Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand–and melting like a snowflake…"— Francis Bacon
Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Playwrights
*** NYCPLAYWRIGHTS 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY ***
NYCPlaywrights web site is celebrating its 10-year anniversary on December 1.
For ten years we have posted at least one new playwright opportunity almost every day of the year. We've posted 5121 items so far. Plus ticket discounts, give-aways and of course this weekly email.
Have you found any opportunities during the first 10 years, through NYCPlaywrights, that led to a reading, publication, or full production?
If so, let us know - email us at info@nycplaywrights.org with the details and any photos you can share.
We will share your information on the NYCPlaywrights web site in the same manners as we shared our readers' accomplishments in the series last year, Share Your Theater Story 2019 or the year before with Share Your Theater Story.
Thanks for reading these past 10 years!
*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***
Women in Theatre Festival (Live and Online!)
In March we put out an open call for plays and scenes written to be performed on the Zoom platform. After receiving around 300 plays through this open submission databas, we had two teams of readers the plays in the open source ZOOM PLAYS database. The reading committee chose 3 plays and 1 musical to present as public readings.
Reserve your spot to watch the digital premiere of these new plays. Each is followed by a talkback with the playwright and director!
November 30th at 7:30pm
Missing Ingredient
Written by Colleen O’Doherty
December 2 at 7:30pm
Soup
Written by Rachael Carnes
Directed by Shelley Butler
December 4 at 7:30pm
Cliffhanger
Written by Catalina Florina Florescu
***
UNSEEN THEATER AUDIO PODCAST
PARADISE ENOW
by Albi Gorn
***
CROSSROADS
By Israela Margalit
Crossroads is a show about relationships , conflict and the messy feelings we have about our selves and each other in both drama and comedy
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
2020 has been a wild ride, to say the least. With theater not returning to “normal” any time soon, IGC is determined to continue to produce throughout this time - specifically, we want to produce works that reflect the time we are living through. And that is where you come in! We are on the hunt for one-person shows, as they are just about the safest option theater has at the moment. We are putting out a nationwide call for one-actor new works that feature a dramatic turn in plot - giving the audience the same kind of “where the hell did this come from?!” feeling we’ve all become so accustomed to this year.
***
University of Miami Online New Play Festival
The Theatre Arts Department normally produces 4 productions a semester in two on-campus theaters. However, due to the restrictions and health concerns of COVID 19, we hope to expand our students learning opportunities by working on pieces which have been written, conceived, or re-conceived for an online Zoom platform. In return, we hope that writers will see the constraints of the format as a way to tell their stories in a different and unique manner while benefiting from working with the department’s very talented and disciplined students.
***
Teatro LATEA is looking for one acts stage scripts by Afro-Latinx playwrights to produce a stage reading during the second week of January 2021 in honor of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
******* ITEMS FROM 10 YEARS OF THE NYCPLAYWRIGHTS WEEKLY SATURDAY EMAIL *******
*** 2010: B OR NOT B? ***
Patrick Stewart performs this soon-to-be-classic monologue:
*** 2011: SASSY GAY FRIEND: HAMLET ***
*** 2012: THEATER BUZZWORD BINGO: BOUNDARIES ***
*** PUSH BOUNDARIES ***
Theatre has always been an evolving and dynamic form of self
expression. It is meant to PUSH BOUNDARIES and raise questions.
*** BUSTS BOUNDARIES ***
PuSh Festival: Multimedia work Amarillo potently BUSTS BOUNDARIES of
traditional theatre
*** DESTROY BOUNDARIES ***
The Icarus Theatre Collective explores the harsh, brutal side of
classical and modern drama. We also value post-modernism and the great
surrealists, blending classic stories into a new Theatre of the
Absurd, which maintains a cohesive, evocative story. Tales of
mutilation, rape, and incest are not anathema to us, rather we choose
to relish what others shy away from, show what others daren’t, DESTROY
BOUNDARIES when others would create rules.
