* FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

 ** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

TIGER TAIL
by Tennesee Williams
Produced by Shakespeare Downtown
Audience members will be able to get free tickets the day of the performance starting at 6:00 pm at Castle Clinton National Monument located at The Battery.
[http://address=Battery%20Park%20Viaduct,%20New%20York,%20NY%2010004,%20United%20States&auid=3871846077770729621&ll=40.703478,-74.016806&lsp=9902&q=Castle%20Clinton%20National%20Monument]https://maps.apple.com/

Performances will start at 6:30 pm and finish at 8:30 pm.
There will be no intermission.
The play will run for two more days: June 21 & 22
https://www.shakespearedowntown.org/tickets.html

*** ANOTHER UNSOLICITED TESTIMONIAL ***

"Thanks so much to NYC Playwrights! My short play 'Our Daily Bread' was published last month by Fresh Words, an international literary magazine, in its Hello Godot issue, and this week Mini Plays Review, an international journal of short plays and monologues, published another of my plays, "The Cradle's Rocking."

So grateful for all that you do for playwrights and the theater community! Mark Rosati (Instagram @marksrosati, Bluesky @msrosati.bsky.social)

Thanks for sharing Mark! 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

Things that go bump in the night? Ghost, goblins, and monsters? Nightmares of showing up to work naked? What puts the SCARE in you? We are seeking plays that have an element – or a heaping cup – of fear. Scare us or force us to laugh till we die with horror plays and musicals, including a great spoof. Plays must be BOO–themed, which means scary, eerie, or horrifying in some way.

Plays must have a running time of 15 minutes or less (which roughly translates to 15 pages) to qualify for the weekly contest. Each week a winner – selected by audience vote – receives the honor of “Best of the Week” and $100 prize.

***

We at UP Theater Company believe that World Premieres are overrated. We know that all new plays that receive production runs of three weeks or less are just about ready to open by the time they close. That’s why we are putting out a call for new plays that have had a single production of three weeks or fewer.

***

The Science Playwriting Competition brings science and theatre together for the dissemination of scientific knowledge through an intriguing lens — providing inspiration for plays that lead to exciting ways of learning about science. Rooted in artistic expression, the best science plays can be exceptional works of art that aesthetically convey scientific concepts, potentially resulting in further explorations in both disciplines. In this way, science and theatre may learn from each other, through their common goals of investigating and gaining an understanding of the significance of science and how the world works.

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** LES MISERABLES ***

The U.S. Army Chorus certainly made an impression after they sang "Do You Hear the People Sing?" from the musical Les Misérables at the Governors Ball—and it seemingly went right over MAGA's heads.

The song, a standard from a musical that is at its heart about social injustice, includes lyrics like “Will you join in our crusade? // Will you be strong and stand with me?” as it explores the theme of an oppressed working class rising up against a despotic regime.

But that seemed to go completely over the head of Dan Scavino, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, who said it was a "great honor to attend" the event.

President Donald Trump—who, along with billionaire Elon Musk, is actively eroding checks and balances throughout the government—included the anthem in his 2016 and 2024 campaign events, but many on social media have pointed out the irony of his administration continuing to support its message now that he’s returned to office.

More...
https://www.comicsands.com/army-chorus-les-mis

***

VP JD Vance, who was booed alongside second lady Usha Vance while attending a symphony at the Kennedy Center in March, proudly touted his facetious misreading of the musical, writing on social media: “About to see Les Miserables with POTUS at the Kennedy Center. Me to Usha: so what’s this about? A barber who kills people? Usha; [hysterical laughter].” In a follow-up tweet explaining his wildly obvious joke, he added, “That’s apparently a different thing called Sweeney Todd.”

Trump allegedly knows a lot more about the megamusical, which, like most of his favorite pop-cultural touchstones, hails from the 1980s. When announcing his third presidential run in 2022, he walked onstage to the protest anthem “Do You Hear the People Sing?”—a song that the US Army Chorus also performed at the 2025 White House Governors Ball. Meanwhile, the Obamas once bonded over their distaste for the show.

