The Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival honors new American plays that provide dynamic performance opportunities for college-aged actors.
The festival endeavors both to recognize playwrights for their outstanding work and to provide a resource for universities across the country to identify dynamic plays with robust roles for college-aged actors for production at their institutions. The festival features both a full-length and short play division.
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The Eric H. Weinberger Award for Emerging Librettists is a juried cash and production grant given annually to support the early work and career of a deserving musical theatre librettist. It commemorates the life and work of playwright/librettist Eric H. Weinberger (1950-2017), who was a Drama Desk Award nominee for Best Book of a Musical (Wanda’s World), and the playwright/librettist of Class Mothers ’68, which earned Pricilla Lopez a Drama Desk Award nomination.
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Sundog Theatre in NYC is seeking one-act plays for “Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry 2022”
Sundog Theatre’s 20th annual presentation of new and original, one-act plays about our favorite boats, the Staten Island Ferries.
Since it is our 20th anniversary, the themes are “celebration” or “anniversary”.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BASED ON A TRUE STORY ***
Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, has put more distance between the theater and the monologist Mike Daisey, who was found to have fabricated details in his one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which just finished a hugely successful run at the Public.
In remarks offered Thursday night before a panel discussion on the fallout from the revelations, Mr. Eustis was more critical of Mr. Daisey than he had been after the radio show “This American Life” first disclosed that incidents recounted in the stage production, about Apple’s labor practices in China, had been invented or embellished. The radio show had run a lengthy excerpt of “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” only to retract it after discovering the inaccuracies.
“We would not have called it nonfiction had we known that incidents described in the piece were fabricated,” Mr. Eustis said, reading a statement. “We didn’t know, and the result was that our audience was misled. The piece had a powerful, positive impact on the world, and we are proud of that. But that doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of honoring our contract with our audience.”
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The musical only barely targets Thomas Jefferson as a "slaver," but most of the real life-characters in the story, including George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, and the Schuyler family, also were. It's unclear if Hamilton was too; the evidence is scant. But according to historian Michelle DuRoss, the politician's grandson alleged that Hamilton owned one or more enslaved people, referencing a purchase in the politician's expense book. And as Gordon-Reed said before, he helped his in-laws, namely Angelica Schuyler and her husband, purchase enslaved people.
Whether Hamilton was a slave owner or not, Miranda understands that the statesman was "complicit in the system" of slavery, despite his vocal stances against it. "[Slavery] is in the third line of our show. It's a system in which every character in our show is complicit in some way or another," the composer and actor told NPR's Fresh Air podcast last week.
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Saegert attended a performance of The King and I, along with nine other descendants of Leonowens, including a great-great-great-great-granddaughter, at the Princess of Wales Theatre on Sunday.
Leonowens’ memoirs inspired a novel, which then inspired the films and musical that popularized the story. A dive into the actual facts of her life, however, reveals many things outside of this well-known narrative.
“While the musical is a treat in terms of the musicality and the songs, it really is a small portion of Anna,” Saegert said.
Leonowens, Saegert said, was born in Bombay, India, not Wales as she had said during her life, and is thought to have had Indian heritage on one side of her family.
“She was Eurasian, and after becoming a widow with two children, she faked it that she was a Brit, from England,” Saegert said. Her husband had died some years before she accepted the job in Thailand.
“The fact that she was not a Brit but a Eurasian is not something that in today’s world would be thought of as a limitation. In Victorian times it most certainly (was).”
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Kaufman goes deep in Quills, but in the end he may stand back from the abyss, too. He’s a bit too much of the civil libertarian to do full justice to Sade, who, for all his preening decadence here, is never depicted in the full measure of his atrociousness. Sade catalogued and exulted in practically every perversion imaginable, but the words we hear spoken from his works are for the most part weak derivatives of the real thing; likewise Sade’s monstrous crimes, while alluded to, are not emphasized. These crimes, which included the torture and mutilation of young women, with possible intent to murder, were at least as responsible for getting Sade repeatedly locked up as anything he wrote.
Quills is one of the few really good American movies of the year, and it’s bursting with intellectual energy and standout performances and good old-fashioned Grand Guignol theatrics. But for all its attention to ambiguity, it’s also pushing a rather neat formulation: In order to know virtue, we must know vice. The film is offered up to us as a kind of curative. But since Sade’s vice has been adulterated by the filmmakers, our ensuing knowledge of virtue is a bit too easily won.
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Shakespeare is notorious for rewriting history to fit his dramatic needs. Combining characters, omitting important events, and making up iconic scenes in the hopes of boosting the drama of the story all work together to create plays more founded in fiction than fact. For instance, Henry VI Part One contains one of literature’s most iconic and exciting scenes— the plucking of red and white roses, initiating the start of the infamous War of the Roses. It’s a tense, striking scene that sparks the brutal wars of the next few plays. It’s because of this famous scene that we call the conflict the War of the Roses. So what makes this scene really amazing is that it probably never happened.
There is absolutely no evidence that either side ever plucked colored roses during an argument. On the contrary, the Yorkist white rose and the Lancastrian red were heraldic badges worn by either side. Shakespeare’s political flower-picking was really only a metaphor for the noblemen siding with their closest kinsmen. Before Shakespeare, no one thought much of the red and white roses. They were just pieces of the heraldry, nothing more.
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We feel increasing, wrenching desperation watching this story of coercive confinement, although more and more frustrated with Cosson as an interviewer. He asks questions, but they are of the extremely basic kind. Perhaps he was being understandably gentle with his friend’s mom, but interviews are interviews, and a play is a play—and too much in Dana H. is simply left unasked and unanswered, such as where was Hnath in all this?
He was a New York University student at the time, and the play does not make clear if he knew about his mother’s kidnapping. Indeed, it doesn’t make clear if law enforcement knew and was trying to find her. It seems odd that Higginbotham was kidnapped and essentially left her life for five months, and no family or authorities attempted anything to return her to safety. (The Daily Beast sent a list of questions to the play’s spokesperson for Hnath and received no response.)
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Mike Daisey has been a monologuist for more than 20 years. Not continuously — though it has sometimes felt like it.
So his disappearance from the stage during quarantine was an especially vivid marker of the pandemic’s devastating effect on live theater. Likewise, his re-emergence in a new show, which popped up on Friday night like a bud in early spring, signifies the beginning of a long-hoped-for renewal.
But what will that renewal be like?
On the evidence of the 90-minute monologue Daisey performed in front of an actual audience at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, it will be — at least at first — a hasty and hazy affair with redeeming glints of brilliance.
The haste is to be expected: Daisey was eager to be the first actor back onstage on the first day permitted by new state regulations. That was Friday, when plays, concerts and other performances were allowed to resume at reduced capacity, with the audience masked and distanced. At the 99-seat Kraine, that meant a sellout crowd of 22; to accommodate others — in all, 565 tickets were sold — the show, produced by Daisey and Frigid New York, was also livestreamed.
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