*** SURELY, TRADITIONAL THEATRICAL BOUNDARIES HAVE BEEN BROKEN? ***
Perhaps a little too slow-moving and slightly drawn-out at times, it
is nonetheless effective in tugging at the heart-strings. Touching and
sentimental, time is not the only boundary crossed here; SURELY,
TRADITIONAL THEATRICAL BOUNDARIES HAVE BEEN BROKEN?
*** 2013: THE NEW YORK TIMES ASKS YOU: WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WORK IN THEATER? ***
Whether you’re a playwright, a community theater manager, an actress, her agent, her understudy, a sound technician, a set painter or a Broadway usher, we want to hear about the theatrical works or experiences that led you to dedicate yourself to the field.
Please submit a comment below (see link below) describing what you do and how an experience in theater led you to your career. Keep submissions under 250 words.
We will present some of your stories alongside Mr. Isherwood’s essay. We look forward to reading about your theatrical inspirations.
*** 2014: THEATER BLOGGERS ***
JK’s TheatreScene
***
The New England Theatre Geek
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Broadway & Me
*** 2015: STAGE NUDITY ***
Nude is Good for Broadway Box Office
That Radcliffe did the play in London last year and opened last week on Broadway in a transfer of that production would be news enough insofar as the star of one of the most successful franchises in film history is performing live on stage, in the flesh. But here, the phrase "in the flesh" is especially appropriate: Equus famously includes a full-frontal nude scene for Radcliffe in the role of the psychosexually tormented youth Alan Strang, who develops an erotic fixation with horses and then blinds a stable-full of them with a metal spike when his attempt to lose his virginity with a local girl fails miserably.
It's scarcely an exaggeration to say that Radcliffe's nude scene has caused as much excitement as would be engendered if Ethel Merman could be brought back to life and signed to star in new Broadway musical. (Of course, that's not the same situation, since presumably few would want to see her naked.)
More…
***
Kidman and 'Blue Room' Generate a Red-Hot Buzz
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani may have shuttered most of the porn joints around Times Square, but the hottest sex show in quite some time lands on Broadway on Nov. 27.
"The Blue Room" comes with a much better pedigree, of course. David Hare has adapted this sophisticated sex comedy from Arthur Schnitzler's turn-of-the-century Viennese classic of lust and longing, "La Ronde." The brilliant young Sam Mendes has directed it.
But, most important, Nicole Kidman in her American stage debut teams up with veteran British actor Iain Glen for this sexual merry-go-round in which they play a quintet of couples coupling across economic and social barriers.
More…
***
Sex and the theater: An actress bares all about onstage nudity
I’ve been a stage actor for 10 years, but this summer was the first time I’ve ever really considered taking a role with two explicit sex scenes and nudity. Despite my apprehensions — how my body would look, how the role would change the way people perceive me, in theater and in real life — my biggest concern was the potential for lameness. Sex delivered badly onstage is just as depressing as sex done badly in real life, exponentiated by the presence of an audience.
I really wanted the part, the lead in a sexy comedic romance between two brainy people more comfortable quipping than feeling, just like everyone I know. The premise was that a woman at her sixth college reunion starts up a relationship with a virginal 18-year-old freshman, and awkwardness ensues. It was called “The Campsite Rule,” after columnist Dan Savage’s advice for older or more experienced persons in sexual relationships with mentees: Leave them better than you found them.
More…
*** 2016: ADVICE FOR WRITERS ***
THE MEANING OF SHOW, DON’T TELL
Like most easily-digestible protein-nuggets of writing advice, Show-Don’t-Tell is one that ends up confusing. After all, what we do is called storytelling, and then in the next breath we’re chided for telling and not showing. And yet, the advice remains true just the same. Exposition is often the biggest customer in terms of telling-above-showing, and it reeks of amateur hour karaoke. Here’s an example: consider the difference of you telling me “John is an assassin,” and you showing me the act of John stalking and killing a dude on the job. The former is dull: a narrative name-tag, a Facebook profile. The latter is engaging: action and example. This is the key to exposition always, always, always: stop telling, start showing.
