The Ringwald Theatre is sounding a call for new, original one-act plays to be performed at their annual Gay4Detroit Festival (previously the GPS Festival) in September 2020. The Detroit-area’s only LGBTQ+ short play festival is striving to provide early-career writers the opportunity to see their work produced, giving them what is oft-needed exposure.
The plays submitted should have a performance time of 30 minutes or less and deal directly with issues or characters that are identified as LGBTQ+, or contain a queer sensibility.
In addition, this year the scripts must exclusively be one- or two-person shows that deal specifically with the quarantine and/or the pandemic.
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The Courtship of Winds publishes poetry, fiction, short dramatic pieces...
We are interested in short verse plays and one-act plays.
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The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers supports projects that draw on the research collections at The New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (formerly the Humanities and Social Sciences Library). The Center looks for top-quality writing from academics as well as from creative writers and independent scholars. Visual artists whose projects require extensive use of Library collections are also encouraged to apply. The Center aims to promote dynamic conversation about the humanities, social sciences, and scholarship at the highest level—within the Center, in public forums throughout the Library, and in the Fellows' published work.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** ORIGINS OF WESTERN THEATER ***
What Is Theater? Crash Course Theater #1
Welcome to Crash Course Theater with Mike Rugnetta! In this, our inaugural week, we're going to ask the two classic questions about theater. 1.What is theater? And 2. Is it spelled -re or -er? Well, there's a clue to question two in the title of the video. The first question is a little trickier. We'll look at some of the historical definitions of theater, and investigate some of the ways people have thought about theater in different times and places in the world.
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DITHYRAMB
A dithyramb was a choral hymn sung by fifty men or boys, under the leadership of an exarchon, to honor Dionysus. The dithyramb became a feature of Greek tragedy and is considered by Aristotle to be the origin of Greek tragedy, passing first through a satyric phase.
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THESPIS
November 23 marks the traditional date when the first ever human being to take the stage and portray someone else other than himself took place. This person, according to various sources, most notably Aristotle, was a man named Thespis of Icaria. (which is also where we get the word “thespian”, meaning “actor”) In his first performance as an actor, Thespis supposedly took the stage wearing a mask and portraying the god Dionysus, which was considered by many to be blasphemous.
Before Thespis, performers would take the stage as story tellers and the performances were often choral. According to Aristotle, Thespis would take the stage actually portraying a single character and would wear different masks, depending on what character he was at that moment portraying.
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TETRALOGY
The Athenian term given to the group of four plays which the poets produced in rivalry with each other at the dramatic contests held at the feast of Dionysus. After the introduction of the satyric drama, this, or a drama of a comparatively cheerful character (such as the Alcestis of Euripides), formed the fourth piece of three tragedies or of a trilogy. By a tetralogy is more particularly meant such a group of four dramas as had belonged to the same cycle of myths, and had thus formed a connected whole. Of such a kind were the tetralogies of Aeschylus. It is doubtful, however, whether he found this type of connected tetralogy already in use, or was the first to introduce it. Sophocles abolished the connexion between the several pieces, and Euripides followed his example. A complete tetralogy is not extant, although a trilogy exists in the Oresteia of Aeschylus, consisting of the tragedies Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides; the satyric play appended to it was the Proteus.
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DRAMA CONTEST
In classical Athens, the competitions in tragedy, comedy and dithyramb (choral lyric compositions, nominally in honour of Dionysus), at festivals such as the City Dionysia, were judged by ten-man panels selected by lot from longer lists of nominees; except by a rare accident, the judges would not be professional dramatists or poets, and such expertise as they might possess would only be that of the educated and experienced spectator (like all Athenians holding positions of public responsibility, they would have to be at least thirty years old). One of Aristophanes’ comic choruses can happily divide the judges into the two classes of “intellectuals” and “those who enjoy a laugh” (of course they solicit the votes of both groups alike). The judges were under oath to give a fair and impartial decision, but comedy generally assumes that they were very susceptible to evidence of the preferences of those sitting beyond and behind them.
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Deus Ex-Machina” Reconstruction in the theatre of Phlius
In some ancient Greek drama plays, the stage machine used to bring the gods or the heroes of the tragedy on stage, known with the Latin term deus-ex-machina, was used for the solution of an apparently insoluble crisis. A twin-facing stone base was found in the theater of Phlius in Corinthia, Greece, behind the stage building. The existence of similar foundations in other ancient theaters indicates their use for specific purposes connected with the needs of the play. An attempt to reconstruct the mechanism is presented based on archeological evidence and literary descriptions. The reconstructed mechanism was designed for path generation and comprised a single beam with ropes controlling its planar motion and a sidle twin lifting system.
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Cosmic Connection: The Satyr Plays
(Some Images Considered NSFW)
The Greek tragedies we have portray a world dominated by murder, incest, dragons, and fire—plays that were so jarring they were said to have caused miscarriages in the aisles. With that in mind it’s easy to forget that the Greeks also knew how to have a good time; and what better way to lighten the mood after finding out you’ve been sleeping with your mother than by performing a Satyr play? Satyr Plays, sometimes referred to as the Phallic Plays, are short comedic pieces that were used as a kind of comic relief in between tragedies, especially at competitions, and can be traced back to 500bc.
A satyr is a half-man half-goat creature that was portrayed as being drunk, very sexual, and generally quite bawdy. The satyr character would sing and dance, drink and orgy, which brings up one of the more important parts of the Satyr Plays: the use of phallic props. Many of the pictures we have now of Satyr plays show satyr creatures with hilariously long phallic props that drag on the ground or that stood completely erect and were used to whack the other satyr players on stage.
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