Off-Broadway theater company BEDLAM is seeking submissions for a Spring 2022 festival of new play readings. Presented alongside our 2022 Off-Broadway mainstage production, these readings will showcase works-in-progress by artists expanding the bounds of the form, interrogating (or ignoring) the “canon,” and creating specifically theatrical work.***Flint Repertory Theatre is seeking new plays and musicals for the 2022 New Works Festival April 29 – May 1, 2022. The New Works Festival is an annual weeklong event featuring staged readings and workshops of new plays and musicals. Playwrights and composers from around the country are in residence in Flint during the process, which includes post-show audience discussions.***Bay Street Theater is seeking submissions of new full-length plays for our New Works Festival, to take place in early May 2022.We are offering an opportunity to work with directors and actors on your play, in-person. Selected plays will be provided with dramaturgical notes from our artistic leadership, rehearsal time, and a public presentation in Sag Harbor, New York, with an audience feedback session, spread over the course of several days.*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ****** MYSTERY PLAYS ***Mystery play, one of three principal kinds of vernacular drama in Europe during the Middle Ages (along with the miracle play and the morality play). The mystery plays, usually representing biblical subjects, developed from plays presented in Latin by churchmen on church premises and depicted such subjects as the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, and the Last Judgment.More...https://www.britannica.com/art/mystery-play***The Mysterious Disappearance of the Coventry Mystery PlaysI see in the press that Chester Cathedral has recently completed a programme of the Chester Mystery Plays. These plays are only performed every five years and they are always well received.Coventry Cathedral used to have its own series of Mystery Plays, that were performed every three years up until 2006. I was fortunate to be able to perform in the last two productions in 2003 and 2006.The Coventry Mystery Plays date back to the early Medieval Mystery Plays which were perhaps best known as the source of the Coventry Carol. Performances of the Coventry plays are first recorded in a document of 1392–3. It is very likely that the young Will Shakespeare saw them as he quotes from the Mystery Plays in some of his own plays with scenes and events from them. Various Coventry Trade Guilds would put on small plays on mobile stages around the city. The plays were mostly taken from scenes from the Bible. Each Guild would perform a scene while the other guilds were changing in preparation for the scene that they would perform. Unfortunately few records of the plays now exist but the Shearmen Guild and Tailors' Guild plays were transcribed and published by Thomas Sharp and most recent performances are loosely based on these plays, from Adam and Eve to Noah's Ark then Annunciation, Nativity, Massacre of the Innocents to Christ's Crucifixion.More...https://www.coventrysociety.org.uk/news/article/call-for-the-return-of-the-mystery-plays.html***York's contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain was an Arts Festival that included a four-hour revival of the Plays, running each evening, selecting the best-known stories. This took place in the Museum Gardens, with the ruined wall of the nave of St. Mary's Abbey as a backdrop and with a large temporary grandstand for the audience. This format was used for further productions every three or four years until 1988. Whilst most of the cast were local volunteers, major roles were often taken by professionals such as Ian MacShane (Lucifer, 1963), and Christopher Timothy and Simon Ward (Christ, 1980 and 1984). York citizens are especially proud of Judi Dench playing the Virgin Mary in 1957 whilst still a York schoolgirl.The Friends of the Mystery PlaysThis organisation came about to retain the spirit of the Plays, to keep scenery and costumes and to build an archive. They continue to support all York productions.More...http://www.yorkbutchersgild.co.uk/the-mystery-plays.html***Wakefield plays, also called Towneley plays, a cycle of 32 scriptural plays, or mystery plays, of the early 15th century, which were performed during the European Middle Ages at Wakefield, a town in the north of England, as part of the summertime religious festival of Corpus Christi. The text of the plays has been preserved in the Towneley Manuscript (so called after a family that once owned it), now in the Huntington Library in California.At some time, probably in the later 14th century, the plays performed at York were transferred bodily to Wakefield and there established as a Corpus Christi cycle; six of the plays in each are virtually identical, and there are corresponding speeches here and there in others. On the whole, however, each cycle went its own way after the transfer. From a purely literary point of view, the Wakefield plays are considered superior to any other surviving cycle. In particular, the work of a talented reviser, known as the Wakefield Master, is easily recognizable for its brilliant handling of metre, language, and rhyme, and for its wit