Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
CRITICAL CARE, or REHEARSALS FOR A NURSE
July 31 – September 12
Free! In The Streets!
Saturday and Sundays @ 2 PM; Friday Performance in Coney Island @ 6:30 PM (full schedule below)
Writer and Director, Crystal Field
Composer, Joseph Vernon Banks
CRITICAL CARE, or REHEARSALS FOR A NURSE is about a young lady named Rose, who is studying to be a Nurse. She takes a job in a Nursing home so that she will be able to pay her tuition, books, and living expenses. But COVID-19 rears its Ugly Head, and Rose has a big fight on her hands, to help to save her city and her own future as a pediatric nurse. In this beautiful Street Theater Story, the old and the new, the old and the young, all come together, to assure us that this Pandemic will end, and together, we shall survive. Like the phoenix, we will rise from the ashes. As the juggler/clown, working in the local Hospital Clown Care Unit predicts: “When we wear our masks and wash our hands – grab that vaccine and deeply care for each other, we are unstoppable.”
SCHEDULE
Saturday, July 31@ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Outside Theater for the New City at E. 10th Street & 1st Ave.
Sunday, Aug 1 @ 2:00 PM: BRONX -- Pontiac Playground at St. Mary's Park, 350 St. Ann's Ave.
Saturday. Aug 7 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Wise Towers, 117 West 90th Street
Sunday, Aug 8 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Central Park Bandshell, 72nd Street Crosswalk
Friday, Aug13 @ 6:30 PM: BROOKLYN -- Coney Island Boardwalk @ W. 10th Street
Sat, Aug 14 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Abe Lebwohl Park @St. Marks Church, E. 10th St. & 2nd Ave.
Sunday, Aug 15 @2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Jackie Robinson Park, W. 147th St. & Bradhurst Ave.
Saturday, Aug 21 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Washington Square Park
Sunday, August 22 @ 2:00 PM: QUEENS -- Travers Park, 34th Avenue Between 77th and 78th Street
Saturday, August 28 @ 2:00 PM: BROOKLYN -- Sunset Park, 6th Ave. & 44th Street
Sun, Aug 29 @ 2:00 PM: BROOKLYN -- Ft. Greene Park, Myrtle Ave. bet. N. Portland Ave. & St. Edwards St.
Saturday, Sept. 4 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Outside Theater for the New City at E. 10th Street & 1st Ave.
Saturday, September 11 @ 2:00 PM: STATEN ISLAND -- Tappen Park at Canal, Bay and Water Streets
Sunday, September 12 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Tompkins Square Park at E. 7th St. & Ave A
*** FREE FEEDBACK FOR PLAYWRIGHTS***
Trade A Play Tuesday (#TAPT) has been operating every Tuesday for seven years and offers one-to-one trading for same-day feedback on ten-minute plays or scenes only.
Get complete details and guidelines here:
Playwrights Offering Free Feedback (#POFF) is for full-length plays and is more of a credit system; you must read one to get one read.
Get complete details and guidelines here:
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
“Take Flight” Festival
Full-length OR one-act plays in any genre: comedy, drama, multimedia, etc.
An inspiring, interactive weekend of new plays that address the ideas of growth, change and transformation.
Our team of readers select the shows but the festival audience votes for the one script that will 'take flight' with a full production in our next season.
***
Veterans Repertory Theater (VetRep) is launching a 10-minute audio play competition for playwrights who meet one of the following criteria:
- current or former US military, law enforcement, fire, EMS, foreign service, or intelligence service veteran
- immediate family member of a current or former military, law enforcement, fire, EMS, foreign service or intelligence service veteran
***
Stay True, An LGBTQ+ Theatre Company based in New York City is seeking submissions for a holiday play to be produced as part of their 2021/2022 Season. The play should take place around one of the major winter holidays and center LGBTQIA+ characters. Special considation will be given to works that celebrate queer joy or feature characters with intersectional identities.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PLAYS ***
COWBOY MOUTH
Cowboy Mouth is a surreal, poetic piece dreamt up by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith in a war of words that lasted for two nights. Every reference in the play is infused with the true character of these two icons and the dynamic of their volatile love affair. Their performance on April 29, 1971 at the American Place Theater is shrouded in mystery and intrigue, with Shepard presenting a double bill of his plays: Back Bog Beast Bait, starring his wife O-Lan, followed by Cowboy Mouth with Smith. According to his friends, it was "one of the wildest autobiographies he ever produced and one of the most exciting performances they'd ever seen."
However, on the third night, unable to cope with the goldfish effect of playing out his reality on stage, Shepard vanished, forcing the show to close.
More...