More...
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/shocker-donald-trump-jd-vance-les-miserables-kennedy-center

***

Michelle and Barack Obama review Les Miserables

We sat side by side in the theater, both of us worn out after a long day of work. The curtain went up and the singing began, giving us a gray, gloomy version of Paris. I don't know if it was my mood or whether it was just Les Misérables itself, but I spent the next hour feeling helplessly pounded by French misery. Grunts and chains. Poverty and rape. Injustice and oppression. Millions of people around the world had fallen in love with this musical, but I squirmed in my seat, trying to rise above the inexplicable torment I felt every time the melody repeated.

When the lights went up for intermission, I stole a glance at Barack.

He was slumped down, with his right elbow on the armrest and index finger resting on his forehead, his expression unreadable.

"What'd you think?" I said.

He gave me a sideways look. "Horrible, right?" I laughed, relieved that he felt the same way.
Barack sat up in his seat. "What if we got out of here?" he said. "We could just leave."

Shared on X/Twitter - https://archive.ph/ioqPt

***

Globally, it’s the most famous French musical. One hundred and thirty million people have seen Jean Valjean face off against Javert, in 22 languages; its downtrodden characters have taken to the barricades in London’s West End nearly continuously since 1985.

Everyone knows “Les Misérables.” Everyone — except the French.

In a strange twist of fate, “Les Miz,” an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s sweeping novel about justice, poverty and the social reality of 19th-century France, has never been popular in the country of its birth. Despite being created by two Frenchmen, the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and the lyricist Alain Boublil, it has only been performed in Paris twice since the 1980s. The 2012 film adaptation, starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, also performed poorly at the French box office.

Now a major new stage production, set to open at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on Wednesday, aims to make “Les Misérables” a star at home, too — with the enthusiastic assent of its creators.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/theater/les-miserables-paris.html

***

It was, however, Francis King in the Sunday Telegraph who pithily summarised what many of us felt, when he described the show as "a lurid Victorian melodrama produced with Victorian lavishness". And that's exactly why it has run so long. Victor Hugo's novel wrestles with all kinds of big themes: social injustice, redemption through love, the power of providence. On stage all this is boiled down to the triumph of a good man, Jean Valjean, over the cop who relentlessly pursues him. Essentially, it's The Fugitive with songs. And any notion that the show provides a searching account of the social oppression that led to the 1832 uprisings was scotched by a poll taken during the Broadway run, when a majority of theatregoers said they thought it all took place during the French revolution.

Les Mis succeeds because it is spectacular Victorian melodrama. Nothing wrong with that. What irked some of us back in 1985 was the claim by the original directors, Trevor Nunn and John Caird, that we were watching a piece of High Seriousness that required the resources of the RSC to stage. You could also argue, as I would, that Les Mis, by ditching spoken dialogue in favour of a through-composed score, led the musical down a false trail: away from the fun of wit, satire and romance towards the pomposities of pop-opera. But the fact is that audiences love Les Mis. What I find intriguing is that we think we live in a very cool, smart, cynical age. Yet, when the chips are down, what we really crave is a contest of good and evil, and lashings of spectacle. Just, in fact, like our Victorian ancestors. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme show.

More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/sep/21/les-miserables-25-year-anniversary

***

THERE WERE PEOPLE who told me ''Les Miserables'' was going to be wonderful and people who told me it was going to be terrible. The truth - or my reactions, at least - turned out to lie somewhere in the middle. If the lyrics were often little more than doggerel, and if the score often seemed the musical equivalent of doggerel, there were compensations in Colm Wilkinson's rightly acclaimed Jean Valjean, in a few of the supporting performances, in the scenery and lighting, and, every now and then, in a genuinely striking dramatic effect. But none of it added up to Victor Hugo.

How could it have done? The novel is vast and sprawling and dense with detail; any dramatization, however skillful, is bound to sacrifice an enormous amount, and there are important episodes - the Waterloo chapters in particular, which the musical understandably skips - that it is very hard to imagine being successfully transferred to the stage.

