Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
my innocence.
“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”- F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Happiness,
Happiness, not in
another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour. Walt Whitman
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***
THE TEMPEST - Thursday, February 25, 7pm PT / 10pm ET Curtain"
A live performance of THE TEMPEST, by William Shakespeare, directed by Patrick Nims. Presented by Zoom Theatre. Free, live and on the web.
During the performance you will will have option of opening your microphone so that the actors can hear your reactions live, as they perform the show.
The lobby will open at 6:30pm PT / 9:30pm ET. The performance will begin at 7pm PT / 10pm ET. Please login at least 15 minutes before the start of the performance to insure you have no problems connecting. There will be no late admittance.
You can watch the show from any Zoom supported device, but we strongly recommend watching the show on a computer or on a TV connected to a computer if possible. If you have not used Zoom software before, we recommend that you test your computer at https://zoom.us/test before the show.
Thanks and we hope you enjoy the show!
=Feb 25, 2021 06:30 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)
*** PRIMARY STAGES ***
STARTING IN FEBRUARY: Online Classes at Primary Stages ESPA!
Start a First Draft, write your own Hamlet, learn techniques of Writing for Zoom, or try your hand at an Adaptation. PLUS! New classes just announced: Playwriting Structure, Fundamentals of Playwriting, Storytelling of Marginalized People, and How to Create a Collaborative Virtual Space. Faculty includes ABE KOOGLER (Obie Winner, Fulfillment Center), NIKKOLE SALTER (Pulitzer-nominated In the Continuum), CARIDAD SVICH (OBIE Winner for Lifetime Achievement), and many other award-winning writers who provide expert guidance in a collaborative atmosphere.
Classes begin mid-February. Flexible, artist-friendly payment plans available.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
2021 One Act Play Festival (OAPF) Presented by Artists’ Exchange
Seeking Short Plays: Comedic, absurd, dramatic, satirical, farcical, musical, etc. are all welcome for review. Works for actors of all ages (children thru seniors) and abilities are strongly encouraged. Selected plays will be performed outdoors by Artists’ Exchange in Cranston, Rhode Island in late June 2021 (details TBD).
***
Shellscrape Theatre Company seeks New Play Submissions for our upcoming Virtual Play Reading. Our goal for this virtual production is to assist the development of an unproduced work with an emerging playwright. Through this we hope to be able to provide logistical support, facilitate casting and provide exposure to our audience base.
***
The Brooklyn Review is looking for innovative new poetry, fiction, performance texts, nonfiction and visual art. We are particularly interested in featuring BIPOC voices and perspectives.
All submissions will be considered for both our site and print issues.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** MOVIES ABOUT THEATER ***
"Shakespeare in Love" is set in late Elizabethan England (the queen, played as a young woman by Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth," is played as an old one here by Judi Dench). Theater in London is booming--when the theaters aren't closed, that is, by plague warnings or bad debts. Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is not as successful as the popular Marlowe (Rupert Everett), but he's a rising star, in demand by the impecunious impresario Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), whose Rose Theater is in hock to a money lender, and Richard Burbage (Martin Clunes), whose Curtain Theater has Marlowe and would like to sign Shakespeare.
More...
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Actor Tim Robbins adds to his writing and directing laurels with this film set in an era when art and theater really mattered. The time is the mid-1930’s, and the place is Manhattan (with scenes from Washington D.C. where the infamous Dies Committee is riding the crest of anti-Communist hysteria). Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones) as director of the WPA-spawned Federal Theater Project is attending to the multitude of details involved in mounting dozens of plays around the country that employed thousands of out of work artists and actors. The FTP lasted only four years before it was terminated by the anti-New Deal Congress, but its cultural impact has been enormous, many actors and directors going on to win great acclaim in the theater and film. Until now the amazing story of the FTP, and especially of its controversial production “The Cradle Will Rock,” was little know beyond theater circles–and even there only known in part. Tim Robbins and company, through their meticulous research and engaging performances, have done us a real service in bringing to life this stirring moment in our history.
More...
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Mel Brooks certainly laid it all on the line for his debut feature, The Producers! It’s hard to think of anything as fresh as this hard-hitting satire before or since. Even today, 51 years later, its audacity is astonishing. If it still seems outrageous now, it’s hard to imagine the impact it had on audiences in the late-1960s.
