Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***
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 others' plays, and perform them as cold-readings for the audience. What could they have written in just 45 minutes? Find out at our upcoming performance of Write Away! It's a show. It's a jam. It's the best of both worlds!
FEATURING THE WRITING TALENT OF
Heather Adams
Kenn Adams
Jenny King
Kat Koppett
Laura Livingston
HOSTED BY
Mike Durkin and Laura Valpey
This is a free event but attendance is limited to just 80 people and advanced registration is required.
REGISTER HERE:
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Durango Arts 2021 10-Minute Play Contest
Only original plays, never before produced or published, are eligible.
Each play should require two to four characters, and minimal props and costumes.
The play, exclusive of title and cast description pages, must be no more than ten pages.
Authors may submit more than one play.
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The 15th Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, a prominent Quaker congregation in Manhattan, NYC, is seeking scripts based on people or events from Quaker history. We're planning a non-union production in 2022 in our beautiful meetinghouse, a landmark building, in Gramercy.
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That Uppity Theatre Company For Briefs anthology
Submissions sought for an LGBTQ+ anthology of writing by trans and non binary playwrights of 5-10 minute plays for possible publication in a volume edited by Joan Lipkin and Jon Fraser.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** GALENTINE'S DAY ***
Split into three parts that chronicle the course of a day, FEFU AND HER FRIENDS follows a group of 1930s women as they gather at their friend’s home to work on a charity event. As the hours pass, issues of romance, womanhood, and the betrayals that the women have carried through the years begin to emerge.
“I love that this play has eight women onstage–and they’re not talking about men,” says Traber, who has assembled an all-female cast of some of Houston’s most recognized actors.
The strong female cast is fitting given Fornés own history in the theater world. Often called America’s “greatest and least know dramatist,” the Cuban American playwright wrote and directed more than 40 plays and won nine Obie Awards, the annual awards given to Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway productions, before her death in 2018. Her work has also inspired such playwrighting heavyweights as Tony Kushner, Edward Albee, and Paula Vogel.
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The male presence in Elinor Cook’s OUT OF LOVE has no name. Peter Gertas portrays all the men in the story of Grace and Lorna, the two friends at the center of Cook’s play. Gertas slips into the personas with grace and helps the stories weave together as the audience observes a nonlinear drama spanning thirty years in the lives of the women.
And that’s all I have to say about men. This is a story about female friendship in its messy, painful glory. That is precisely what Cook’s play, in a succinct seventy-five minutes, gives us. It’s poignant and powerful, two things that are rarely true for portrayals of female friendship. This isn’t a fluff piece where the girls gossip and drink wine. Nor is it “Sex and the City.” It’s the combination of benign and malignant. The ugly and the beautiful.
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Swallow your cynicism, theatergoers. In the interest of disclosure I had to choke back a considerable amount of vitriol, having been decidedly underwhelmed when seeing the show early in its original Broadway run. As I watched swarms of tweens and teenage girls swooning over the musical and beating a path to the souvenir stands, I lamented the diminishing of the estrogen and other hormones apparently necessary to take WICKED deep into your heart.
Flash forward nine years later. I found myself captivated by Wicked and not only warmed to the themes of authentic female friendship and really being careful what you wish for and why, but I also fell like a two-dollar floozy for the over-the-top schmaltz that is composer Stephen Schwartz and the eye-popping special effects and production values.
Granted, what was once a plot-heavy and confusing second act has been cleaned up and streamlined for the touring version. This and some other tweaks—as well as a constellation-worthy performance by Christine Dwyer as Elphaba (the “evil” witch)—renders Wicked a highly enjoyable piece of musical theatre.
Based on Gregory Maguire’s novel, Wicked describes the coming of age of two unlikely friends. Thrown together at the same college of sorcery, Glinda (Jeanna De Waal, sweet and sparkling with just the right amount of entitled attitude) is the BWOC—big witch on campus—blonde, bouncy and gung-ho as a head cheerleader. All she needs is her prince and he arrives right on cue, the handsome layabout Fiyero (Billy Harrigan Tighe, who turns out, after a shaky start, to be eye candy with substance).
