*** FREE THEATER
ONLINE ***
Between Acts is an
immersive audio theater podcast experience. Each biweekly episode sets the
stage for your imagination to freely venture through the works of newfound
playwrights—from dramas to comedies and everything in-between.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/between-acts/id1533365134
*** PLAYWRIGHTS
HORIZONS MASTER CLASSES ***
Our 2020 Master Class
series offers sessions with some of the most dynamic artists working in the
American theater. Each upcoming class will take place on the following Monday
evenings at 7PM Eastern, and will be streamed live for attendees via
YouTube.
Admission is free —
participants will receive details via email in advance. Note that these
sessions usually run about 75 minutes in total.
October 26: Raja
Feather Kelly (choreographer of A Strange Loop and If Pretty Hurts…)
November 9: Jaclyn
Backhaus (playwright of Men On Boats and Wives)
November 16: Heather
Christian (author of Animal Wisdom and the musical Soundstage episode “Prime”)
https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/about/programs/perspectives
*** PRIMARY STAGES ***
LAST CHANCE THIS FALL:
Comedy Writing with Kate Moira Ryan at Primary Stages ESPA!
Learn how to craft a
laugh with KATE MOIRA RYAN (Writer with Judy Gold, 25 Questions for a Jewish
Mother) in Comedy Writing! This class is for any playwright in any stage of
your career interested in the comedic form. By the end of this class, you will
have a solid understanding of the principles of comedy and how to weave them
into any script.
Flexible, artist-friendly
payment plans available.
https://primarystages.org/espa/writing/comedy-writing-for-the-stage
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR
PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The goals of The
Miranda Family Foundation Voces Latinx National Playwriting Competition are to
discover, develop, promote and amplify Latinx plays and playwrights. Repertorio
Español is now in its 53rd season and 2nd decade of championing new works
through playwriting initiatives. To that end, this competition and our theatre
will prepare the way for an American Theatre that is reflective and
representative of the Pan Latinx Community. An endeavor that becomes
increasingly more important.
***
Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries
is a groundbreaking, industry-changing undertaking that is discovering,
developing, and producing a new canon of 38 plays that are inspired by and in
conversation with Shakespeare’s work. It’s an opportunity for playwrights
of every background, perspective, and style to engage with Shakespeare and his
stage practices. It’s our chance to bring living writers into the world’s only
re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre: the Blackfriars Playhouse.
***
The Anderson Center’s
Jerome Emerging Artist Residency Program offers month-long
residency-fellowships at Tower View to a cohort of early-career artists from
Minnesota or one of the five boroughs of New York City for concentrated,
uninterrupted creative time to advance their personal artistic goals and
projects.
*** FOR MORE
INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** FLOTUS ***
Forget “Six,” the
musical that was scheduled to open on the evening Broadway shut down in March.
A clutch of variously divorced, beheaded, dead — and now delayed — queens of
England is nothing compared to the long parade of American first ladies who
have graced the White House since before there was one.
Whether the
presidents’ wives (and mistresses and daughters) had it much easier than Henry
VIII’s consorts is a question raised — and raised and raised — by “45 Plays for
America’s First Ladies,” a relentless sketch comedy flipbook from the
Neo-Futurist Theater in Chicago. Speeding through the 50 women it counts as its
title characters in 100 snarky and ultimately unsettling minutes, it scratches
the phrase “graced the White House” to find the grim beneath it.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/theater/45-plays-for-americas-first-ladies-review.html
***
Jackie O is a musical
and dramatic happening that takes us back to the heady days of the 1960s and an
imagined gathering of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her peers in Andy Warhol's
New York Studio.
Reinterpret Jackie
through the eyes of Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Grace, Maria Callas and others.
Explore the essence of media celebrity and pop culture. Rediscover the decade
noted for extreme idealism, crash-and-burn transition and the rise of
post-modernism. All to a fabulous, pop-inspired score.
More...
***
Charles Nirdlinger's
comedy, "The First Lady in the Land," was made known at the Gaiety
Theatre last night with Elsie Ferguson as the star. Of course "the first
lady" meant Dolly Madison, who was to become mistress of the White House
and give her title to be transmitted to all other mistresses of the
Presidential home.
More...
***
In ''Eleanor,'' now at
the Helen Hayes Performing Arts Center here, Jean Stapleton is once again
playing the First Lady of the 1930's and 40's, one of her many television
roles, in Rhoda Lerman's stage adaptation of her own 1979 novel. The book was
dedicated to Ms. Stapleton, ''who has made Eleanor Roosevelt come alive.'' The
actress in turn credits Ms. Lerman's book as being ''truer to the great lady's
heart than any other account.'' It has ''informed all of my dramatic readings
of Mrs. Roosevelt,'' Ms. Stapleton writes in an endorsement for the new
paperback edition from Blue Heaven Publishing.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/01/nyregion/theater-review-a-one-woman-show-but-what-a-woman.html
***
“I do believe you
darkies are trying to kill me,” says Martha Washington to her house slaves in
this fantastical-historical play, just opened in a sensationally cheeky
production at the new Ally Theatre Company. Martha has reason to be concerned.
Philadelphia Playwright
James Ijames, a 2017 Whiting Award recipient, made up the script’s surreal
story: George Washington’s frail widow lies in her sick bed having a fever
dream populated by an antic assortment of black people. They appear to be
waiting on her but really they are waiting for her to die, because by the terms
of her husband’s will, they are then to be freed. So they pass the time messing
with her head, playing out a wild series of comic sketches, and thoroughly
entertaining the rest of us.
More...
***
Julie Harris, pale,
gaunt and gallant, received a stand ing ovation at the ANTA Theater last night.
She was starring, indeed largely sup porting, a new play by James Prideaux
called “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln.” The play is slightly old‐fashioned —some
will find it none the worse for that—its texture is decidedly episodic, even
patchy, yet it has spotlit mo ments of valid melodrama.
Mr. Prideadx takes a
rather different view of Mary Todd Lincoln than that so often taken by legend.
He apparently reels that her name was blackened in Herndon's first memoirs of
Lincoln and has remained blackened in the popular mind ever since. This could
very well be true, historians are certainly far kinder to Mrs. Lincoln than is
common myth that tends to dismiss her as a schizophrenic shrew.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/13/archives/stage-prideaux-last-of-mrs-lincoln.html
***
Hillary Clinton has
long loved theater — back in the day, she wore out a “Camelot” cast album and
got standing room tickets to the original production of “Hair.”
In the years since the
2016 presidential election, she has become Broadway’s best-known fan, showing
up regularly to see big musicals (she liked “Ain’t Too Proud” so much she
returned with her husband) and small plays (she raves about “What the
Constitution Means to Me”). Between 2016 and the 2020 theater shutdown, she saw
39 shows in New York.
The theater world, of
course, is now in crisis. Because of the pandemic, it remains unclear when
Broadway and other professional stages can reopen.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/theater/hillary-clinton-broadway.html