Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***
March 19, 2021
7:30 PM – 9:15 PM EST
Please join us for the virtual NYC Friday Night Footlights® series, celebrating new dramatic works in progress! This virtual reading will present A Few Thoughts About the Play by Jim Shankman.
The artistic director steps onto the stage to deliver his opening night speech, but something is amiss. It seems he has been drinking and his tongue is loosened. He has been asked by the theatre's board to produce AR Gurney's sweet Romantic comedy "Sylvia", but instead he seems to have chosen Edward Albee's scathing sexual tragedy, The Goat, Or Who is Sylvia. Or has he? Slowly but surely, the artistic director unravels emotionally and in the process he reveals himself to be a deep (and deeply unreliable) thinker on the subjects of sin, God, sexuality and theatre.
Rated: R for frank discussions of sex.
DG Footlights™ is a program, created and moderated by the Dramatists Guild, that connects dramatists with free space in which to hold a public reading of a new work that is currently in development. This initiative operates on a space-grant model: a representative from the Guild will arrange for a venue to donate space during allocated dates and times, and will ensure that the space is available for dramatists to use to present a self-produced reading to the public, with an optional feedback session following the reading. Attendance is always free and open to all.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award Competition fosters new playwrights and scripts through this important competition established by Molly Gassner, wife of theatre historian John Gassner. The Award was created in 1967 to honor the late John Gassner (1903-1967) for his lifetime dedication to all aspects of professional and academic theatre. The competition is open to all playwrights. Submissions must be new full-length plays.
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The subject of reproductive justice is one too often simplified by our current dialogues, and too often the voices and perspectives of the people most affected by restrictions, legislative prohibitions, and cultural prejudices are excluded from our artistic institutions.
A is For seeks to change that. We believe the theatre is an especially powerful platform with which to share stories, debunk myths, and disempower fears. We believe the theatre can transform. We want to amplify voices which can reframe the conversation, to support and promote artists who can dispel myths and misconceptions. We want to change the way people think about abortion and reproductive justice. We want to hear the stories you want to tell.
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Fantasy Theatre Factory in Miami, Florida, wants to celebrate all the facets of Fatherhood. We are holding a call for Florida playwrights and BIPOC playwrights nationally to submit monologues that reflect their personal experience with a father figure in their life. We encourage playwrights representing diverse ethnicities to apply.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** IRISH THEATER HISTORY ***
JUST AROUND THE corner from Dublin Castle, on Werburgh Street, Dublin 8, is a nondescript underground car park.
To the unknowing passerby, it looks like a regular city centre car park with grey concrete walls and barriers overhead – and that’s because it is. But once upon a time, 383 years ago to be exact, it was something quite special: the site of Ireland’s first public theatre.
Back in the 17th century, in 1633, the Earl of Strafford Thomas Wentworth arrived in Dublin as Lord Lieutenant and set about commissioning a theatre.
Some two years later, he appointed John Ogilby to build the theatre for a cost of £2,000 at the time. The exact date of the theatre’s opening is unknown, but it’s estimated to be before June 1636.
In A History of Irish Theatre, Chris Morash writes that Ogilby’s timing was “propitious” as London theatres had been closed because of the plague since May 1636 and this allowed him to hire “a strong company” of English actors.
There are no eyewitness descriptions of the theatre, but Morash quotes an account from 18th century theatre historian Thomas Wilkes, who said it “had a gallery and pit, but no boxes, except one on the stage for the then Lord Deputy, the Earl of Strafford.” Morash also describes it as a “versatile, intimate performing space.”
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Oliver Goldsmith not only excelled at fiction and poetry; he also wrote two plays. The first, The Good-Natured Man (1768), was not terribly successful, but demonstrated Goldsmith’s ability to undermine, or make subversive use of, the tropes associated with the “sentimental comedies” of his day. From an Irish point of view, it is also noteworthy for the fact that it includes the Irish character Flanigan the follower. (Incidentally, Flanigan’s friend, Twitch, was also played as Irish in the Gate Theatre’s Dublin production of 1974.) Goldsmith’s second play, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), is a brilliant comedy that has been continually produced across the world since it was written. The play’s plot is based around an incident that happened to Goldsmith himself while he was still living in Ireland (mistaking a country gentleman’s home for an inn).
