Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***
NYC Friday Night Footlights® series
will present an online reading of FUKT by Emma Goldman Sherman Please join us
for the virtual NYC Friday Night Footlights® series, celebrating new dramatic
works in progress! This virtual reading will present FUKT by Emma Goldman
Sherman.
DG Footlights™ is a program, created
and moderated by the Dramatists Guild, that connects dramatists with free space
in which to hold a public reading of a new work that is currently in
development. This initiative operates on a space-grant model: a representative
from the Guild will arrange for a venue to donate space during allocated dates
and times, and will ensure that the space is available for dramatists to use to
present a self-produced reading to the public, with an optional feedback
session following the reading. Attendance is always free and open to all.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS
***
The So.Queer Playwrights Festival is
a competitive, biennial festival of LGBTQ+ works which will lead to the selection
of one work by a playwright — a work that RTP will develop further in close
collaboration with the chosen playwright. The festival brings RTP to the
forefront in the region to inspire and develop new LGBTQ+ musical and
non-musical works.
***
With theatre activities affected by
the Covid-19 pandemic, Carlow Little Theatre Society (CLTS), will be running a
new one-act playwriting competition this Autumn to encourage the writing of new
play material.
Three finalist plays will be
selected from the entries, which will each receive a rehearsed, performed
reading by actors from CLTS. An overall winner will then be selected, with a
monetary prize of €300 for 1st place, €200 for 2nd place, and €100 for third
place.
***
Fort Worth Opera wanted to provide
librettists with a platform for dramaturgical development and assure the industry
and opera lovers everywhere that the storytellers within this incredible art
form would not be neglected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company continues
its commitment to supporting the creation of new works, and Frontiers: FWO
Libretto Workshop will provide librettists with an exclusive opportunity to
hone their craft. Not only will they experience passages of their libretto
performed by professional actors, but they will receive real-time feedback from
some of the top creative minds in opera. Librettists will also be able to
obtain a recording of the Zoom workshop to assist them further in their
compositional process.
This collaborative series is
presented free of charge to all participating librettists and auditors.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these
and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** THE PANSY CRAZE ***
This period, during the late 1920s
and the early 1930s, was a golden era in Los Angeles for gay performers,
entertainers in drag and the crowds of Angelenos – gay, straight, rich and poor
– that loved them. It was during Prohibition and all the clubs were underground;
but the culture was completely open and vibrant, filled with fluid sexuality
and music that was often coded. It was called the Pansy Craze and it swept up
not only Los Angeles, but many of the major cities nationwide.
Lillian Faderman, co-author of “Gay
LA: a History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics and Lipstick Lesbians,” said of
the era, “I think that sexuality was very fluid in Hollywood, particularly in
the movie industry in the 1920s and the 1930s. These upscale nightclubs that
featured female impersonators and male impersonators were a real draw for
bohemian Hollywood.”
More...
***
During the Pansy Craze, people in
the LGBTQ community performed on stages in cities around the world, but New
York’s Greenwich Village, Times Square and Harlem were at its centre, hosting
some of the most renowned drag acts of the 1920s.
It was the early 1930s, however,
when gay subculture became mainstream and rose to prominence on the stages of
Manhattan.
Why? Well, prohibition in the US had
a large part to play in things. How come? Because everyone was in search of a
delicious drink, of course.
Rather than doing what it was
supposed to do, prohibition actually played a part in getting the party
started. Because, unsurprisingly, alcohol brought people from all walks of life
together in speakeasies and underground culture.
“It’s not just that they were
visible, but that popular culture and newspapers at the time remarked on their
visibility – everyone knew that they were visible,” says Chad Heap, a professor
at George Washington University.
More...
***
When Mae West’s play The Drag was
first performed, in Connecticut in 1927, its author was starring as a
prostitute in the scandalous Broadway hit Sex. That show was soon deemed indecent,
earning her a 10-day jail sentence. She took a limo to prison and said she wore
silk underwear throughout her detention. The Drag proved no less controversial:
it lasted for 10 performances before it was banned.
Why the fuss? Partly because West
was a woman writing about sexuality and, in particular, gay male sexuality. The
Drag, subtitled A Homosexual Comedy in Three Acts and written under the
pseudonym Jane Mast, is about the cost of living with a secret life. Its hero
is a closeted gay socialite, Rolly Kingsbury, who comes “from one of the finest
families” and is trapped in a loveless marriage. Rolly’s father is a homophobic
judge, his father-in-law a therapist who specialises in gay conversion. West
herself had been a male impersonator early in her career, and the play
culminates in an elaborate drag ball, with largely improvised dialogue and a
jazz band on stage.
More...
***
Gladys Bentley left home at 16 and
ended up in New York, the capital of "The New Negro" and the Harlem
Renaissance. For Bentley, her sexuality and the large Homosexual population
in the 1920s made her need to strike out on her own all the more urgent.
In Harlem this great creative outpouring was also a celebration of
optimism about the future of Black America.
Audiences of the prohibition era
were often craving something new. There was a "fashion of the
Negro”, accompanied by a curiosity for "Pansy Acts" and "Hot
Mama" lesbian or bisexual singers. Bentley carved out a place for
herself around this curiosity. She would transform popular tunes of the
day with bawdy mischievous playful lyrics. Dressed in signature tux and top
hat, she openly and riotously flirted with women in the audience. Her
popularity and salary climbed, as she was frequently mentioned in many of the
entertainment columns of the day and characters based on her appeared in
novels.
More...
***
The Pansy Craze: A New Musical by
bright talent Avery Jean Brennan, welcomes us to the early 1930s, a time when
the appetite for drag performances and “nance” roles (foppish, effeminate men)
crested in vaudeville and burlesque shows, especially in underground clubs
serving illegal liquor, where much was permitted (especially, it seems, that
which was forbidden elsewhere).
More...
***
"Hip Zip Hooray" is a
comedy short made in 1933. It features female impersonator and Pansy
Craze artist Ray (Rae) Bourbon in a supporting role. Ray plays the
designer in the underwear shop and is in several slapstick sequences in the
second half.
***
Gene Malin - Pansy Craze - "I'd
Rather Be Spanish" 1932
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