Paper Wing’s playwriting competition is a battle royale of theater.

Every year for four years now, Paper Wing Theatre has invited California playwrights to send original unpublished plays to their Summer Play Reading Festival, where the stronger ones get workshops and readings by actors in front of an audience.

The playwright gets feedback, the actors get exercise, the audience gets a preview, and the best play gets a full production by Paper Wing the following season. Last year it was Heather Flescher’s Daughters of Nothing, an audience and committee winner that wrapped up in April, about the inner lives of four transgender women.

This year there are 11 plays competing across five days; eight of those are packed into Saturday and Sunday marathons. Here are first looks at three of them.

Play: 5 Old Norwegian Women | Playwright: Lee Brady | Playing: 7pm Thursday, June 8

A play-within-a-play about a young man debuting his play that rounds up women characters from the works of Ibsen and Strindberg. It’s also a slice-of-life of a community theater in a fictionalized city not unlike Carmel. The ensemble comedy brings together six older actresses, and they in turn bring their idiosyncrasies, histories and shenanigans.

In this scene, the playwright, Tim, has pissed off an experienced actress who storms off. Sandy, the costume/prop person, swoops in to advise him.

SANDY: Well, you blew that one!

TIM: You heard?

SANDY: Would I miss the battle of youth and age?

TIM: It wasn’t about that… exactly.

SANDY: No? And you weren’t a smart-ass who didn’t respect a woman who was acting when you were in diapers? (beat) Look, just tell me why you are writing about five old women, Norwegian or not, when it is obvious that you don’t know the first thing about women or being old?

TIM: You haven’t even read it!

SANDY: Actors aren’t robots, Tim, that’s the last thing they are. They have hearts and minds and guts and vulnerability and pride and, in Rosemary’s case, a whole shitload of experience. She brought all that in, and you –

TIM: I didn’t appreciate it. Yeah.

Play: Let’s Kill the B**** | Playwright: Mark Cunningham | Playing: 7pm Wednesday, June 7

I don’t like to ex out expletives (see my review for The Motherfucker with the Hat) but the title of this piece begs for some restraint. This local playwright is probably not some misogynist. He seems more like a fanboy of lowbrow culture and cult movies. He wrote Dad’s Porn Stash, about grown sisters coping with their departed father’s secret porn career.

Here, he mixes up a dark trope about offing an irritating wife with male-bonding clichés, held together with dialogue as labored as Kevin Smith’s early movies. The result is disturbing, like this meta exchange between scheming husband Bret and his childhood buddies.

CLEM: You’re not the first guy who wanted to knock off his wife. Plenty of movies use it as a plot – hell, it’s probably where you got this cockamamie idea to begin with. You couldn’t sleep one night and you saw the late late show with some black and white picture starring Jimmy Cagney or Bogie, and you thought that sounded like a dang swell idea.

Uncomfortable pause.

BRET: Yeah, pretty much.

CLEM: So, is there more ta’ the story?

BRET: What? Like a turning point?

CLEM: Why not? Sure.

BRET: She cheated on me –

REGGIE: Then you file for a divorce. It’s that simple – you give up the money, the lifestyle, and everything that comes with it and you file for a divorce.

Play: Harry and Maura | Playwright: Elizabeth Flanagan | Playing: noon Saturday, June 10

This play is a revelation: realistic, empathetic, deceptively simple but emotionally layered. Maura, a recovering alcoholic and gambler, returns to her childhood apartment home in San Francisco’s skid row where her ailing father, Harry, still lives. She’s there to move him into a retirement home, but she’s loaded with baggage, which gets unpacked in a series of revelations about family dreams and immigration, exploitation and addiction, loyalty and luck. Flanagan has an ear for dialogue, as in this scene with Maura and her Irish dad in his apartment one morning.

HARRY: Shame you couldn’t have come home when I was getting around better. We could have gone to the track.

MAURA: Probably not the best place for either of us at the moment.

HARRY: You loved the horses.

MAURA: Still do, believe me.

HARRY: Remember taking the train to the race track? We’d get some candy; you’d read the racing form.

MAURA: Wasn’t quite Dick and Jane.

HARRY: You’d have made a fine horse doctor.

MAURA: Thought I was going to win Wimbledon?

HARRY: That, too. You should have stuck with the tennis.

MAURA: I should have stuck with the two-dollar bets.

4TH ANNUAL SUMMER PLAY READING FESTIVAL runs 7-10pm Wed-Fri; 9am-10pm Sat, 9am-10pm Sun (June 7-11) at Paper Wing Theatre, 320 Hoffman Ave., Monterey. $5/play; $25/series pass. 905-5684, paperwing.com.