Spooky Action Theater New Works in Action
Send us your most impossible short play. Do you have a brilliant
idea for a play but you think can never be put onstage? We are looking to
present digitally streamed readings of plays that still fit in the magic
realism genre but include a certain epic or unbelievable element. Therefore, we
are calling Round 13 “THE IMPOSSIBLE PLAY CYCLE.”
***
Brave New World Repertory Theatre is seeking new play
submissions for Brave New Works: Ditmas Park 2021 Reading Series. This season,
we are building upon our 2019 Brave New Works theme of “Race in America” and
are specifically seeking plays that address police brutality. We are especially
looking to feature work from Black playwrights.
***
New World Theatre seeks monologues for publication
This is an open call to black writers to submit monologues that
reflect their personal experience of living while black. The selected works
will be published in an anthology entitled, 08:46.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see
the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER LAWSUITS ***
Seventeen alumni served lawsuits, accusing Children’s Theatre of
abuse. Their cases reveal more than was publicly known about the company's
50-year history, as well as how many of its former tribe prefer to leave that
past untilled.
II. The Village Storyteller
In 1961, John Clark Donahue was 23 and an art teacher at Carl
Sandberg Middle School when he was convicted of molesting a 17-year-old boy.
Police suspected the teen was being traded in an underage pornography ring.
Donahue served three months in jail and went to work as a set designer for a
south Minneapolis children’s theater troupe called the Moppet Players.
More...
***
The biggest commercial theater presenters in San Francisco are
trying to block productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Dear
Evan Hansen” from opening at a competing venue.
Nederlander of San Francisco, which operates that city’s Orpheum
and Golden Gate theaters, this week asked a judge to prevent an
ally-turned-rival, the producer Carole Shorenstein Hays, from staging the shows
at the nearby Curran Theater, which she owns and has lavishly restored and
ambitiously programmed.
The shows at stake are two of the hottest in contemporary theater
— critically acclaimed, commercially lucrative and attractive to adolescents
and young adults who rarely attend theater.
More...
***
It was a standing room-only crowd as supporters of Stephen
Buescher, the plaintiff in a discrimination lawsuit against his former employer
American Conservatory Theater (ACT), gathered Wednesday evening to discuss
racism in the theater world.
In a complaint filed a day prior, Buescher alleges that ACT,
where he held faculty and creative roles for ten years until 2018, created a
racially hostile environment and systematically discriminated against black
artists, staff and students.
The event in the 92-seat theater at Pianofight in San Francisco
was billed “#LiftTheCurtain on Racial Inequity in the Arts.” For more than an
hour, Buescher, current staff and students at American Conservatory Theater and
other theater figures passed a microphone to share their frustrations with
being typecast, tokenized and silenced as black artists.
It began with poems from Jerrie Johnson, one of several ACT
graduate students present, followed by Buescher. Choking up, he called his experience
at the company a “long, silent, lonely road” before saying that, in the wake of
the lawsuit, he’s heard from many theater figures with similar accounts. Most
of the following speakers said they now felt emboldened.
More...
***
Indiana Repertory Theatre closed its doors in March as part of a
wave of shutdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus. "Murder on the
Orient Express" ended midrun. The widely anticipated "Paper Dreams of
Harry Chin" and "Sense and Sensibility" were canceled.
The loss of ticket sales, sponsors, concessions, theater rental
fees and other items added up to more than $1 million, managing director
Suzanne Sweeney said. So the theater filed a business interruption claim with
its insurer to recoup income loss due to the pandemic.
But The Cincinnati Casualty Co., the Ohio company that insures
the theater under a commercial property policy, denied the claim. Like other
businesses, performingarts organizations are finding that their definition of
direct physical "loss” and “damage” is different from what insurance
companies say.
More...
***
“This is one of the most extraordinary sites I’ve worked on.
After nearly five hundred years, the remains of the Red Lion playhouse, which
marked the dawn of Elizabethan theatre, may have finally been found,” said
Stephen White of Archaeology South-East, part of University College London’s
Institute of Archaeology, in a press statement. “The strength of the combined
evidence–archaeological remains of buildings, in the right location, of the
right period, seem to match up with characteristics of the playhouse recorded in
early documents. It is a privilege to be able to add to our understanding of
this exciting period of history.”
...The site unearthed by White and colleagues is modest in size
(just 40 feet by 31 feet) and closely mirrors descriptions of the venue, an open-roofed
wooden structure, mentioned in two late 16th-century lawsuits between Brayne
and the laborers hired to build the playhouse. The dimensions of the stage, in
fact, are an exact match.
In addition to the timber remains of the Red Lion, archaeologists
unearthed drinking vessels, coins, and fragments of what are believed to be
green-glazed glass boxes that were used to collect admission fares at Tudor-era
theaters.
More...
***
Lawsuits contend that three community theaters failed to stop a
technical director from sexually abusing aspiring teenage actors and a production
assistant.
The allegations prompted Little Theatre of Manchester, where
Daniel Checovetes was paid technical director, to cut ties with him on
Thursday.
Three young women, who were ages 14, 16 and 17 when the alleged
abuse occurred, accuse theater staff of failing to watch and supervise
Checovetes, giving him free reign to abuse minors working on shows and plays.
Checovetes is named as a defendant in the suits filed in Waterbury Superior
Court, along with Landmark Community Theatre, Inc. of Thomaston, Naugatuck Teen
Theater, LLC and Northwest Connecticut Association for the Arts and Warner
Theatre of Torrington.
More...
***
A Christian actress is suing her former agency and the theatre where
she had a starring role in the musical, The Colour Purple, before being let go
over Facebook comments expressing a biblical view of homosexuality.
On 14 March, Seyi Omooba was awarded the lead role of Celie in
Leicester Curve and Birmingham Hippodrome's co-production of the play, based on
Alice Walker's classic American novel.
A day after her casting was announced, she was tagged on Twitter
by Hamilton actor Aaron Lee Lambert with a screenshot of a Facebook post she
had written over four years ago on 18 September 2014 in which she said that she
did not believe people could be "born gay" and that Christians should
stand up for what they believe in.
More...
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