More…
***
Making Something Happen in Story
When writers speak of the inciting incident, they’re talking about one of two moments in a story. There are not two inciting incidents per story, not really, but there are two places in story that can be referred to as the inciting incident.
And no matter which moment you refer to as the inciting incident, your novel requires both of these events.
The first event that can be referred to as the inciting incident is the event that gets your story started. It’s the event that occurs within the first couple of pages that alerts the reader that this is it, the story has begun. It is not description or setting detail, it is event. So until something happens in the early pages of your book, you haven’t provided this element.
More…
***
MR. MURRAY'S LITERATURE PAGE: DENOUEMENT
The Denouement is the French term meaning "unraveling"
or "unknotting," used to describe the resolution of the plot
following the climax. It is also known as the “Falling Action.”
Example. In To Kill A Mockingbird, the climax is the attack on Scout. The denouement
features the Sheriff and Atticus trying to cover up for Boo Radley's stabbing of
Bob Ewell. Jem comes to terms with the injustice of trial, Scout succumbs to sleep,
and Atticus wraps it all up by repeating the famous line,
“You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes.”
More…
*** 2017: HELLO DOLLY ***
Alice Faye 1964
Hello Dolly! Pearl Bailey 1968 Tony Awards
Barbra Streisand & Louis Armstrong 1969 movie
Carol Channing 1979
Sally Struthers
Bette Midler curtain call
*** 2018: MCSWEENEY’S THEATER ***
OUR FLEDGLING THEATRE COMPANY’S ONLY GOAL IS TO CONSTANTLY BETRAY OUR AUDIENCE’S TRUST
The Dien Bien Phu Experimental Theatre Company was founded with one goal: to push the boundaries of what Theatre could be. We wanted people to see our shows and think to themselves, “Huh, I had no idea that theatre could do that,” and “why did I let my coworker talk me into coming to this?” That’s why our company’s mission is to make our audience feel as unsafe as possible; and thus we use every moment of Theatre as an opportunity to betray our audience’s trust.
More…
***
AUDIENCE INSTRUCTIONS FOR OUR IMMERSIVE/EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE PRODUCTION IN AN ABANDONED MIDDLE SCHOOL IN BUSHWICK
If you are receiving this missive, you have purchased a ticket for The Ducks Have Flown, an immersive/experimental theatre experience inspired and maddeningly loosely based on both the novel The Catcher in the Rye and the 1944 film Gaslight. Congratulations on your good taste, your sense of adventure, and your stout and noble heart. Please note the following in preparing for your upcoming visit to our tiny and wondrous universe:
1. It goes without saying that you must both read the book and watch the film, despite the fact that the performance will bear little resemblance to either. Many of our scenelets (“scenes” without formal, prohibitive structure or beholdenness to theatrical or social conventions) contain “Easter eggs” that can only be discovered and recognized by an astute observer well-steeped in the imagery, motifs, tropes and symbols of our “inspiration-texts.”
More…
***
YOUR PLAY HAS BEEN ACCEPTED INTO THE THEATER AND CHEESE FESTIVAL OF YAKIMA, WA!
That’s right, playwright! CONGRATS TO YOU! Your production has been ACCEPTED into the 58th biannual Theater and Cheese Festival of Yakima, WA, presented by the Eastern Washington Theater Company, TheaterWOW!
So what happens now?
FIRST: Celebrate! After thousands of submissions, our esteemed, well-decorated and highly ambulatory judges have selected you. This is no small feat, playwright! Alumni of TCFYWA include Steven Lawrence (“Beans” from Even Stevens) Ben Ramsey (screenwriter of Dragonball: Evolution), Monty (Tom Hanks’s dog) and Joey Fatone. Toast to yourself knowing that you are in excellent company!