If you formed your idea of ''Les Miserables'' solely on the basis of the Royal Shakespeare version, or if you knew of Victor Hugo only by hearsay, the aspect of the book for which you would probably be least prepared is its originality. Hugo's reputation today tends to be that of a rather obvious rhetorician, a master of eloquent cliches. But start reading him and you will quickly find yourself confronted by the workings of a bold and unconstrained intelligence.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/19/theater/new-york-les-miserables-distinctive-stirring-version-still-victor-hugo-s.html

***

Boublil and Schonberg's international career started with their musical adaptation of Hugo's Les Miserables. Like La Revolution Francaise, Les Miserables started as a concept album released in June 1980. A few months later, Robert Hossein directed the stage version at the Palais des Sports. The revised English version, produced by Cameron Mackintosh and directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird of the Royal Shakespeare Company, opened in London on Oct. 8, 1985 and on Broadway Mar. 12, 1987 with Colm Wilkinson and Frances Ruffelle in both productions. The rest is history. The musical has been seen by more than 40 million people worldwide.

More...
https://playbill.com/article/for-claude-michel-schonberg-its-cest-la-guerre-com-101103

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WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD ESSAY?

 

                              CHAPTER II.

 

WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD ESSAY?

 

 

Prose has a bad name. We think of it and speak of it as including

everything in language that is _not_ poetry. In former times art

in literature meant poetry,--or, at a stretch, it included in addition

only oratory.

 

The beginning of art in the use of _unmeasured_ language (if we

may use that term to designate language that does not have the metrical

form) was undoubtedly oratory,--the impassioned appeal of a speaker to

his fellow men. The language was rhythmical, but not measured, that

is, not susceptible of division into lines, corresponding to bars of

music; and the element of beauty was distinctly subordinate to the

elements of nobility and truth. In modern times poetry has come to be

more and more the mere aggregation of images of beauty, without much

reference to the intellectual, and still less to the ethical; and prose

has been the recognized medium for the intellectual and the moral.

 

Of course, modern times have not given us any oratory superior to

that of Demosthenes and Cicero; nor any plain statement of historical

fact superior to that of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Tacitus. But art

in conversational prose, reduced to writing and made literature,

may fairly be said to date from the essayists of Queen Anne’s

time--Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, and their fellows; and it was brought

to perfection by Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, Irving, and

others of their day.

 

In most of this prose we find a new element--humour. The original,

characteristic, typical essay is whimsical, sympathetic, kindly,

amusing, suggestive, and close to reality. The impassioned appeal of

oratory has been adapted to the requirements of reading prose by such

writers as De Quincey and Macaulay; but the humorous essay has been by

far the more popular.

 

And what is humour? It would be hard to say that it is either beauty,

nobility, or truth. The fact is poetry, with its lofty atmosphere,

rarefied, artificial, and emotional, is in danger of becoming morbid,

unhealthy, and impractical. Humour is the sanitary sea salt that

purifies and saves. No one with a sense of humour can get very far

away from elemental and obvious facts. Humour is the corrective,

the freshener, the health-giver. Its danger is the trivial, the

commonplace, and the inconsequent.

 

The primary object of prose is to represent the truth, but in so far

as prose is true literature, it must make its appeal to the emotions.

The humorous essay must make us feel healthier and more sprightly,

the impassioned oratorical picture must fire us with desires and

inspire us with courage of a practical and specific kind. Mere

logical demonstration, or argumentative appeal, are not in themselves

literature because their appeal is not emotional, and so not a part

of the vibrating electric fluid of humanity; and beauty plays the

subordinate part of furnishing suggestive and illustrative images for

the illumination of what is called “the style.”

 

Gradually prose has absorbed all the powers and useful qualities of

poetry not inconsistent with its practical and unartificial character.

So the characteristics of a good prose style are in many respects not

unlike the characteristics of a good poetic style.

 

First, good prose should be rhythmical and musical, though never

measured. As prose is never to be sung, the artificial characteristics

of music should never be present in any degree; but as poetry in its

more highly developed forms has lost its qualities of simple melody

and attained characteristics of a more beautiful harmony, so prose,

starting with mere absence of roughness and harshness of sound,

gradually has attained to something very near akin to the musical

harmony of the more refined poetry. Almost the only difference lies

in the presence or absence of measure; but this forms a clear dividing

line between poetry (reaching down from above) and prose (rising up

from below).

