Write Act Repertory is accepting submissions for our ongoing Play Festival
based on the works and/or life of Edgar Allen Poe. We are seeking submission
from members and non-members. All selected playwrights will have their plays
produced in reading form, live or electronically, first at a selection
festival.
***
The On and Off Theatre Workshop (@onandoffwkshop) is looking for audio drama
scripts - 10-minute plays or 40- to 50-minute plays - to be produced in their
next season. Chosen plays will get a full audio production and the playwright
will receive a small stipend. Requirements below.
***
Ruby Slippers Theatre call for submissions
Advancing the Radically Inclusive Stage
The Advance Theatre Festival showcases dramatic readings of five new plays
written and directed by female-identifying and gender non-conforming IBPOC
playwrights and directors.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** RANDOM THEATER HOT TAKES ***
Promoting Shakespeare as the “best” writer of all time is a dangerous and white
supremacist viewpoint. Until the Shakespeare field as a whole learns how to
examine that, theatres that produce his work cannot be welcoming spaces for
people whose ancestors were beaten and forced to give up their own languages
and learn Shakespeare’s. As a Mohegan theatremaker, it is my duty to make clear
that the immense amount of space his work currently takes up is an ongoing tool
of colonization, just as his work has been used historically as a weapon to
remove other people’s cultures and teach them that one British playwright is
superior to all other writers. To be clear: I’m not talking about
scarcity—there is always room for more plays and more artists. But Shakespeare
has not been positioned amongst us. He has been positioned above us, and that
is something entirely different.
More...
https://howlround.com/interrogating-shakespeare-system
***
There’s something about modern-day acting—the style that is famously associated
with Lee Strasberg’s Method and that gained currency from his Actors Studio and
its offshoots—that inclines toward deformations of character. That modern
school, which links emotional moments from a performer’s own life to that of a
character, and which conceives characters in terms of complete and filled-out
lives that actors imagine and inhabit, asks too much of performers.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/is-method-acting-destroying-actors
***
Like many, I grew up reading John Simon on the theater in New York magazine. It
was a post he commanded for nearly thirty-seven years with unparalleled
intensity. He panned much more than he praised, upsetting many. Still, the
theater world never hesitated to proclaim his favorable judgments, which were
not always expected. He called Cats, for example, a “delightful albeit trivial
Gesamtalmostkunstwerk.” He also dared to see theater as a visual experience
rather than some disembodied political statement. At times he even discussed
the bodies on view. He once picked at Barbra Streisand’s prominent proboscis.
When the actress Calista Flockhart took the stage, he commented that here was
“Ally McBeal in the flesh,” but “be forewarned: There is very little flesh on
dem bones.” Of Wicked he wrote that “Kristin Chenoweth is cute as a button, but
rather makes you wish for a zipper.” He called Liza Minnelli a “performer whose
chief diet is audience adulation” and whose “comeback” was “from alcoholism,
[being] overweight, and an overlong absence from regular performing.”
More...
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/1/john-simon-19252019
***
Why can they do us so convincingly, but when we try to do them, it always goes
pear-shaped? For answers, I sought out Bob and Claire Corff, the
husband-and-wife team of highly regarded dialect coaches who recently weighed
in on the convincing American accents of some of our television’s interlopers.
After a quick confab with his wife, Bob called me, and this is the explanation
they offer.
Trained English actors, Corff explains, “learn very early on that if they can’t
do standard American accents, they will not have an international career. A lot
of their training is much more intense than the training in America. So they
are studying movement, and they’re studying voice, and they’re studying
accents, and fencing—they’re used to the idea of not being so good at
something, working a long time, and becoming good at it.”
More...
https://slate.com/culture/2016/09/why-are-americans-so-bad-at-british-accents-a-dialect-coach-explains.html
***
To put it bluntly, I wondered if the world needed more undergraduate
playwrights.
Before I can explain my thought process and my eventual decision, I need to
make something clear: I don’t give in to the lazy notion that you can’t make
money in the arts. I imagine that anyone who has ever even considered undergrad
arts education has had a well-meaning person say: “You won’t be able to get a
job,” or: “If you can do something else, do that instead.” If what they mean is
that a life in the arts is hard then, yes, it can be hard sometimes. If what
they mean is have a backup plan—sure, have a dozen backup plans that keep your
options open. If what they mean is that it might not go how you expect—yes, it
will definitely not go how you expect. But if they mean that it is impossible,
that’s not true. I, myself, am an unexceptional example. I’ve split my time as
a writer, educator, sound designer, and arts administrator. I’ve made my living
in the field, just not necessarily in the way I pictured. Which seems to be the
story of most people I know who have found success.
More...
https://howlround.com/does-world-need-more-undergraduate-playwrights
***
Please, Don't Start a Theater Company!
I was twenty-three when I arrived in San Francisco, fresh from assistant-directing
at the Royal Court in London and eager to start my theater career. I was
brimming over with enthusiasm, and maybe just a little hubris. Shortly
thereafter, I founded Crowded Fire Theater Company and was full of plans for it
to quickly become the next major regional theater. My generation of theater
artists grew up on the stories of how our current crop of institutions were
founded — Sam Shepard and his collaborators starting the Magic Theatre in a
Berkeley bar, Tony Kushner premiering Angels in America at the Eureka, Bill
Ball asking cities to compete to house A.C.T. Why shouldn't my company be the
next success story? I had no question about what that success would look like —
it would look like a building with staff and a season, subscribers and youth
programs, and a healthy mix of earned and contributed income.
More...
https://www.giarts.org/article/please-dont-start-theater-company
***
Stage directions are the very reason I write plays at all. Stage directions are
how I fell in love with theater. Watching actors brawl, kiss, grab, break,
weep, clutch, die, soar, exit, enter. The moments that gripped me are the ones
that orbit around a stage direction that propels a truth-telling action. The
truth is what people do, not say. I crave plays that move, soar, leap, dive,
embrace. Give me action, give me bodies in motion, give me nonverbal
communication!
Stage directions are the thing a line almost never is: honest. Aristotle, of
course, tells us that actions define a person not their words. I love a speech,
but inherently what I’m waiting to see is what that speech causes. Does the
speech cause an exit, or does it cause someone to fall to their knees and
apologize, or does it cause them to cut their throat? Does the joke beget a
laugh or a punch or a smooch? What do all those beautiful spoken lines do?
More...
https://www.laurengunderson.com/press-projects/f6s5g6u1lkb5p9bg26qjgj18wm8yr8
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