*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
TWELFTH NIGHT
Thursday-Sunday evenings at 6pm from July 15th- August 1st Greenhouse Ensemble will be performing outdoors in two lovely areas on The Upper West Side. Thursday and Friday nights we will be in Central Park at Summit Rock (83rd and CPW) and Saturday and Sundays we will be at the Westside Community Garden. (89th between Amsterdam and Columbus) Tickets for this event are FREE*
To Reserve your tickets, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/twelfth-night-tickets-161227227979
At the moment reservations are *limited* due to COVID- It is recommended to reserve your seats as soon as possible. Capacity will be updated if/when we receive more information from the City of New York Parks Department
*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***
UNDER THE CARPET
by Jesse Bernardini, Diane Quinn and Bill Fuller
A creative life is interrupted by a traumatic event that not even her wealthy family can save her from. Can this artist’s determination to be true to her own voice get her back on track?
Unseen Theatre, an audio podcast showcasing original plays featuring female protagonists voiced by SAG-AFTRA actors is available at www.unseentheatre.nyc or anywhere you get your podcasts.
*** PRIMARY STAGES NEW WRITERS GROUP ***
Primary Stages New Writers Group - Applications Now Open!
Echoes Writers Group at Primary Stages is a year-long, educational program focused on finding, nurturing, and amplifying the voices of women, non-binary, and gender non-conforming artists. The Group participates in twice-weekly Mentorship and Sharing Sessions, with mentors including Theresa Rebeck, Chisa Hutchinson, Madhuri Shekar, AriDy Nox, Nikkole Salter, and more. Each Group member will receive a $500 honorarium and the program culminates with a public presentation of the Group members’ works in Spring 2022. We are looking for people who love to write but have not had the chance to fully explore their passion in a professional or academic setting.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
PlayZoomers, Inc., a leading U.S. online theater company, is seeking scriptssuitable for Zoom productions, for our upcoming season beginning January 2022. We produce live, monthly performances, featuring plays of different genres and lengths, with cast sizes ranging from 2 - 20. We are pleased to work closely with playwrights to adapt their work to a digital platform while reaching a new audience.
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In the pursuit of creating platforms for emerging artists and unique pieces, Lost and Found Theatre is thrilled to announce our new works series. Each month, a team of professional actors, directors, and designers across all backgrounds and locations will come together to tell new stories through the medium of virtual theatre. We will be in close collaboration with each artist and playwright, allowing for opportunities to develop the work further during their time with us on the digital stage.
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Strange Trace is pleased to announce our second annual Stencils Festival! We’re seeking proposals for short (up to 20 minute) works of chamber opera to be workshopped and produced by Strange Trace throughout our 21/22 season for inclusion in the Stencils Festival, to be held in the first weekend of June, 2022. If you’re a composer, librettist, playwright, or theater-maker and you’ve got an idea for us, we’d love to hear from you!
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** STORMY WEATHER ***
Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), like so many of his later plays, features an intense storm scene which profoundly restructures the plot and characters within their dramatic universe. Through his “so potent art” (5.1.50), Prospero causes a shipwreck at the outset of the action, marooning on his island not only his two most bitter enemies, but also the future husband of his beloved daughter, Miranda. Suspended between his lust for revenge and his need for regeneration and renewal, Shakespeare’s magician-hero forgives his adversaries, bestows his daughter upon the future king of Naples, and then abjures his “art” by breaking his magic staff and drowning his book of charms “deeper than did ever plummet sound” (5.1.56).
Not surprisingly for a play so devoted to tempests both physical and emotional, Shakespeare’s comedy has elicited a storm of controversy from a number of different sources during the past four centuries. Even the long-accepted conventional interpretation of the play as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, complete with Prospero as playwright renouncing his theatrical magic, has recently come under close scrutiny by bibliographers who believe the script was written before Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen and may even have preceded The Winter’s Tale. So much for dramatic tradition!
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Final preparations for two outdoor stage comedies took a dramatic turn when a fierce thunderstorm rolled through North Jersey on Tuesday, destroying the set and damaging facilities of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey's outdoor stage at Saint Elizabeth University.
Opening night, previously scheduled for Friday, will be delayed a few days. But the shows will go on, said Artistic Director Bonnie J. Monte, who has experience dealing with tempests that threaten her productions.
"It's getting downright Biblical here," said Monte, whose award-winning professional company was preparing to premiere the first of its two outdoor productions on Saturday. The performances would have been the first seen on either of its primary stages since the pandemic turned both dark for 2020.
