennings, a professor of Theatre at Washington D.C.'s American University, has been nominated twice for the Helen Hayes Awards' Charles MacArthur prize for Outstanding New Play. Her works have been published by Dramatic Publishing Company and New Plays, Incorporated.

To Wilner, the Heideman is old hat as she was co-recipient of the award in 1999 for her play Labor Day. Her other works include Hunger, Relative Strangers, Little Death of a Salesman and Joan of Arkansas which was part of the 1999 Actors Theatre Apprentice Showcase. For your chance at the Heideman prize, submit your ten-minute play — postmarked by Dec. 1, 2002 — to National Ten-Minute Play Contest, Actors Theatre of Louisville, 316 West Main Street, Louisville, KY 40202-4218. For further details, visit http://www.actorstheatre.org.

— by Ernio Hernandez