*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
KING LEAR
by William Shakespeare
with Nahum Tate’s 1681 “happy ending”
The original source material for King Lear wasn’t a tragedy! Tate’s adaptation—which lets our well-meaning royal live and let live—was performed almost exclusively until the 1840s.
Performances
Tuesdays to Sundays at 7pm
Central Park
(West 100th Street & Central Park West)
Previews June 24 - June 30, 2021
Performances July 1 - July 11, 2021
Brooklyn Commons at MetroTech
(Brooklyn Common Park at Myrtle Avenue & Bridge Street)
July 13-18, 2021
Carl Schurz Park
(East 87th Street & East End Avenue)
July 20-25, 2021
The Battery
(Battery Place & Broadway)
July 27 - August 8, 2021
Tuesdays to Sundays except Thursday, July 29
Reservations
*** PRIMARY STAGES ***
NOW ENROLLING: July Happenings at Primary Stages ESPA!
July is just around the corner! We have classes starting as early as next week at Primary Stages ESPA that are still open for enrollment! Learn the Fundamentals of Playwriting with Dennis A. Allen II (Writer, National Black Theatre) starting June 28; get to know The Business of Theater with John Gould Rubin (Director, Turn Me Loose Off-Broadway) starting July 1; or complete a Fast First Draft with Lia Romeo (Writer, 4-time Kilroy's List writer) starting July 14. Classes begin mid-June.
Flexible, artist-friendly payment plans available. http://primarystages.org/espa/writing
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
In its 10th season, TEDxAsburyPark is broadening its commitment to ideas by seeking short original plays to be produced and directed for a Zoom audience.
Plays must have a running time of less than 25 minutes, involve a small cast and be suitable for Zoom or a simple production. As a lab, our directed and rehearsed productions will involve the playwright, and all sessions, including the final production, will be recorded.
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Stories 1.0 is the full-length musical comprised of works selected in the first several rounds. Several works in Stories 1.0 were workshopped in San Francisco, New York City, Miami, and Nashville over the years. Individual segments have been independently workshopped in Dallas, Chicago, London, and Boston. SEEKING: Complete original stage musicals which play between seven and twenty minutes. Works which have been previously produced are acceptable, as are excerpts from full-length shows, if they can stand up on their own.
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Three Rivers Theatre Company, a non-profit community theatre, based in East Tennessee, has launched a somewhat different kind of playwrighting contest. It is one in which they are looking for faith-based or family-friendly plays.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** PRIDE & THEATER ***
National Queer Theater is an innovative theater collective dedicated to celebrating the brilliance of generations of LGBTQ artists and providing a home for unheard storytellers and activists. By serving our elders, youth, and working professionals, NQT creates a more just future through radical and evocative theater experiences and free community classes.
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My husband Lenny was a big bruiser of a man, a rough-edged New Yorker with a thick, Alphabet City accent and a very traditionally masculine presentation.
In his prime, you'd have been quicker to take him for a Lower East Side gangster than a theater queen.
But how that man loved Judy, Liza, and Barbra!
I wish you could have seen his eyes sparkle as he barked out a lilting line.
I don't think he missed a single musical, on Broadway or off, after West Side Story.
He took an usher job as a kid just so he could see shows he couldn't afford.
Up until his last days, he spiced his conversation with snippets of lyrics and melodies from musical theater. He loved opera too, which is another common stereotype about gay men that contains a good bit of truth.
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ONE EVENING NOT long after “The Boys in the Band” had its Off Broadway premiere in April 1968, Laurence Luckinbill, who played Hank, brought his tool kit to work. Theater Four, as the joint was called, was a dowdy old converted church in a part of Manhattan that the play’s author, Mart Crowley, called a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” But Luckinbill wasn’t lugging tools to make repairs. Instead, he drilled a hole in a piece of the set called a tormentor flat, about waist-high, so that he and his eight castmates, standing backstage, could get a glimpse of whoever was sitting sixth row center: the best seats in the house. Over the coming weeks the actors took turns peeping at the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx and Rudolf Nureyev. Even New York City’s glamorous mayor, John Lindsay, showed up.
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It seems almost inconceivable today, with the abundance of openly gay playwrights and gay-themed plays, that less than 50 years ago a drama critic for The New York Times felt the need to call for “social and theatrical convention” to be “widened so that homosexual life may be as freely dramatized as heterosexual life, may be as frankly treated in our drama as in contemporary fiction.” The impetus for Stanley Kauffmann’s 1966 article was his contention that three unnamed “reputed” homosexual playwrights—clearly identifiable then and now as Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee—were presenting a “badly distorted picture of American women, marriage, and society.” Although Kauffmann’s premise is highly debatable, he does end up advocating that the gay playwright be free to write about himself and his world without having to “disguise his nature.”
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Lillian Hellman’s controversial 1934 play The Children’s Hour—about two female teachers at a private girls’ school and the lesbian rumor that destroys their reputations—concluded with one of the lead characters committing suicide. Though shocking, this ending was not surprising to audiences: it was common for the handful of lesbian characters in mainstream plays throughout most of the 20th century.
Accordingly, lesbian playwrights, actors and audiences found few positive portrayals of themselves on stage. It was not until the 1960s that a community of lesbian theater artists were able to write and produce work that explored feminism and gender roles, a scene that coincided with movements to further the civil rights of African-Americans, women and gays. Rather than wait for mainstream theater to catch up with the times, radical female playwrights and actors created what they wanted to see on stage.
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It’s no coincidence that I took comfort in musical theatre. While as an art form, musical theatre is generally considered the purview of gay men, with its camp excess and absurdity, I put it to you that musical theatre is deeply, deeply sapphic. It’s feelings upon feelings upon feelings, and the show simply cannot go on without a gruff butch stage manager calling the shots.
The thing is, despite this, a search through the back catalogue of musicals reveals a dearth of explicitly lesbian characters. We got a nod (and an absolute banger of a duet) in Rent and we’ll always have Calamity Jane singing about ‘a woman’s touch’, but for decades we had nothing truly driven by a queer woman’s perspective.
Enter Fun Home in 2015, an unlikely adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, a dark tale of growing up in a funeral home, coming out, grief and family secrets, with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori. Bechdel is arguably best known for the pop cultural phenomenon of The Bechdel Test but to queer women she is so much more. And to queer women who love musical theatre, she’s iconic.
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Transgender equality is one of the main civil rights struggles of our era, and it's certainly having a cultural moment. Make that many moments. Transgender has become a household word with the Emmy nomination of Laverne Cox of Orange Is the New Black, the recent opening of an exclusively trans modeling agency and Caitlyn Jenner's launch of a surprisingly informative reality show featuring trailblazers like Candis Cayne and Kate Bornstein. This is the case even in homes that didn't know the trans community existed until Chaz Bono competed on Dancing with the Stars.
In many ways, Broadway and Off-Off Broadway have been receptive to the fight for transgender visibility and equality, even more so mainstream TV and movies, which only recently jumped on the bandwagon. Since the '60s, openly transgender actresses like Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn have graced downtown stages. And in more recent decades, genderqueer artists such as Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac and Bianca Leigh have written and performed their work, often casting their peers.
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