Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
After the pandemic pushed it back by a year, a free, three-night theater performance will be held this summer at Roosevelt Island's flagship park.
The play in question is "The Alcestiad," a 1955 work by the playwright Thornton Wilder. Organized by the Magis Theatre Company, it coincides with the run-up to the famed playwright's 125th birthday.
The three-act play will be held from June 18–20 at Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, backed by the Manhattan skyline and the ruins of the island's smallpox hospital. Tickets are free but must be reserved, and are available now on Eventbrite.
Performances will begin at 7 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Each show is 90 minutes, with no intermission. To get there from Manhattan, take the F train to the Roosevelt Island station, or the Tramway at East 59th Street.
Read more at alcestiad.com
*** PRIMARY STAGES ***
NOW ENROLLING: Summer 2021 Online Classes at Primary Stages ESPA!
Start a First Draft, keep working on Rewriting Your Draft, learn the techniques of writing 10-Minute Plays and One Acts, or try your hand at Dramaturgy or Television Writing. Faculty includes ABE KOOGLER (Obie Winner, Fulfillment Center), NIKKOLE SALTER (Writer, Pulitzer-nominated In the Continuum), LIA ROMEO (4-time Kilroys List writer), DANIEL TALBOTT (Writer, "The Conners"), and many other award-winning writers who provide practical skills and expert guidance in a collaborative atmosphere. Classes begin mid-June.
Flexible, artist-friendly payment plans available. http://primarystages.org/espa/writing.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Green Stories Radio Play Competition
We are looking for a radio play or series that in some way touches upon ideas around building a sustainable society. We will consider all genres – comedy, drama, science fiction, mystery, crime etc. – but stories must engage with the idea of environmentally sustainable practices and/or sustainable societies.
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PLAYWRIGHTS ON PARK is an exciting artistic endeavor for Playhouse on Park. Our mission is to develop and produce original plays, to foster emerging and established playwrights, and to become a leader in new play development. We aim to help establish the Greater Hartford Area as a premiere destination for the cultivation and exploration of innovative theatrical work. We are currently accepting submissions for the 2021-2022 season of the Playwrights on Park
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The 2022 Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative welcomes submissions for full-length, unproduced plays by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) playwrights in accordance with the mission statement of the Crossroads Project (see below). A diverse panel of judges including faculty, staff, students, and alumni will select one playwright as the winner.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THE MOUSETRAP ***
Three Blind Mice was first published in the US in the May 1948 edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, and subsequently in the book Three Blind Mice and Other Stories, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead & Co in 1950. It has never been published in the UK in any format. The other short stories in the collection were all printed later in the UK, so I’ll ignore the rest of them for the moment in this relatively short blog post! Christie had decided that Three Blind Mice should not be published in the UK until the West End run of The Mousetrap had ended.
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27 November 1952: The Ambassadors Theatre in the West End stages a new comedy thriller by Agatha Christie
As the snow piles up around the isolated guest-house in “The Mousetrap,” at the Ambassadors Theatre, the false clues drift across the stage, deluding the less alert in the audience and appearing to deceive characters in the play who ought to know better.
Agatha Christie’s comedy-thriller, like a more expensive production which Miss Tallulah Bankhead once commented on, has “less in it than meets the eye.”
Coincidence is stretched unreasonably to assemble in one place a group of characters each of whom may reasonably be suspected of murder in series. One killing happens in a black-out at the rise of the curtain, another at the end of the first act, and the third is unconvincingly forestalled in time for the end of the second (and last) act.
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19 years ago Agatha Christie stepped into a producer's office with a typed script, tied up in a pink hair ribbon, with circles of coffee cups on many pages. The play, “The Mouse trap,” opened on Nov, 25, 1952, to mediocre reviews.
“Well, darlings,” Mrs. Chris tie told the cast after the open ing, “we may get a few months out of it but it won't break any records.”
Tonight “The Mousetrap” enters its 19th inexorable year, the longest‐running play in British history with 7,479 per formances. The mystery, which fills the Ambassador Theater each night, may yet overtake the world record‐holder, “The Drunkard,” which ran for 26 years and 9,477 performances in Los Angeles.
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Christie's 'Mousetrap' Alive and Well at 36
The crime thriller that Agatha Christie gave her grandson for his ninth birthday is still keeping theater audiences on the edge of their seats 36 years later.
''The Mousetrap,'' the world's longest-running play, in two weeks time will have its 15,000th performance since it opened in London's West End in 1952.
Actors and actresses who have appeared in the play over the years turned out in force on Thursday to celebrate what has become a British theatrical institution.
Guests of honor at London's Savoy Hotel included 30 actresses who played Mollie Ralston, the leading role in the Christie whodunit. Sir Richard Attenborough, the play's first Detective Sergeant Trotter, was among the guests. So was his wife, Sheila Sim, who was the first Mollie Ralston.
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The Mousetrap at 60: why is this the world's longest-running play?
Quentin Tarantino came to see The Mousetrap two years ago. I wish I hadn't been told this, because when I recently caught the play, which this week clocks up its 60th year in London's West End, I couldn't help wondering what he might do with Agatha Christie's creaky old detective story. Blood, gore, black humour, circuitous chatter. It could be wonderful, although it would probably only run for a fortnight.
I had always been fascinated by The Mousetrap, which was at the Ambassadors theatre for 22 years after its premiere in 1952, before moving next door to the atmospheric St Martin's. I had registered the annually changing sign on its facade – "60th year" it trumpets today – and wondered about the clusters of Japanese tourists outside. But I had never seen it until last week, when, to mark the joint celebration of its 60th birthday and its 25,000th performance, I saw it not once but three times.
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A 1952 play by Agatha Christie adapted from her 1947 radio play, "Three Blind Mice". Since its opening night in London Soho, the play was running continuously (until the COVID-19 Pandemic forced the theatre to close in 2020). It holds the world record for longest running show (of any type) of the modern era.
The plot takes place in a guest house called Monkswell Manor, run by a Mr. and Mrs. Ralston. They've only just inherited the house, close to where Mrs. Ralston grew up, and they're excited about the arrival of their very first guests. On their first night running the guest house, however, the Ralstons and their four odd lodgers are snowed in during a blizzard. The radio announces that a serial killer is on the loose — one who uses the children's song "Three Blind Mice" as a Leitmotif. And the more and more time passes, the more and more reason there is to believe that the killer may be inside Monkswell Manor. When one of the guests indeed ends up murdered, suspicion starts falling on anyone and everyone in the manor. Suffice to say, there are a ton of twists which unfold slowly over the entire course of the tale.
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“I’m convinced it’s the posh woman who runs the hotel,” said Lockie Chapman, 40, a singer, before immediately changing his mind.
“Actually, it’s the major!” he said. “Or how about that shifty Italian dude?” he added.
“The shifty Italian dude?” replied Rah Petherbridge, 37. “But he could be a red herring!”
Such debates have rung out outside the “The Mousetrap” ever since it debuted in 1952, but those accompanying the show’s 28,200th performance on Monday were significant. They marked the reopening of the West End.
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