and satire. His Second Shepherds’ Play is widely considered the greatest work of medieval English drama.More...https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wakefield-plays#ref908101***Miracle Plays and MysteriesThese two names are used to designate the religious drama which developed among Christian nations at the end of the Middle Ages. It should be noted that the word "mystery" has often been applied to all Christian dramas prior to the sixteenth century, whereas it should be confined to those of the fifteenth century, which represent the great dramatic effort anterior to the Renaissance. Before this period dramatic pieces were called "plays" or "miracles". The embryonic representations, at first given in the interior of the churches, have been designated as liturgical dramas.Liturgical dramaThe origin of the medieval drama was in religion. It is true that the Church forbade the faithful during the early centuries to attend the licentious representations of decadent paganism. But once this immoral theatre had disappeared, the Church allowed and itself contributed to the gradual development of a new drama, which was not only moral, but also edifying and pious. On certain solemn feasts, such as Easter and Christmas the Office was interrupted, and the priests represented, in the presence of those assisting, the religious event which was being celebrated. At first the text of this liturgical drama was very brief, and was taken solely from the Gospel or the Office of the day. It was in prose and in Latin. But by degrees versification crept in. The earliest of such dramatic "tropes" (q.v.) of the Easter service are from England and date from the tenth century. Soon verse pervaded the entire drama, prose became the exception, and the vernacular appeared beside Latin. Thus, in the French drama of the "Wise Virgins" (first half of the twelfth century), which does little more than depict the Gospel parable of the wise and foolish virgins, the chorus employs Latin while Christ and the virgins use both Latin and French, and the angel speaks only in French. When the vernacular had completely supplanted the Latin, and individual inventiveness had at the same time asserted itself, the drama left the precincts of the Church and ceased to be liturgical without, however, losing its religious character. This evolution seems to have been accomplished in the twelfth century. With the appearance of the vernacular a development of the drama along national lines became possible. Let us first trace this development in France.More...https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10348a.htm
***Mystery plays for gamersIn the Middle Ages, ‘mystery plays’ were a popular genre of public entertainment. The performances told stories from the Bible or from the lives of saints in a spectacular fashion. One of the most popular forms told the history of the world, from Creation to the Last Judgement, across multiple stages erected in the town square, complete with wild props and fireworks. Let’s build an adventure with one of these mystery plays as its centerpiece! Because Role-playing Games (RPGs) are usually only fun when the Player Characters (PC) are interacting with something cool, not just witnessing it, we need to get the party inside the mystery play. Maybe some foreign dignitaries are in town to see the show, and the aldermen are concerned that someone is going to interrupt the play to make the city look bad. So they rope the party into providing security from inside the show. Or maybe the play contains within it an important religious or magical ritual, obfuscated by all the pageantry. Heretics or cultists have figured this out and are going to try to disrupt it. Guards will be present in force, but the PCs have to go inside the play and protect it without disrupting it. No matter your plot hook, what’s important is that the PCs have a vested interest in seeing the show performed as intended, and that someone is trying to stop that from happening. The show must go on!More...https://www.moltensulfur.com/post/2019/02/12/medieval-mystery-plays
***Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta. This is Crash Course Theater, and today we're going to circle up our pageant wagons and talk about the theater of the late Middle Ages, mainly mystery plays and morality plays.Judged by contemporary standards, these plays are awkward. They're episodic, kind of basic, and pretty chaotic in their mix of comedy, drama, and scripture. But some of the jokes are good, like the ones about baby-eating. But that's more Yorick's speed than mine. You really love a good morose groaner, don't you, bonehead? This guy.Mystery plays and morality plays were the first European plays to unite religious life and secular life in more than a thousand years. Whole towns pitched in to create them, and whole towns arrived to see them. Those wagon wheels paved the way for the Renaissance's theatrical explosion.Today we're going to look at The Second Shepherds' Play, written by the Wakefield Master. It may seem a little humdrum, but no Wakefield Master no Shakespeare, and no Shakespeare no Yorrick. Maybe that's okay, though.More...https://nerdfighteria.info/v/5VI3qcSuUlk/
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