SECOND: Send in your deposit of NINE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS. This deposit will go towards staffing the festival with volunteers, renting donated venues, and purchasing unfiltered tap water for festival patrons.
More…
***
BREITBARD: THE CANONICAL PLAYS
Richard II Amendment
Love’s Labour’s Not Covered By Your Insurance
The Merchant of The Federalist
All’s Well That Ends Immigration
More…
***
CROWDFUNDING PAGES OF FAMOUS MUSICAL THEATER CHARACTERS
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria’s Alcoholism?
Medical
$25,260 of $48,000
Raised by 320 people in 2 days
After years of caring for the seven von Trapp children, Maria turned to liquor. Vodka now tops her list of favorite things. We’re trying to send her to Promises, the same rehab Britney Spears attended. Please help us put the sound of music back into Maria’s hills.
The “I Feel Pretty” Scholarship Fund
Community
$35,795 of $36k
Raised by 707 people in 7 days
After Tony’s tragic death, Maria started an after school program on West Side Story Blvd to help young women learn to sing + dance. The nonprofit seeks to show them ways to feel pretty outside of the male gaze. We’re looking to expand enrollment by offering more scholarships to both the Sharks and the Jets alike.
More…
*** 2019: TERRENCE MCNALLY ***
In “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune”—first staged in 1987 and revived on Broadway, at the Broadhurst—the playwright Terrence McNally spins this scenario into a kind of underclass romantic comedy; now, though, in 2019, it feels like the first coil of a horror story, or the premise of a miniseries based on a true crime. The thirty-two years between the original production and this new one is, in many ways, not so long a time, but, in the past several years, we have undergone a radical revision in our understanding of male persistence—the sort that keeps Johnny (Michael Shannon) firmly planted, mostly naked, and making his case at the bedside of Frankie (Audra McDonald). The odd tenderness and the funny pathos of “Frankie and Johnny” were, for me, sometimes hard to hear over the din of possible disaster.
More...
***
At first glance, the early life and career of Terrence McNally seems suspiciously charmed: Just a year after graduating from Columbia University in 1960,1 he was hired by John Steinbeck and his wife as a tutor for their two teenage sons on a yearlong family trip around the world.2 By then, McNally was already in a relationship with his first lover, the playwright Edward Albee, who was a decade older.3 Even a warning about McNally’s heavy drinking, in 1980, was starry: The actress Angela Lansbury admonished him that he would never reach his potential as a writer if he continued drinking — at a birthday party for Stephen Sondheim, no less.
More...
***
Few people remember this, but Terrence McNally’s first Broadway play, “And Things That Go Bump in the Night,” ran for only 16 performances in 1964.
“The best thing that ever happened to me was that my first play was not a success,” McNally said during a long interview in the expansive lobby of the Driskill Hotel. “But I got back on the horse. If you get out, you don’t belong at the table. I do belong. I spent 60 years or so proving that I belong at the table.”
Indeed, he has.
The Texas-reared playwright, who received a lifetime achievement honor during the June 9 Tony Award ceremony in New York, and whose “Immortal Longings” is scheduled for its world premiere at Zach Theatre on June 20, has penned more than 50 plays, musicals, operas, movies and television dramas.
More...
***
2019 Tony Awards: Lifetime Achievement - Terrence McNally
***
Terrence McNally and Fifty Years of American Gay Drama
by John Clum
Chapter 1
And Things That Go Bump In The Night,
Edward Albee, And
the New Gay Theater
“Probably the most overtly homosexual play yet seen on Broadway.”