 

Second, the more suggestive prose is, the better it is. It is true

that images should not be used merely for their own sake, as they may

be in poetry; but their possibilities in the way of illustration and

illumination is infinite, and it is this office that they perform in

the highest forms of poetry. To paraphrase Browning, it enables the

genius to express “thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow” word.

And so that whole side of life that cannot possibly be expressed in

the definite formulæ of science finds its body and incarnation in

literature.

 

Third, good prose will never be very far from easily perceived facts

and realities of life. The saving salt of humour will prevent wandering

very far; and this same humour will make reading easier, and will

induce that relaxation of labour-strained faculties which alone permits

the exercise and enjoyment of our higher powers. We shall never get

into heaven if we are forever working, and humour causes us to cease

work and lie free and open for the inspiration from above.

 

It would be hard to find either nobility, truth, or beauty as

distinguishing characteristics in the following letter of Charles

Lamb’s; but it is certain that it is admirable prose. If it does not

give us that which we seek, it most certainly puts us into the mood in

which we are most likely to find it in other and loftier writers:

 

“March 9, 1822.

 

“Dear Coleridge--It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig

turned out so well: they are interesting creatures at a certain age.

What a pity that such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank

bacon! You had all some of the crackling and brain sauce. Did you

remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just

before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Œdipean

avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of ripe pomegranate? Had you no

complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of

delicate desire. Did you flesh maiden teeth in it?

 

“Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen

could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in his

life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig after all

was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent,

the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest

truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending

away. Teal, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowls, ducks, geese--your tame

villatic things--Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or

pickled; your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes,

muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are

but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine

feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity,

there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs,

and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an

affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon

me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the

bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child--when my kind

old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole

plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a venerable

old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal

petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity, I gave away the

cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical

peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me; the sum it

was to her; the pleasure that she had a right to expect that I--not the

old impostor--should take in eating her cake--the ingratitude by which,

under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished

purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I

think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of

unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake

has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of

that unseasonable pauper.

 

“But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me

a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act

towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.

 

“Yours (short of pig) to command in everything,

 

                                                      C. L.”

 

When we have finished reading this, we wonder if we have not mistaken

our standards of life; if the senses are not as truly divine as our

dreams, and certainly far more within the reach of our realization.

We think, we feel happy, we are certainly no worse. Whatever strange

thing this humour may have done to us, we are more truly _men_ for

having experienced it.

 

And it is this that prose can do that poetry, even of the best, can

never accomplish.

 

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

 *** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

North Park Vaudeville and Candy Shoppe is looking for:
1. Short new plays (no more than 12 pages, less is fine) that are easily staged and have casts with no more than four people. Our theater is very small and we normally use a minimal set concept in this festival. We have to be able to change sets in just a few minutes as we do six to seven plays each evening of the festival. We don't have space for large casts.

***

New Works/New Voices (NWNV) is an initiative at the Syracuse University Department of Drama created to support the development of musicals by writers and composers whose perspectives have been historically underrepresented in the musical theater canon. NWNV is seeking completed musicals or musicals-in-progress from teams who are interested in developing their work with undergraduate BFA students.

***

Blank Page Theatre Co. is looking for playwrights and directors for our 4th Annual Summer New Works Festival. Every year, Blank Page Theatre Co. picks a theme that reflects the social climate of the year and focuses on pieces and works that support the theme.  This year's theme is: DEI


*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** ROTTEN REVIEWS & REJECTIONS ***

The book is available to borrow for free online at the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/pushcartscomplet00hend

***

UNCLE VANYA
Anton Chekov
performed in New York, 1949

If you were to ask me what UNCLE VANYA is about, I would say about as much as I can take.

Robert Garland, Journal American

***

A DOLL'S HOUSE
Henrik Ibsen

It was as though someone had dramatized the cooking of a Sunday dinner.