***
COME BLOW YOUR HORN
In Neil Simon's 'Come Blow Your Horn,' the author's alter ego, a character named Buddy Baker, tells his father he is thinking about writing plays for television or the theater. His father would prefer him to go into the family's wax-fruit business, and warns him: 'Plays can close. Television you turn off. Wax fruit lays in a bowl till you're a hundred.'
Ignoring the father's dire prophecy, Mr. Simon turned his back on wax fruit, metaphorical or otherwise. In the play, Buddy's future is, as yet undetermined. Mr. Simon's future was to become America's richest, most popular playwright.
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***
HOW I LEARNED
By 2000, August Wilson had written eight of the 10 plays that would constitute his American Century Cycle, including “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the works that made him famous. It was then that Wilson started thinking about projects he might tackle after the cycle was finished. He had plans for a novel, a musical, a screenplay, some non-naturalistic theater, rewrites of his early apprenticeship plays and more poetry.
Wilson began working on many of these, but the only one he finished before he died from liver cancer at age 60 in 2005 was his one-man autobiographical show, “How I Learned What I Learned.” Wilson himself performed the piece during a two-week run at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2003. That production was directed and co-developed by Wilson’s longtime assistant, Todd Kreidler, who is giving “How I Learned” its Washington-area premiere at the Round House Theatre.
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***
THE GLASS MENAGERIE
Early in his career, Tennessee Williams often looked to his family and his own life experience for writing inspiration. Indeed, Williams’ first major success, The Glass Menagerie, is considered to be his most transparently autobiographical work, as it appears to mirror many aspects of his early adult life featuring characters based upon his mother, sister, and himself.
Edwina Dakin Williams, Tennessee’s mother, played a significant role in his upbringing. Because Williams’ father worked as a travelling salesman, and spent much time on the road, Edwina became primarily responsible for raising her children. The daughter of a strict minister, Edwina grew up in the South. When the Williams family moved to St. Louis, Edwina maintained traditional Southern values much like how Amanda hangs onto her past and Southern roots. While Williams spent a considerable amount of time with his mother as he grew up, his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, remained relatively absent. Cornelius struggled with alcohol abuse much like Tom’s absent father in the play. As a travelling salesman, he often expressed his frustration at feeling too tied down to his family. While Tom’s father in the play goes so far as to abandon Amanda, Tom, and Laura, Cornelius never acted on his frustration to that extent.
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***
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME
Note the last two words in the title of Heidi Schreck’s hit show, “What the Constitution Means to Me”: This is a highly personal take, not a historical or legal lecture. Yet Schreck succeeds in widening her autobiographical play into a paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.
Like the recent captures of “Hamilton” and “American Utopia,” albeit on a much more intimate scale, “What the Constitution Means to Me” (streaming on Amazon) successfully preserves a Broadway experience for the screen. Schreck, who has the amiable presence, storytelling verve and pedagogical chops of an ideal schoolteacher, starts off by recounting how she paid for college with the money she earned as a teenager giving speeches about the Constitution in American Legion halls.
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***
THE NORMAL HEART
As the first sign of the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, Larry Kramer started ringing the alarm — loudly and with fury.
But he was often met with inaction, which drove him to get even louder and more furious.
It was that passion — and aggression — with which the playwright reacted to the onset of the AIDS epidemic in New York City that set him on a course in the 1980s and 1990s that would eventually help shift national health policy.
But early on in his fight, in the depths of his frustration with the lack of coverage by the media and lack of action by the government, he documented his own journey in the 1985 play The Normal Heart. While he was fictionalized as the character Ned Weeks, many of the events were autobiographical, as was the heart of the play itself.
“What inspires me is seeing things that are wrong,” he told the New York Times in 2014. “It’s wrong to be treated with such inequality. Considering how many of us there are, how much disposable income we have, how much brainpower we have, we have achieved very little.”
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***
LACKAWANA BLUES
Tony Award winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson returns to MTC for the Broadway debut of his brilliant solo play celebrating the strong, big-hearted woman who raised him: Miss Rachel. In a 1950s boarding house outside Buffalo, Nanny, as she was affectionately called, opened her doors to anyone and everyone in need of kindness, hope, compassion and care. Giving a tour-de-force performance accompanied by live music written by acclaimed composer Bill Sims, Jr. and performed by Blues Hall of Fame Guitarist Junior Mack, Santiago-Hudson embodies more than 20 vibrant characters, creating a richly textured reminiscence that’s inspiring, uplifting and right at home on Broadway.
PERFORMANCES BEGIN SEPTEMBER 14.
OPENING NIGHT SEPTEMBER 28.
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