Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***




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.”


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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. 


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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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“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.

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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.

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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. 

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