Sesame Workshop Writers’ Room is a writing fellowship from the creators of Sesame Street. And we’re looking for YOU! Fresh new writing talent from writers with diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural identities. Emerging storytellers who are selected to join the Writers’ Room will receive hands-on writing experience guided by Sesame Street veterans and other media industry leaders. Each participant will develop and write a pilot script for their own original kids concept. Past fellows have gone on to develop their own original content with Sesame Workshop, as well as write for Sesame Street and various programs at Nickelodeon, Disney, DreamWorks, and more.***Platform Presents are thrilled to announce submissions for the 2022 Platform Presents Playwright’s Prize are now open.This is an open call for distinctive, dynamic plays, no more than 10,000 words.The prize includes ongoing mentoring and producing the winning script, as well as the £5,000 cash prize.***Molecule accepts submissions of poetry, prose (fiction & non-fiction) plays, reviews and interviews in 50 words or less (including titles and interview questions). Visual artwork of tiny things like tea bags and toothpicks, or tiny paintings, also wanted: no skyscrapers please!*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ****** KENNETH THORPE ROWE ON THEATER ***Available for free:WRITE THAT PLAYhttps://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.183007/page/n13/mode/2upA THEATER IN YOUR HEADAnalyzing the Play and Visualizing Its Productionhttps://archive.org/details/theaterinyourhea00rowe***Kenneth Thorpe Rowe was a professor at the University of Michigan. Rowe taught Shakespeare and modern drama, but was best known as an influential teacher of playwriting.Rowe regarded playwriting not as a mystical experience, but as a craft that could be understood and analyzed; he had remarkable insight into how a writer could construct a play with an eye toward the most effective development of plot and emotion. Across the span of six decades at Michigan, he taught and inspired legions of notable students, including Josh Greenfeld, Lawrence Kasdan, Dennis McIntyre, Robert McKee, Arthur Miller, Davi Napoleon (aka Davida Skurnick), Betty Smith, and Milan Stitt.Professor Rowe began his playwriting seminar each semester by asking his students to read "The Poetics" by Aristotle. He then taught them how to identify the workings of classic structure. In Rowe's view, all successful plays built dramatically from an "attack" (the introduction of a conflict) through a crisis and finally to a resolution. He applied his methods even to modern plays that were not unified in time and place; it was Rowe's contention that even non-realistic plays had the classic underlying structure.Arthur Miller enrolled in Rowe's seminar in 1937. He later described learning from Rowe that the theater "was not a carousel one jumped onto but an instrument one had to learn to play." His early plays Honors at Dawn and The Grass Still Grows were written under Rowe's tutelage, and his teacher's influence was evident in the careful structural revisions that Miller made as he revised them over time. Honors at Dawn was recognized with a Hopwood Award at Michigan (1937), while The Grass Still Grows won the attention of a theatrical agent. Thus for Miller, Rowe became "a combination of critical judge and confidant," bringing together a unique "interest in the dynamics of play construction" with "his friendship, which meant much to me."More...https://alchetron.com/Kenneth-Thorpe-Rowe***Kenneth Thorpe Rowe (September 19, 1900 – October 27, 1988)[1] was an influential professor of drama and playwriting. For decades, Rowe taught playwriting, Shakespeare and modern drama at the University of Michigan. There he had an enormous impact on students, from Arthur Miller (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman) to Lawrence Kasdan (Star Wars). His book Write That Play become a widely used college textbook for the teaching of playwritingMore...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Thorpe_Rowe
***What advice do you have for playwrights starting out?Write, write, write. Be honest in your writing. Knock out any sentimentality from it. Sentimentality runs both ways: dishonestly happy or dishonestly bleak. Listen to how different people talk. Read and reread Kenneth Thorpe Rowe’s book, Write That Play, and devour Aristotle’s Poetics. Break or bend dramatic principles only for good reason, and after you know how to use them. Kenneth Thorpe Rowe taught Arthur Miller and Milan Stitt, among others.More...https://portlandshakes.org/interview-with-playwright-simon-fill/***Lawrence Kasdan was honored with a Maverick Spirit Award at the recent Cinequest Film Festival, which is where I got an opportunity to interview him about his long association with George Lucas, and his writing and the influence of his professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, who taught at University of Michigan. Why did Kasdan want to study with Prof. Rowe? It was because of Arthur Miller. You see Miller was a student of Prof. Rowe and Kasdan was a fan of Miller’s writings. So, we talked about Rowe, who is the author of two seminal books, “Write That Play,” and “A Theatre In Your Head.”https://kamlashow.com/2015/03/19/video-lawrence-kasdan-on-star-wars-george-lucas-and-writing/
***FROM THE THEATER IN MANUSCRIPTby Kenneth Thorpe RoweIf the theater were a simple hierarchy in which the best and most significant plays would assuredly be promptly produced, the potential theater in manuscript might be of only professional interest. Actually, by a variety of pressures toward conservatism, the process of selection for production lags behind the theater in manuscript, and sometimes never catches up. Enough good plays are available at any time to the commercial theater in New York so that there need be no excuse for a bad play to ever be produced. It is not, however. the miscellany of merely good plays that gives to the theater in manuscript its greatest interest, but the trends of thought and feeling reflected. The theater is sufficiently a social art that only occasionally are plays of highest quality and distinction isolated in meaning; while the playwright of force of imagination finds sometimes an even startlingly individual means of communication, his play usually reflects something more than his individual consciousness.New trends in subject matter, thought, and technique appear in manuscript one to two or three years in advance of the theater of producition. When DEEP ARE THE ROOTS by Arnaud D'Usseau and James Gow was finally produced, a trend of plays on the problem of Negro-white relations had been predictable for a year or more by the number of playscripts, but producers had been holding off in doubt whether people would want to be agitated on the subject in the theater.More...https://www.google.com/books/edition/Quarterly_Review/qhNYAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=kenneth+thorpe+rowe&pg=PA317&printsec=frontcover
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