A Cranbrook playwright's submission to the prestigious Yale Drama Series - an international competition to find the best English language play by a new playwright - has taken second place out of almost 1,000 entries.

David Hare, a renowned British playwright, judged the competition. He and a team of readers perused 960 plays, and awarded first place to Virginia Grise for "blu," and second place to Mary Hamilton for "Siona MacDuff." "Siona MacDuff" is about a teenage girl - the title character - and her relationship with her best friend Jenny.

"In second place," Hare said in a press release, "I was happy to put Mary Hamilton's delightful Canadian comedy 'Siona MacDuff,' a strikingly original work about teenage anxieties and friendships. It's sexy, funny and true."

Hare awarded third place to Tom Lavignino's "Nineteen Kinds of Peril."

Hamilton plans to attend an awards ceremony in New York in September. There will also be a reading of the winning play at Yale University, in New Haven Connecticut, which she will also attend.

As for "Siona MacDuff," in some ways the real work is just beginning. The recognition from the competition is great, Hamilton said, but the challenge now is to get the play produced and staged. "This is where it gets slippery," she said.

"I'm hoping to get more development opportunities - to polish up the play, get professional feedback, and also get an audience screening. This way you can find out what the pitfalls are in staging it, and get those ironed out."

To this end, Hamilton has "put out feelers" to the Playwrights' Theatre Centre in Vancouver, an organization whose mandate is to develop, produce and promote new works by Canadian playwrights, especially British Columbia playwrights.

"These are people who understand what new writing is, and what it takes to stage it," she said.

Once these details have been taken care of, Hamilton said, the next step would be to find someone to direct it.

"Siona MacDuff" has already seen some stage life. Hamilton held a public reading last year at the Studio Stage Door, to gauge its flow and rhythm and to observe some audience reaction. The cast of the reading featured Sydney Savage, Marina Stropky, Hailey Cartier, Ryan Gardener, Vince Capuano, Ben Stropky and Michael Pocha. Dalton Hamilton directed the ready, and Frank Hackett provided critical guidance.

Hamilton parsed the plot of the play in a previous interview with the Townsman/Bulletin.

"Siona has this talent for fashion design and Jenny encourages her to start a line and have a show, to which Siona agrees. And then into the picture comes another girl, Chloe, who is a model and who Jenny is kind of intrigued by but Siona resents. So the course of the play has to do with Siona getting shut out and having to claw her way back in. It's about the relationship between teenage girls primarily."

Hamilton has another play - "Juliet's Costume" - in third draft, and is working with a Calgary dramaturge to further its development.

Hamilton — a drama teacher at Parkland Middle School — is also helping her students prepare for an upcoming “Parkland Fringe” — a one-night drama festival of one-act plays and musical numbers, set for April 8 at the Key City Theatre in Cranbrook. The public is invited to come out for this event. Watch for more details on Parkland Fringe in an upcoming issue of the Townsman/Bulletin.