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In its heyday, Shadowland, a New Orleans dance hall, bar and hotel, provided its Black clientele, many of them visiting jazz musicians, with the dignity and amenities (including air conditioning) they were barred from enjoying at whites-only establishments.
But on the day that Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s floridly powerful new play “shadow/land” begins — Aug. 29, 2005 — that heyday is long gone, and the place is in bad disrepair. Mostly memories live there now.
If the date doesn’t ring a bell, that’s part of the reason Dickerson-Despenza must have felt the need to write “shadow/land” in the first place. It is the opening salvo in a planned 10-play sequence about Hurricane Katrina and its long, too often invisible tendrils of disaster.
That the disaster is literally invisible here, in a thrilling Public Theater production that renders the play as a podcast, is all to the good. As directed for the ear by Candis C. Jones and performed by actors with extraordinary voices, “shadow/land,” may be better in your headphones than it would have been onstage.
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Sturm und Drang, (German: “Storm and Stress”), German literary movement of the late 18th century that exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and sought to overthrow the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism. Goethe and Schiller began their careers as prominent members of the movement.
The exponents of the Sturm und Drang were profoundly influenced by the thought of Rousseau and Johann Georg Hamann, who held that the basic verities of existence were to be apprehended through faith and the experience of the senses. The young writers also were influenced by the works of the English poet Edward Young, the pseudo-epic poetry of James Macpherson’s “Ossian,” and the recently translated works of Shakespeare.
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Jared Anderson and Derek Arey face each other, leaning forward in folding chairs on the stage at Sweet Briar College’s Babcock Theater.
They’re rehearsing a scene from Endstation Theatre’s “The Bluest Water,” an original play about the impact Hurricane Camille had when it hit Nelson County in 1969.
The play is the cornerstone of the Amherst-based company’s Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival, one of our area’s first. It wraps up this weekend with one already sold-out performance of “The Bluest Water” and two performances of “Romeo and Juliet,” an outdoor production set in front of Sweet Briar’s Benedict Building. Tickets to both of those shows are still available.
In “The Bluest Water,” Anderson and Arey play Emory and Neddy, who are, in this particular scene, at odds over whether Neddy should close down a Lovingston liquor store after the storm. Emory is a state policeman, and Neddy is his ne’er-do-well little brother.
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Art dealing with natural disasters tends to focus on the phenomenon itself and the ways in which it affects the characters in the story. There's usually a lot of planning and preparation, endurance, and eventual survival or mourning. But most of the time this art chooses to leave audience members with a smidge of hope; not so in David Thigpen's Hurricane Party a deliciously nihilistic take on disaster art opening on September 11 at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village.
Thigpen lays out his plot in sensual strokes, we first meet Dana (Kevin Kane) and Macon (Sayra Player) as they make love. The intimacy of the moment almost enough to makes us want to look away: should we be even witnessing something so precious? As the lovers unwind, we learn they're married, but not to each other. Dana's wife is Caroline (Booker Garrett) who is a few months pregnant and spends her time daydreaming about everything she'll get to do with her "new best friend," as she calls her unborn child. Macon's husband is the volatile Todd (Michael Abbott Jr.) who also happens to be Dana's best friend, and suspects his wife has taken a lover.
We also learn there's a hurricane coming their way, and the four friends have decided the best way to make it through the storm is by having a party and drinking the night away. Thigpen's ingeniously lurid setup makes one think of the play as a cross between Body Heat and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the secrets that haunt four people will come to the surface when they find themselves trapped in a house.
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There’s a rain-soaked scene in “Indecent” that looms over the play, appropriately enough, like an impending storm.
Paula Vogel’s 2015 fact-based play follows a theater company as it prepares a 1923 Broadway production of playwright Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” a provocative Yiddish drama about two women’s sexual awakening that, on the show’s opening night, leads police to arrest the cast on obscenity charges. The primary source of controversy: a scene featuring a passionate kiss in a downpour between the two women — a prostitute and the daughter of a brothel owner.
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Versions of the sequence are rehearsed and discussed throughout “Indecent,” which runs at Arena Stage through Dec. 30. Eventually, rainwater spills from the rafters and the scene from the play-within-the-play is staged in full.
“It’s not just beautiful because water comes out of the sky, which is theater magic at its best,” says Susan Lynskey, who plays Halina, the actor playing the prostitute. “It’s beautiful because it represents love and tenderness and joy.”
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