Terrence McNally’s first original play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, which opened on Broadway on April 26,1965, received a particularly nasty set of reviews and closed sixteen performances later. The producers kept the play open to large houses for its short run by reducing the ticket price to $1 and $2. One reviewer’s comment became so etched in McNally’s mind that he quotes it in It’s Only a Play: “The American theatre would be a better place this morning if Terrence McNally’s parents had smothered him in his cradle.”1 McNally claims to have forgotten who penned this attack. What most angered many of the critics was the overt, for its time, homosexuality of the play. McNally recalls that “And Things That Go Bump in the Night was considered really shocking because there were two gay men in it. In a way, I feel I’ve even been punished for it. That certainly wasn’t a masterpiece, but people were really shocked by the relationship between the two men.” Wilfrid Sheed called it “probably the most overtly homosexual play yet seen on Broadway.” The notoriously homophobic John Simon echoed the language of Leviticus when he wrote, “Well, now we have an honest-to-goodness homosexual play, and is it ever an abomination!”
More in the free preview...
*** 2020: MASKS ***
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the globe, so does the concept of boogie-fever face masks.
At Wednesday night’s opening party for the Brooklyn Museum’s “Studio 54: Night Magic” exhibit, a number of partygoers sported flashy COVID-19-themed face coverings. Attendees Allison Eden and Gary Goldenstein, who wore matching disco-ball masks to the gala, told paparazzi their coordinated glitterati garb was inspired by the potentially deadly virus.
“It took me a day and a half to make each one,” Eden, 50, tells The Post of her and her husband’s masks. “I feel if you have to wear a face mask now, why not make it fabulous? Why not make disco balls?”
More...
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Since the dawn of theater, many cultures from around the world elected to represent actors as other persons or beings, enabling performances that were much more striking and effective. Theater traditions in both West and the Asia adopted masks as one of the most important tools that could be used on stage, often creating plays that were fully acted by masked actors. Most notable example of this approach was born in ancient Greece, specifically the state-city of Athens where culture, poetry, and art were valued as an important foundation of daily lives. Stage drama received special care, enabling quick popularization of three main types of plays– tragedy, comedy, and satyr play (comedic satire).
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The sock and buskin are two ancient symbols of comedy and tragedy. In Greek theatre, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a buskin (Latin cothurnus). The actors with comedic roles only wore a thin soled shoe called a sock (Latin soccus).
Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, is often depicted holding the tragic mask and wearing buskins. Thalia, the muse of comedy, is similarly associated with the mask of comedy and comic’s socks. Some people refer to the masks themselves as "Sock and Buskin."
***
Local theater members have shifted their focus from creating costumes to making face masks in an effort to combat COVID-19.
The grassroots work to create homemade masks is occurring across the country, and the Chippewa Valley citizens recently began helping by creating masks that follow guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the Eau Claire Children’s Theatre, four employees are coordinating their efforts to create face masks after encouragement from a health care worker who also helps out at the ECCT.
Ann Behrens, ECCT costume shop manager, called it an easy decision to help with a lifesaving measure.
More...
***
Their almond-shaped eyes stare blankly into space. The ambivalent corners of their mouths leave their moods utterly indiscernible.
These wooden masks, used in an ancient form of Japanese theater called Noh, were made to be expressionless. But performers are charged with using slight and subtle movements to reveal the hidden emotions carved into each one.
Dating back almost 1,000 years, Noh is a style of musical drama with plots ranging from Japanese legends to modern-day events. Its masks, carved from blocks of cypress, are a key part of the tradition, representing figures like demons and monks. Actors are able to portray their characters' feelings by changing the angle and orientation of their heads.
More...
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With theatre marquees dark and wardrobe production at a halt, production staffers across the country are joining the national effort of home sewers to #SewtheCurveFlat. One growing concern around the spread of the coronavirus is the scarcity of masks to protect medical professionals from infected patients; medical masks are direly needed at clinics and hospitals because of the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control has released criteria for how to make effective handmade masks, and so theatre companies across the country are working with their local government officials and hospitals to devise mask patterns and plans to meet their community’s needs.
More...
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