WRITERS JAM
Our intrepid playwrights have 45 minutes to write a brand-new play, entirely based on audience suggestions. While they're hard at work, you're taking part in our fantastic Writer's Jam and having a blast meeting new people and exploring your creativity with a series of fun spontaneous writing exercises. Then, the playwrights come back, take roles in each other’s plays, and perform them on the spot. What could they have written in just 45 minutes? Find out at the next performance of Write Away! It's a show. It's a jam. It's the best of both worlds!
This is a free event but attendance is limited to just 80 people and advanced registration is required. Please use the buttons below to register Write Away!
Register For Monday, November 16th
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The Episcopal Actors’ Guild will present Black Voices, an evening of one-act readings featuring Black/African-American playwrights and casts.
When: Thursday, November 19, at 7:00 P.M. (EST)
Where: Online via Zoom
Tickets: $0-$25, available at ticketstripe.com/eag-black-voices
Event Contact: Rebecca Lovett - (212) 685-2927, rebecca@actorsguild.org
*** HUNTER COLLEGE MFA ***
The Hunter College MFA Playwriting Program is accepting applications through January 15th! The program is a highly selective, rigorous, and affordable two-year playwriting program located in the heart of NYC. We seek writers eager to develop their craft and challenge assumptions about what theater is and will become.
Students study with award-winning writers, working theatre professionals, and esteemed guest artists. The program offers workshop opportunities and fosters a collaborative, close-knit artistic community. Teaching Assistantships and tuition waivers are available.
Current and recent faculty include: Clare Barron, Oliver Butler, Lisa D'Amour, Maria Striar, Lloyd Suh, and Anne Washburn. Visiting artists for 2020 include: Mia Chung, Will Davis, Michael R. Jackson, Jen Silverman, and Whitney White.
For more information, visit: https://www.huntertheatre.net/mfa
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Theatre In My Pajamas is looking for multi-act plays for serial readings on Zoom that will be read over multiple weeks from January through March and maybe beyond.
A group that started out as a dozen theatre geeks has grown to a thriving community of nearly 600 members. Since March, we have had readings and open mics of new plays, unrehearsed, and the results have been powerful. Our readings have been ten-minute plays, and they have featured playwrights from Vermont to New Zealand. But we are now ready to grow. Get your pajamas on and send us your work.
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FAST & FURIOUS FESTIVAL 2021
Spokane Stage Left proudly continues its ONE PAGE play festival running virtually February 27, 2020. We are currently accepting plays for the festival from all over the world. Each play is presented in traditional reader's theater format. It is FREE to submit!
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This Moment Productions seeks to redefine the way we consume theatre in a changing world. We are seeking submissions that fit the Zoom or online streaming format only. We will produce four, ten minute one acts. Each will stream for two weekends in Spring 2021.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** OVERLOOKED NO MORE - THEATER ***
Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
When Margarita Xirgu met Federico García Lorca in the summer of 1926 at a bar in Madrid, he was a fledgling playwright and a questionable investment for most producers.
But Xirgu, a Catalan actress and director who was also a lesbian and a political radical, was known for her willingness to take risks. She accepted the challenge, and staged Lorca’s “Mariana Pineda” in Barcelona the next year, with costumes by the artist Salvador Dalí.
The play was a hit, and it cemented a friendship between Lorca and Xirgu, who became instrumental in staging and exporting his work in the early years of the 20th century. Lorca went on to become one of Spain’s most admired writers.
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Anne Crawford Flexner was a successful playwright. Her big hit was the theater and film adaptation of the Alice Hegan Rice novel “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” a tale of urban poverty. She wanted Eleanor to become a writer and supported her research with royalties from “Mrs. Wiggs,” along with additional money she left her when she died in 1955. Eleanor Flexner dedicated “Century of Struggle” to her mother, whose “life was touched at many points by the movement whose history I have tried to record.”
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She was a tiny 12-year-old girl with wide, darting eyes and a big headdress, undulating across the stage in the graceful, highly stylized dance of Bali.
Her arms floated and twined, as if they had no bones or joints, as she dipped and rose to the urgent syncopated gongs of a gamelan orchestra.
It was 1952 in New York and the young dancer’s name was Ni Gusti Ayu Raka Rasmi. She had never before left her home village, Peliatan, with its small, mud-walled houses surrounded by bright green rice fields.
Now she was the star of the Bali Dancers, a troupe that had traveled more than 10,000 miles into the alien worlds of the United States and Europe.
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For as long as there have been people with disabilities, the able-bodied world has made clear to them, in ways subtle and not-at-all subtle, that it prefers them to be unseen, except for the occasional feel-good photo op, and that it definitely prefers them to be unheard.
Cheryl Marie Wade was having none of that.
Beginning in the mid-1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wade turned her experiences as a woman with severe rheumatoid arthritis into performance poetry, one-woman shows and films that were funny, moving, startling and, above all, unsparing.
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“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”
“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”
So begins “Ballad of Birmingham,” a poem inspired by the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.
They were also the first words that the poet, a librarian named Dudley Randall, printed and copyrighted under the name Broadside Press in 1965.
He did it to retain his rights to the poem, which was adapted into a folk song by Jerry Moore.
Randall started the publishing house, which was based in Detroit, with his librarian’s paycheck, and it swiftly became a success, producing dozens of broadsides — a printing style in which just one side of the paper is used — as part of the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of African-American literature, theater, music and other arts.
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Sissieretta Jones forged an unconventional path to singing opera, becoming the first African-American woman to headline a concert on the main stage of Carnegie Hall, in 1893.
She sang at the White House, toured the nation and the world, and, in a performance at Madison Square Garden, was conducted by the composer Antonin Dvorak.
But there were color lines she never managed to break, like the one that kept the nation’s major opera companies segregated, denying her the chance to perform in fully staged operas.
“They tell me my color is against me,” she once lamented to a reporter from The Detroit Tribune.
When another interviewer suggested that she transform herself with makeup and wigs, she dismissed the idea.
“Try to hide my race and deny my own people?” she responded in the interview, which was published by The San Francisco Call in 1896. “Oh, I would never do that.” She added: “I am proud of belonging to them and would not hide what I am even for an evening.”
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The Angel of the Waters alighted in Central Park with more of a thud than a splash.
“All had expected something great, something of angelic power and beauty,” The New York Times wrote of the unveiling of the Bethesda fountain statue on June 1, 1873, “and when a feebly-pretty idealess thing of bronze was revealed the revulsion of feeling was painful.”
“The figure resembles a servant girl executing a polka,” the unnamed reviewer added.
It was an inauspicious debut for the first public art commission ever awarded to a woman in New York City.
But over the decades, as the Angel watched over picnics, parties and wedding proposals, and appeared in movies and television shows as a silent observer of musical numbers and grand romantic moments on the park’s Bethesda Terrace, she became all but synonymous with New York.
Her creator, Emma Stebbins, was the daughter of a wealthy New York banker whose family encouraged her pursuit of art. She enjoyed success from a young age: Her work was exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and she was nominated in 1842 to be an associate member of the group — the only category open to amateurs. Later, she moved to Rome to study sculpture and fell in love with an American actress, with whom she lived for years.
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