Vivid Stage seeking full-length playsAre you a playwright with an original new play? We’d love to read it! Your play could be selected for a reading in our “Meet the Artist” series in May. Or it might even end up on our mainstage!Script ParametersFull-length comedies or dramas (no musicals)One script per writerCast size of no more than 9Roles for women (if any) are realistic and substantialContemporary topicsFocus on “the human story”Warmth and optimism***Alpine Fellowship Theatre Prize 2022Awarded for the best playwriting response theme of the Alpine Fellowship 2022.The prize will be £3,000 plus a rehearsed reading at the fellowship’s annual symposium to which the winner will be invited to attend. Runners up will be invited to attend the symposium, their travel expenses will be reimbursed up to a total of £500 and all food and accommodation will be covered.***
Troy Foundry Theatre (Troy, NY) is currently accepting submissions of new plays for the 2022 February sessions of the DARK DAY MONDAYS FREE READING SERIES, which is dedicated to the support and development of new playwrights and new work. The selected plays will be presented in staged reading format with the possibility of consideration for a full production.We’re calling for submissions of new plays or devised pieces of work in which visual art is a central theme; this includes works having to do with the process of creating visual art, the world of visual art or having to do with the life and/or process of visual artists. *** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ****** THE FBI VS BLACK LEADERS & DRAMATISTS ***From the March on Washington in 1963 up until his assassination in 1968, the FBI engaged in an intense campaign to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. and his work. Film director Sam Pollard chronicles those efforts in the new documentary, MLK/FBI."The first fear that [FBI director J. Edgar Hoover] had was that King was going to align himself with the Communist Party, which ... J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with destroying," Pollard says.Pollard's documentary is based on newly declassified files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, along with restored archival footage. It shows the government's extensive targeting of King and his associates in the 1960s.More...https://www.npr.org/2021/01/18/956741992/documentary-exposes-how-the-fbi-tried-to-destroy-mlk-with-wiretaps-blackmail***Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI "ghostreaders" monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as F.B. Eyes reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.
The F.B. Eyes Digital Archive makes available for the first time a collection of 51 FBI files on prominent African American authors and literary institutions, many of them unearthed through William J. Maxwell's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Now part of the public domain as unrestricted U.S. government documents, these once-secret files are arranged on this site as they were at FBI national headquarters, under the names of individual authors and institutions.More...http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/fbeyes***Amiri Baraka’s art and activism took a more radical black nationalist turn after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, a crime for which he eventually blamed the FBI. Within months of the murder, Baraka had moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), the prototypical institution of the Black Arts movement. Though it had opened in 1957 with inquiries into Baraka’s possible Communism, his FBI file ballooned with the establishment of BARTS. Bureau informers, present at BARTS’s first meetings in Harlem, also recorded some of Baraka’s poetry readings as he toured the U.S. Baraka fought back against FBI secrecy by making portions of his FBI file public years prior to his death.More...http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/fbeyes/baraka***Not the last well-respected African American actress to find good roles hard to come by, Alice Childress began to write eclectic dramas of her own, inspired in part by her friend Sidney Poitier’s bet that a well-crafted play could not be written overnight. Florence (1949), the result of Childress’s quick work, won the wager with Poitier and was produced by the ANT. Childress’s earliest full-length play, Trouble in Mind (1955), received the first Obie Award presented to an African American woman......Childress was monitored through an individual FBI file. A resourceful Bureau agent, this file shows, dug deep for traces of Childress in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library.More...http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/fbeyes/childress
***If J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had ever edited an anthology of African American writing, Lorraine Hansberry’s often-revived play A Raisin in the Sun (1959) might have been its central text. FBI officials monitored the progress of Raisin even before it premiered on Broadway, and sent an especially literate undercover agent to a Philadelphia try-out at the Walnut Theatre. “The play contains no comments of any nature about Communism as such,” this ghostreader certified in a sensitive review, “but deals essentially with negro [sic] aspirations, the problems inherent in their efforts to advance themselves, and varied attempts at arriving at solutions.”More...http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/fbeyes/hansberry***The 1,068-page FBI file of Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977) exceeds that of her famous husband, W.E.B. Du Bois, by over 300 pages. As the Bureau’s ghostreaders recognized, her career as a novelist, composer, playwright, and activist outlived his, and began decades before their marriage in 1951. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Graham Du Bois studied music and French in the preferred New Negro destination of Paris prior to earning B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oberlin College. Her name in musical theater was made when she expanded her one-act play Tom-Tom into a 1932 opera with an all-black cast, perhaps the first such opera produced by an African American woman.More...http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/fbeyes/duboisshirley
***The author of the plays Big White Fog (1938), produced by the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project, and Our Lan’ (1947), premiered on Broadway, Theodore Ward (1902-1983) was an actor and educator as well as a nationally-recognized dramatist. With Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright, he formed the Negro Playwrights’ Company in 1940. Known for his social realism and leftist politics, Ward spent much of his working life in Chicago and contributed to the city’s “post-Harlem” cultural renaissance. Under FBI scrutiny from 1944 to 1966, he was included on J. Edgar Hoover’s Security Index and discussed in what became a 289-page FBI file.More...http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/fbeyes/ward
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