Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***




To celebrate PAC’s 10th anniversary season and to celebrate the vitality of classical themes in new work, PAC invites playwrights to submit for consideration for our first ever New Venture Reading Series Play Festival. The theme for the plays is Transformation.

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In 2017, Audible launched a theater initiative, intended to radically increase access to exceptional plays and performances. A core pillar of the initiative is the Emerging Playwrights Fund, a program that invests in and nurtures self-identifying emerging playwrights, some of our most inventive, delightful, and provocative storytellers. Through the Fund, Audible aims to connect extraordinary performers with remarkable original work, amplifying new voices and harnessing the power and potential of audio to reach millions of listeners.

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Calling all Playwrights! Do you have a masterpiece of a full-length play completed? Would you love to see it brought to life on both stage and screen?
Any selected play will receive a $1000.00 award


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



*** ANTITHEATRICALITY ***

Winner of the 1982 Barnard Hewitt award for “outstanding research in theatre history,” Jonas Barish’s monumental The Antitheatrical Prejudice was ten years in the making. Covering 2500 years of theatre history, it is also the sort of book almost no scholar today would attempt to write—not least because the norms of academic publishing have shifted so significantly over the past thirty-odd years. Barish moves chronologically from Plato to twentieth-century theatre as he pursues the question of why the institution of theatre has been so vigorously and so widely opposed, especially at those moments when it flourished the most. For Barish,

"the fact that the prejudice turns out to be of such nearly universal dimension, that is has infiltrated the spirits not only of insignificant criticasters and village explainers but of giants like Plato, Saint Augustine, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, suggests that it is worth looking at more closely—that it is indeed, more than a prejudice….looked at more attentively, it comes to appear a kind of ontological malaise, a condition inseparable from our beings, which we can no more discard than we can shed our skins. (2)

More...
https://thehareonline.com/book-reviews/antitheatrical-prejudice

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Consideration of the antitheatrical prejudice must begin with Plato, who first articulated it, and to whom its later exponents regularly return in support of their proscriptions and prohibitions. Plato provides a philosophical framework for the debate over all art, and most of the key terms for a controversy that raged for two millennia after his death and still smolders today. In Plato, moreover, we find a characteristic conflict: a haunting acknowledgement of the potency of the theater leading to an all the more stinging repudiation of it. We cannot, and with Plato we need not, differentiate the art of the theater sharply from that of epic poetry, painting, sculpture or music.

More -  Google Books, the Anti-theatrical Prejudice by Jonas Barish

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Antitheatrical_Prejudice.html?id=J02N1Oc25csC

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The subject of Jonas Barish’s large book is what he calls “antitheatricality”—a state of mind that ranges from a cold dislike of the stage to a furious desire to burn every theater to the ground and dispatch all actors to the flaming underworld. “These pages… propose no polemical thesis,” Professor Barish writes, but the fact that not a single antitheatrical writer from Plato to Yvor Winters is allowed to express himself without being taken apart by Professor Barish gives a polemical flavor to every page of the book. The author half admits this when he says in his peculiar prose: “Sometimes I have temerariously engaged in debate with authors dangerous to disagree with.”

The usefulness of the professor’s book lies in his classification of objections to the theater. By way of these objections, he shows clearly the ways in which morality varies according to the culture from which it comes and makes this truism seem new by staging it, so to speak, instead of confining it to prose. When he speaks of the theater he almost always means the actors in it—they having drawn the fire, he believes, of all antitheatricalists from time immemorial—and thus has the advantage over other academic writers of a subject that is like an echo of his own words.