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I am currently in the middle of teaching my Shakespeare unit to my students. I suppose that’s why, when the theme of female friendship came up this month, I immediately thought of Rosalind and Celia from Shakespeare’s AS YOU LIKE IT. While this isn’t a play I’ve ever taught before, it is one of my favorites, and one of the reasons I love it so much is because of the beautiful depiction of friendship between these two women.
In this play, Rosalind is a young woman whose father is out of favor with his brother, the treacherous duke–and he is thus exiled–but Celia, the duke’s daughter, so loves her friend that she begs Rosalind be allowed to stay. The duke dotes on his daughter and cannot deny her this request…until he, for no real reason other than mad jealousy, rescinds his offer and tells Rosalind she must leave immediately, on pain of death. Celia tries to beg for her friend and cousin’s life again, but this time, is denied. Rather than stay at home and mourn for her lost companion, Celia chooses to run away with Rosalind, and the two girls escape to the forest where they meet a shepherd, a band of merry men, and their eventual love interests.
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Essential among Ms. Levy’s skills for FROZEN is the ability to consistently land “Let It Go,” which stands as the musical’s Act I closer. “Her vocal resources are so great that they seem to be effortless, and she has convincing emotional range as well,” said Matthew Warchus, who directed her in “Ghost.” “She’s got a very interesting, pure voice, which doesn’t strain when it belts.”
The two actresses live across the street from each other on the Upper West Side, but, like the sisters they portray, they are quite different. Ms. Levy is rigorously disciplined about sleep, exercise and diet (“there’s nothing worse than being onstage and feeling compromised because you ate pizza last night”) and mindful of how she presents herself to the world (“I feel really torn about social media — the nice Canadian girl in me finds it vulgar”). She spends much of her free time at the gym, leaning on Pilates to ease the muscle strain of her 15-pound costumes, and shooting hoops to relax.
Ms. Murin is freewheeling (“I really like cheese, so I’m not ever going to give that up”) and confessional, sharing on social media about her battle with depression and her unsuccessful first marriage, as well as her passion for books, rescue dogs and “The Bachelor.” (“I can’t imagine living a life where I feel like I have to hide something from people,” she said.)
They have forged a fast friendship, holding hands at curtain calls and texting and tweeting at each other through the day. They acknowledge that their obvious sisterly connection helps reinforce the show’s themes, but they also say it is genuine. “When you’re carrying a show with another person, you’re in it together for the long haul,’’ Ms. Levy said. “But I had no idea it would be so easy.”
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It's a play with a graceful title and an often difficult story to tell: One of splintered families and dashed dreams and the looming specter of violence, both on the field of war and within the home.
But in A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS set in Afghanistan in the 1990s, people also find reasons to rejoice — and prominent among those reasons is the comfort that comes from friendships forged between women.
The play, which is about to get its Southern California premiere at the Old Globe Theatre, is based on the book of the same name by Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-born American author of the acclaimed novel "The Kite Runner."
The piece, adapted by the Irish-Indian playwright Ursula Rani Sarma, centers on Mariam and Laila, the two wives of a harsh and sometimes physically abusive man named Rasheed.
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Once a week, when Paula Vogel was 15 and growing up in suburban Maryland, she would fake her mother’s signature on a sick note for school and hop a bus to the Library of Congress, where she requested books that formed a kind of autodidact’s course of study.
“And they would bring them to me: these 1930s, 1940s, 1950s really pulp-fiction lesbian novels, in which at the end, one of the young women marries a man and the other one commits suicide,” this Pulitzer-winning playwright, 64, said early one recent evening at the Vineyard Theater, where her new play, “Indecent,” opens May 17.
Created with the director Rebecca Taichman, INDECENT is inspired by Sholem Asch’s Yiddish play “The God of Vengeance” and events surrounding it. Swiftly shut down by the vice squad, its 1923 New York production contained the first kiss ever between two women on a Broadway stage. What stunned Ms. Vogel when she read it, though, as a 22-year-old graduate student at Cornell, came later in the play: a frankly erotic, achingly romantic, rain-splashed female love scene.
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