Clement Scott, Sporting and Dramatic News 1889

***

GHOSTS
Henrik Ibsen
Performed 1891, London

The play performed last night is 'simple' enough in plan and purpose, but simple only in the sense of an open drain; of a loathesome sore unbandaged; of a dirty act done publicly.

Daily Telegram


***

ROMEO AND JULIET
William Shakespeare
Performed in London, 1662

March 1st - To the Opera and there saw Romeo and Juliet, the first time it was ever acted, but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do...

Samuel Pepys, Diary

***

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
William Shakespeare
Performed in London, 1662

The most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.

Samuel Pepys, Diary

***

KING LEAR
William Shakespeare
1605

This drama is chargeable with considerable imperfections.

Joseph Warton, The Adventurer 1754

***

HAMLET
William Shakespeare
1601

It is a vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France, or Italy... one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage.

Voltaire, (1768), in The Works of M. de Voltaire 1901

***

OTHELLO
William Shakespeare
1604

Pure melodrama. There is not a touch of characteriziation that goes below the skin.

George Bernard Shaw, Saturday Review 1897

***

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
William Shakespeare
1606

To say that there is plenty of bogus characterization in it... is merely to say that it is by Shakespeare.

George Bernard Shaw, Saturday Review 1897

***

JULIUS CAESAR
William Shakespeare
Performed in London, 1898

There is a not a single sentence uttered by Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that is, I will not say worthy of him, but worthy of an average Tammany boss.

George Bernard Shaw, Saturday Review

***

ARMS AND THE MAN
George Bernard Shaw
Performed in London, 1894

Shaw may one day write a serious and even an artistic play, if he will only repress his irreverent whimsicality, try to clothe his character conceptions in flesh and blood, and realize the difference between knowingness and knowledge.

William Archer, World

***

MAJOR BARBARA
George Bernanrd Shaw
Performed in London, 1905

There are no human beings in MAJOR BARBARA: only animated points of view.

William Archer, World

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*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

 *** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

The Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, is seeking plays for its 29th Annual Black Box New Play Festival to be held in January (exact dates to be determined) 2026. Each play selected will be given a black box production with non-equity actors.

***

Paris Junior College Department of Drama's 11th Annual Pyro PlayFest is looking for bold, original short plays that explore the heart of creativity — the human spirit, invention, imagination, and the drive to express. Whether you tackle these ideas literally, abstractly, or metaphorically, we want to experience the spark that fuels your storytelling.

***

Nomad Theatre seeks 6-10 short plays to be a part of our upcoming show, Order in the Court in September 2025 in Normal, IL. Submissions will open on May 12th and close on June 16th, 2025. Selected plays must take place in a courtroom. We encourage you to use the space creatively. They must be unpublished and unproduced at the time of submission.

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** SCIENCE, FICTION & THEATER ***

On a bare stage, actor Hank Stratton, playing the role of Werner Heisenberg in Michael Frayn's acclaimed play Copenhagen, muses on the impossibility of self-knowledge. The fictional Heisenberg is agonizing over his role in the Nazi effort to build an atomic bomb and finds himself unsure of his own motivations.

For four years on the London stage, two years on Broadway, and in cities across Europe and America, Copenhagen has defied the conventional wisdom that science and art cannot co-exist. Despite or perhaps because of its heady mix of quantum physics and moral dilemmas, it has been popular with critics and audiences alike; it won the Tony Award for Best New Play in 2000 and was filmed for presentation this fall to U.S. public-television audiences. As New York Times critic Ben Brantley put it, "Who would have ever thought that three dead, long-winded people talking about atomic physics would be such electrifying companions?"

Yet the success of Copenhagen has not been an isolated phenomenon. In recent years, science has become a surprisingly popular subject for playwrights. According to our best count, more than 20 plays on a scientific theme have opened in a professional production over the last five years, although none has yet matched Copenhagen's popular success. At the very least, science is in vogue on stage as it has never been before. The best of these plays go far beyond using science as an ornament or a plot device. They seriously embrace scientific ideas and grapple with their implications. In an era when traditional dramatic subjects such as dysfunctional families have become tired, playwrights have found the lives and discoveries of real scientists to be full of dramatic possibilities and thought-provoking metaphors.