More...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/02/18/the-illegitimate-theater/

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The Theater's Many Enemies

Building on landmark studies of the early twentieth century,1 a host of scholars over the past few decades have sought to tease out the arguments against the theater in France, England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and beyond.2 With just a cursory glance at the scholarly landscape of early modern Euro- pean anti-theatrical discourse,3 several contextual hot points emerge. One example is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, where writers such as Stephen Gosson, William Prynne, and other puritans lambasted what they viewed as the evil effects of the stage.4 Another ripe atmosphere for criticism began in mid seventeenth-century France, where ecclesiastics wrote anti-theatrical sermons and treatises during the heyday of French classical theater, and most notably, against the comedies and tragedies of Pierre de Corneille, Jean Racine, Molière, and others.5
Other sources of anti-theatrical discourse include Jesuits in Spain and in Italy who were hesitant to adopt the pro-dramatic stance that is traditionally associated with members of the Society of Jesus.6 Calvinists and Lutherans were also vocal critics of theater and of artistic representation in German- and Dutch-speaking lands.7

More...
https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2275&context=fac_journ

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Grounded equally in discussions of theater history, literary genre, and theory, Martin Puchner's Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama explores the conflict between avant-garde theater and modernism. While the avant-garde celebrated all things theatrical, a dominant strain of modernism tended to define itself against the theater, valuing lyric poetry and the novel instead. Defenders of the theater dismiss modernism's aversion to the stage and its mimicking actors as one more form of the old "anti-theatrical" prejudice. But Puchner shows that modernism's ambivalence about the theater was shared even by playwrights and directors and thus was a productive force responsible for some of the greatest achievements in dramatic literature and theater. A reaction to the aggressive theatricality of Wagner and his followers, the modernist backlash against the theater led to the peculiar genre of the closet drama—a theatrical piece intended to be read rather than staged—whose long-overlooked significance Puchner traces from the theatrical texts of Mallarmé and Stein to the dramatic "Circe" chapter of Joyce's Ulysses.

More...
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/20638

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...one might measure Kafka’s texts through a triangle formed by modernism, theater, and writing. These three terms create an area of congruence: a modernist antitheatricalism, a field determined by a struggle with and against the theater that is the motor of much modernist writing. When Mallarm writes closet dramas that shun the stage as vulgar and celebrate writing as privileged medium; when Joyce in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses turns to the dramatic form without desire for a stage production; when James rewrites his plays as novels; when Stein creates texts that resemble plays but have no dramutis personae-all these are moments when the most central writers of modernism develop their style by using aspects of the theater to keep it at a distance, by turning the dramatic form against the theater. These writers are far from indifferent to the theater. On the contrary, they testify to the centrality of the theater for modernism, but as something that must be resisted. Likewise, I will argue, Kafka’s prose is not so much theatrical as it is antitheatrical, presenting dramatic and theatrical scenes and characters only to decompose and recompose them according to a specifically literary poetics. Kafka relates to the stage through a resistance to the theater, and it is against this resistance that directors have sought to turn his texts into theatrical performance.

More...
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~puchner/Kafka%27s%20antitheatrical%20gestures.pdf

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The biggest problem for me is that the theater of the age I live in has almost always tried to be “innovative” and “modern.” And that supposed innovation and modernity often consists in such infelicities as these: if it’s a classic work, you almost never see that work, but a version, adaptation, or recreation by some sly contemporary who thus pockets all the money, given that Sophocles, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Molière, Goldoni, and other such luminaries are all out of copyright. These adaptations generally involve the destruction of the classic work: some dispense with verse, if there is any; others dress Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Brutus in suit and tie, or as Nazi bigwigs, or have them run around naked throughout the entire play (although there is also a fashion for dressing everyone in a kind of hideous sack, so that they all look the same);

More...
https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/marias_w17.html

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Because crap automatically gets a standing ovation, but the good stuff doesn’t get one until the Times rave comes out. … Too many jukebox musicals end with a mixtape medley that has you thinking the whole show was amazing. … If it’s British, it must be better. Except when it’s unbearable. … The producers of Chicago are perfectly willing to water down the Fosse choreography to high school level if they can book a big enough name who happens to be spastic.

More...
https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/02/01/why-i-hate-theater-appalling/


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I HATE THEATRE
Abraham Lincoln T-shirt
https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/3037179-i-hate-theatre
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