Given the subject matter — fraud and funny Nazis — it should be offensive, but of course, it isn’t. Perhaps that’s because almost the entire cast and crew appear to be Jewish. Though this is never directly referred to in the script. Who else could get away with such a zealous send up of the Third Reich? Who else has the licence to lampoon what led to the extermination of millions of Jews without causing an uproar? Well, there was Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), a brave and prescient satire which did tackle similar themes, but that was before the holocaust.
More...
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A master of the slow burn and the exaggerated double take, Jack Benny may have been the greatest of all persona comedians on radio and television. The persona was preposterously vain. He played the violin, badly. He would never admit to being older than 39. Above all else, he was cheap.
In his most celebrated radio routine, Jack is walking along carrying a borrowed Oscar award. A mugger stops him, asks him for a light, and then demands: “Your money or your life.” There ensues a lengthy silence. Finally the mugger says “Look, bud! I said your money or your life!” And Benny replies: “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”
Benny plays five roles in Ernst Lubitsch’s comic masterpiece, To Be or Not To Be (1942), and in each of them, he is Jack Benny. We are in Warsaw in August 1939, and Benny is an actor in a troupe—in his own words, “that great, great actor Josef Tura,” whose ambition is to play Hamlet. Behind the scenes, he is the jealous husband of actress Maria Tura (the charming and justly acclaimed Carole Lombard, in her last film appearance), afraid he is being cuckolded. During the course of the film, he also plays a fictional Nazi colonel on stage, impersonates a real Nazi colonel, albeit badly, and impersonates a bewhiskered Professor Siletski (Stanley Ridges), who has passed himself off as a Polish resistance leader but is actually a Nazi spy.
More...
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Topsy-Turvy marked the first time the acclaimed writer-director Mike Leigh made a period drama, turning his gaze from his usual working-class contemporary Britain setting to the pomp and splendour of the Victorian theatre, in particular the then immensely popular comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Despite this vastly different setting, Leigh envisioned the film as looking at his own work and that of other fellow filmmakers and theatre companies, throughout the ages. He stated in an interview that, “I’m not given to making films about filmmakers or artists, but I decided that it would be good to make a film about what we do, what we all go through.” Through presenting the immense amount of work, stress and drama that likely went into writing and putting on one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s audience-friendly “chocolate-box” productions, Leigh planned to show how he and his fellow artists “slave ourselves to death and go to hell and back creating profound trivia for the laughing public”.
More...
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Fuck All About Eve. The real masterpiece about women and theater is Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door, a film which casts Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball and many other RKO women of the era as out-of-work actresses in a theatrical boarding house called The Footlights Club. Excitingly feminist, marked by the Depression, and obsessed by the sound of women talking, yelping, singing and generally whooping it up, Stage Door, though well-loved by many, has never garnered a big reputation, probably because La Cava himself has been overlooked in studies of major directors of the period.
More...
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The Salesman is the story of a play that outplays a play. Asghar Farhadi’s postmodern version of Death of a Salesman portrays the true face of a developing society, in which tradition and modernity encounter in chaotic patterns. The play within a play is the story of Arthur Miller’s modern drama, but it is also the story of many Iranians, who fall in the schism of a changing society. Filming began in 2015 in Tehran, and the movie was released initially on May 21, 2017, at the 69th Cannes Festival. It stars Shahab Hosseini (Emad Etesami) and Taraneh Alidoosti (Rana Etesami) as a married couple, who are also the actors of Miller’s characters, Willy and Linda. The Salesman is not only an adaptation of the important scenes in Death of a Salesman but also a realistic problem drama, which voices the cultural challenges in Iran today. The film could have taken Farhadi to the Oscars for a second time, after his 2012 A Separation. However, Farhadi boycotted the ceremony, refusing to receive his award due to political differences triggered by Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13769, believing that such measurements against Iranians are unjust and therefore objectionable. Similarly, in his movies, he tries to implicitly show the real ambience of Iranians’ lives, when going through national and international changes, caused and influenced by global issues and policies.
More...
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