Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***



OPEN-DOOR PLAYHOUSE is a brand new PODCAST being launched this Summer/Fall 2020 that seeks to provide live Radio theater to audiences due to the shutdown of Live Theaters across the country.
Our goal is to introduce emerging and unknown playwrights with an opportunity to have their works, produced in a ‘Radio Play” format to be broadcast on our Open-Door Playhouse Podcast. 
We invite interested playwrights to submit 1 Acts up to 45 minutes and short 10 min plays to be produced for radio production.

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The Strand Theater Company stands in solidarity with our beloved Baltimore community as we seek justice for Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and all people oppressed by systems of racism. In our efforts to learn more and do more to impact social change, we are proud to team up with Two Strikes Theatre Collective for a virtual bake-off playwrighting festival, focused on Black womxn. 
Inspired by Paula Vogel’s Bake-Offs, our Brown Sugar Bake-Off is an artistic response to the worldwide outcry against systemic racism. Though Black Lives Matter was founded by three Black women, the movement (much like liberation movements before it) has historically erased and undervalued Black women. 

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The Storefront Theatre is accepting submissions for our 8th annual 10-minute play festival. Like all theatres at this time, we are uncertain as to the future but we’re going to take a chance that by next March, we will be able to present the plays on stage as live concert readings. If that isn’t possible, then we will present online as a video recording or live-stream. 


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



*** CLOSET DRAMA ***

Closet drama, a drama suited primarily for reading rather than production. Examples of the genre include John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (three parts, 1903–08). Closet drama is not to be confused with readers’ theatre, in which actors read or recite without decor before an audience.

More...

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THE DYNASTS
Thomas Hardy

AN EPIC-DRAMA OF THE WAR WITH NAPOLEON, 
IN THREE PARTS, NINETEEN ACTS, AND
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SCENES 
The Time covered by the Action being about ten Years

Complete play

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SAMSON AGONISTES
John Milton

Complete play


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There used to be a fine, exclusive term for dramas like James Merrill's "The Immortal Husband," which opened at the Theatre de Lys last evening.

"Closet dramas," they were called. They were not for the theatre and not for the rude public. But they had an esoteric literary value that could be savored by friends in the library or the studio. After graduating from a Browning study group, one could aspire to "closet dramas" in the company of one's peers.

"The Immortal Husband" adapts to the modern age the ancient legend of Tithonius. Aurora bestowed on him the gift of eternal life, neglecting, however, to grant him eternal youth simultaneously.

Mr. Merrill's poetic drama begins with a promising act set in England in 1854. Aurora has fallen in love with the peevish son of a stuffy county family who hates his father, hates age and death and covets eternal life. By introducing Aurora as the accepted visitor of a mortal family in their drawing-room Mr. Merrill seems to have a sense of humor and some wryly amusing ideas about life. The writing is austere, studied, abstract but intelligent withal.

More...

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My dissertation, "Renovating the Closet : Nineteenth-Century Closet Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social Critique," contributes to a new understanding about nineteenth-century closet drama through three distinct and innovative texts: George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Michael Field's Stephania (1892), and Augusta Webster's A Woman Sold (1867). I contend that these three women writers employed the closet drama, a genre written in dramatic form but intended to be privately read or performed, to critique the social, cultural, and ideological limitations placed upon women of their time. In their symbolic use of the genre and innovative experiments with form, Eliot, Field, and Webster created a new stage on which their female protagonists challenge belief systems, institutions, and conventions that confine their gender roles, sexual identity, and social power.

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Closet dramas ares not intended to be performed onstage. They are plays that are read out loud by a reader. Closet dramas written in verse became very popular in Western Europe after 1800. Nonetheless, Faust Part One and Faust Part Two are often performed onstage.

Faust, the main character, is an aging scholar. Frustrated with the limits to his knowledge, power, and enjoyment of life, he agrees to a pact with Mephisto, the devil. Faust agrees to exchange his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures during his lifetime. On earth Faust will be master. In hell, Faust will be the devils’ servant for the rest of eternity.

More...

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FAUST PARTS I & II
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A complete translation, with line numbers, full stage directions
and illustrations by Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798 - 1863), courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.


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