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.
***
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.
***
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...
***
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
***
SAMSON AGONISTES
John Milton
Complete play
***
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...
***
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.
More...
***
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...
***
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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