More...
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/science-as-theater

***

In the quarter century that followed, the Sloan Foundation has supported the development and dissemination of hundreds of plays on scientific and technological themes through commissions, rewrite grants, and production support.

Quick references to the program usually cite a pair of early, celebrated successes, both of which opened on Broadway in 2000: David Auburn’s Tony- and Pulitzer-winning Proof, whose Manhattan Theatre Club production was supported by Sloan; and Michael Frayn’s Tony-winning Copenhagen, which Sloan helped to introduce to U.S. audiences after its success in London by sponsoring a symposium about the piece’s creation, as well as giving PBS a $1 million grant to film the play.

What really sets the program apart is the sheer number of artists and audience members its grants have touched in some way. To date, the theatre program has funded more than 450 of the 3,000-plus proposals it has received for new plays, and has supported more than 100 productions, not just in New York (the heart of its operations) but at some 50 theatres around the world.

Many have been produced at the foundation’s closest partner theatres: Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST), Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and audio producer LA Theatre Works (LATW). (London’s National Theatre is another current partner; previous partners include Playwrights Horizons and the Magic Theatre, and seed grants administered through EST have recruited numerous other theatres across the U.S. to produce Sloan commissions.)

More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2024/03/20/the-unpredictable-experiment-25-years-of-sloan-science-plays/

***

Great plays about science do exist. I can think of no more eloquent evocation of the second law of thermodynamics than Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and in The Doctor's Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw used "an exact record of an actual discovery in serum therapeutics" to inspire a sprightly and affecting comedy. There are more, but not many more – Brecht's Galileo, Dürrenmatt's The Physicists. And several that are certainly very good: David Auburn's Proof, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, Rolin Jones's The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow. (And, yes, I realise how overwhelmingly male that catalogue is. Even more so than the sciences themselves.) So what makes for a successful play about science and why is it so difficult to achieve?

Taking the subway home after two and a half hours of Lovesong, I proposed this question and my friend said she thought that when confronted with what she called "the real", playwrights find themselves in thrall. They get so overwhelmed by actual laws of the universe that they forget those of dramatic construction. I'm not sure I agree. It seems to me that in most plays about science that I see – often those sponsored by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, an organisation with a nifty mission to encourage playwrights to tackle science, but with indifferent results – any actual science is little more than name-checked in favour of some soap opera about the struggles of its diviner. Such a method ignores the fact that though new discoveries are inherently interesting, the same cannot be said of the discoverers themselves.

More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/jul/26/science-plays-stoppard

***

The Internet Science Fiction Theatre Database (ISFTDB) of Cyborphic primarily consists of contemporary plays, i.e. published and/or produced in the 21st Century. Some key texts of sci-fi theatre from the 20th Century are included in a separate section. For a more complete list of 20th Century science fiction plays, see Ralph Willingham’s appendix in his 1993 book Science Fiction and the Theatre.

Our Database is primarily focused on science fiction theatre, yet also features related genres; in short, everything that falls under the umbrella terms Speculative Fiction and Fantastika (such as Horror, Contemporary Fantasy and the Weird) and works of Science Theatre as well are also of interest. Finally, a bibliography of related studies and articles is included in its own section. For the reader’s convenience these are mostly non-academic sources readily available online, but some academic studies are included as well.

Abbreviations: SF (Science Fiction), H (Horror), F (Fantasy), W (Weird. Works considered “Lovecraftian” will be in this category), AF (Afrofuturism) and ST (Science Theatre)

A Number by Caryl Churchill. Royal Court Theatre. UK. 2002. SF

The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones. South Coast Repertory. US. 2003. SF

Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley. Plymouth Theatre Royal. UK. 2005. SF (dystopian)

A Disappearing Number, co-written by the Théâtre de Complicité and Simon McBurney. Theatre Royal, Plymouth. UK. 2007. ST

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