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Playwright, actor and theatre manager Dionysius Lardner Boucicault is remembered as the originator of the so-called “sensation” scene, in which a hero or heroine is rescued from the brink of peril by some death-defying stunt. These spectacular scenes pushed the boundaries of the theatrical form in requiring ingenious sets, the use of wires, and many other processes which would eventually inform the swashbuckling films of Hollywood’s Golden Era.
The king of Victorian sensation theatre took inspiration for his plays from the many twists and turns in his own life. Born the illegitimate son of scientist Dionysius Lardner in Dublin in 1820, he blazed a somewhat chaotic trail across the theatre world in Ireland, the UK and America during a life that contained so many reversals of fortune as to render it dramatically implausible.
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Following its opening, the Abbey Theatre continued to stage provocative dramas. Many of these dramas, such as Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, delved into the harsh realities of Irish peasantry. Synge’s work elicited riots when it premiered in 1907 and had the same effect on American audiences when it opened in the US. Difficulties continued for the Abbey following this incident. Up until this point, Irish audiences were accustomed to simple dramas portraying Ireland and its people in a wholly positive light. Synge’s work, which drew heavily on the wit, quirkiness, and sometimes lewdness or moral reprehensibility of Irish peasants was completely new.
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Irish literary and dramatic movement, in general belief, rose, late in the nineteenth century, in some vague manner from the temperament of the Irish people. As a matter of fact, Ireland in Yeats's young manhood was as ungrateful a soil for art as any that could be found, in a particularly materialistic time. The native Celtic genius that Arnold had felt to be so open to the influence of "natural magic" had been, for over a century, drawn off into politics. The Anglo-Irish tradition, having produced in the eighteenth century Swift, Congreve, Edgeworth, Goldsmith, Berkeley, and Burke, flowered no more.
The Land Agitation (the struggle of the peasantry against their landlords) and the Young Ireland and Fenian Movements (the struggle of the Irish people against English rule) from the '40s on had absorbed the energies and the eloquence of talented young Irishmen. Irish writers, as Stephen Gwynn has said, having been taught by Swift that written English could be used as a weapon against their oppressors, never forgot their lesson. The Catholic Emancipation Bill, by the efforts of Daniel O'Connell, was passed in 1829. In 1842 the Young Ireland Movement was given a newspaper by Thomas Davis: the Nation, whose motto was "to create and foster public opinion in Ireland and make it racy of the soil." The Nation fostered, as well, a school of Irish poets. Their audience was eager for stirring and heartening words; the verse which spoke to it most clearly was the rhetorical and sentimental ballad, celebrating the Irish race and inciting it to action and solidarity. This verse, when it was not written in the sentimental and insipid vein made famous by Tom Moore, was filled, as has been pointed out, with the hortatory gusto of Lord Macaulay. Versifiers used its forms with skill, and one or two—Clarence Mangan and Sir Samuel Ferguson—touched them with real color and depth of feeling. But there is no doubt that Irish literature, in the years between 1848 and 1891, had fallen upon barren times.
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Frank McGuinness started out as a poet (he has a number of collections), and has long been involved in Ireland’s theatre world, since the success of his first play Factory Girls (its follow-up, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, cemented his place as a bright new voice in Irish theatre).
Lately, the theatre world in Ireland has been the focus of a lot of talk around change, equality and moving forward.
What does he think of these changes?
“Well, there have been massive changes since 1982, 1980 when I first got involved professionally in a Dublin theatre scene, and I mean it’s inevitable there’s going to be historical changes and that’s to be expected and to be welcomed actually,” he says.
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The history of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe is one of the great success stories of Irish theatre. Established in 1928, at a time when Saorstát Éireann (the Irish Free State) was struggling for legitimacy, An Taibhdhearc set out to achieve an unparallelled cultural project, a Galway-based national Irish language theatre.
Since 1990 the archive of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe has been held in the NUI Galway Library. The library has received additions to the collection since then, and the entire collection continues to be preserved and made accessible by the Library’s archival service. Details of the administration of An Taibhdhearc are to be found in minute books, correspondence, and financial records. Information about the individuals involved in running the theatre and their sometimes fraught relationships with each other, as well as the many practical difficulties facing the company, may also be found in these documents. In addition there is material relating to each production, including correspondence, theatre programmes, posters, photographs and newspaper cuttings. The latter offer the researcher a detailed record of the plays staged, as well as audience and press reaction to the different productions. There are, in total, over 1500 items of correspondence, 500 programmes, 300 photographs and 250 posters.
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