Your 2022 Hear Me Out entry must in some way refer to some naming and its impact on the characters you’re revealing. As always we hope you will find your own way into our festival theme and we do not require the use of any specific words, language or stylistic choices. We only ask that your character grapples with our festival theme WHEN WE NAME IT in some way.
And remember: your monologue must introduce us to a character who is talking to another person (or group of people). Short stories and essays will be disqualified.
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The Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, is seeking plays for its 26th Annual Black Box New Play Festival to be held in January 2023. Each play selected will be given a black box production with non-equity actors. Playwrights must be available via Zoom or some other virtual venue for rehearsals and use this as an opportunity to continue work on their play.
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Submissions are now being accepted for Paradox Theatre Works’ second annual New Works Festival Showcase 2022, entitled “THE LIVING ROOM”.
Seeking original short plays 10 minutes in length that have not been produced in the Chicago area before, from playwrights from across the globe. This year’s festival is focused on scenes that occur in “The Living Room”.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** HANSBERRY ***
When the Los Angeles-based artist Alison Saar was commissioned a little over four years ago to sculpt a statue of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, she had just one thought: “Am I the right person for the job?”
“I don’t really work with likenesses,” said Saar, 66, whose artwork focuses on the African diaspora and Black female identity. “But they said, ‘No, no, we want it to be more of a portrait of her passion and who she was beyond a playwright.’”
The request had come from Lynn Nottage, the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright, as part of an initiative she was developing with Julia Jordan, the executive director of the Lilly Awards, which recognize the work of women in theater. The Lorraine Hansberry Initiative was designed to honor Hansberry, who was the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway.
“She’s just part of my foundational DNA as an artist,” Nottage said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Throughout my career, if I needed to look to structure, or storytelling, or inspiration, I could go to ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ this perfect piece of literature.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/arts/design/lorraine-hansberry-statue-times-square.html
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In 1937, prominent businessman Carl Hansberry bought a home in the white South Side Woodlawn neighborhood just south of the University of Chicago. White mobs greeted the family and a brick almost hit eight-year-old Lorraine Hansberry. At night her mother, Nannie, patrolled the house with a gun.
The mobs didn’t run out the Hansberrys. The courts did. Anna Lee, a white neighbor, sued arguing a restrictive agreement prevented the sale of blacks to the neighborhood. Illinois courts agreed and the Hansberrys were forced to leave. Racially restrictive covenants consistently kept blacks in residential segregation. Those convents prevented African Americans in Chicago and elsewhere around the United States from buying or renting homes in white neighborhoods. On the South Side of Chicago, the overcrowded Black Belt housed too many families in too many shoddy conditions. White home improvement associations served as gatekeepers to prevent blacks from moving into their neighborhoods.
More...
https://www.thehistoryreader.com/historical-figures/lorraine-hansberry-and-chicago-segregation/
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In recent years, the puzzling paradox of how a Black lesbian Communist became a darling of mainstream America has been explored in multiple biographies, including Imani Perry’s “Looking for Lorraine” and Soyica Diggs Colbert’s “Radical Vision,” and in Tracy Heather Strain’s documentary “Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart.” Shields’s portrait is the latest attempt to expand our sense of the personal struggle behind the public figure, and to illuminate the many contradictions that she sought to live and work through.
Hansberry was not raised to be a radical. She was born in Chicago in 1930, the child of an illustrious family that was well regarded in business and academic circles. Lorraine’s father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a real-estate speculator and a proud race man. When Lorraine was seven years old, the family bought a house in a mostly white neighborhood. Faced with eviction by the local property owners association, Carl fought against racially restrictive housing covenants in court. Shortly before the case was argued, a crowd of white neighbors gathered outside the Hansberry home. Nannie, Lorraine’s mother, stood watch with a gun. Someone hurled a brick through the window, narrowly missing Lorraine’s head. When the police finally arrived, one officer remarked, “Some people throw a rock through your window and you act like it was a bomb.” It was 1937. The bombing of Black families would come.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/the-many-visions-of-lorraine-hansberry
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Freedom Archives online
Freedom (1951-55) was a newspaper founded in Harlem, New York by activists Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham during the Cold War and McCarthy eras. It openly challenged racism, imperialism, colonialism, and political repression and advocated for civil rights, labor rights and world peace. Its writers and contributors included W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry.
http://dlib.nyu.edu/freedom/
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During a protest against racial discrimination at New York University, she met Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer who shared her political views. They married on June 20, 1953 at the Hansberrys’ home in Chicago.
In 1956, her husband and Burt D’Lugoff wrote the hit song, “Cindy, Oh Cindy.” Its profits allowed Hansberry to quit working and devote herself to writing. She then began a play she called The Crystal Stair, from Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son.” She later retitled it A Raisin in the Sun from Hughes’ poem, “Harlem: A Dream Deferred.”
Her second play, THE SIGN ON SIDNEY BRUNSTEIN'S WINDOW, about a Jewish intellectual, ran on Broadway for 101 performances. It received mixed reviews. Her friends rallied to keep the play running. It closed on January 12, 1965, the day Hansberry died of cancer at 34.
Although Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced before her death, he remained dedicated to her work. As literary executor, he edited and published her three unfinished plays: Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers? He also collected Hansberry’s unpublished writings, speeches and journal entries and presented them in the autobiographical montage To Be Young, Gifted and Black. The title is taken from a speech given by Hansberry in May 1964 to winners of a United Negro Fund writing competition: “…though it be thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic, to be young, gifted and black!”
More...
https://www.chipublib.org/lorraine-hansberry-biography/
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The thing about history is that you don’t get answers to questions you don’t ask. Sally Hemings was a forgotten slave until Annette Gordon-Reed came along. Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War forward were said to play no meaningful role until black scholars ferreted out the facts. And Lorraine Hansberry had nothing to do with the lesbian liberation movement until 1976, when an editor revealed the playwright’s surprisingly radical correspondence on the subject.
Black gays and lesbians have been erased from our community’s history with surprising thoroughness. March on Washington planner Bayard Rustin labored away on behalf of the greater good for decades while having his own humanity shunted by fellow movement leaders. Duke Ellington’s genius writing partner Billy Strayhorn’s contributions have been profoundly obscured. And many of the artists who peopled the Harlem Renaissance have had their queer lives entirely straight-washed.
More...
https://www.theroot.com/lorraine-hansberrys-gay-politics-1790869060
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New York Times Review, March 29, 1959
Vivid Drama About A Poor Negro Family
by Brooks Atkinson
Although the acting in Lorraine Hansberry's A RAISIN IN THE SUN is vehement, it never seems excessive. Under the direction of Lloyed Richards, the scenes of crisis in the script touch off explosions in the performance. But the explosions never give an impression of being arbitrary.
For Miss Hansberry has written a homely play about the day-to-day anxieties of a Negro family on the South Side of Chicago. Some of the troubles are uproariously funny; some of them are harrowing. Since the characters have great capacity for feeling, the emotional range is wide. The nervous, tensely paced performance of Sidney Poitier as the wayward son and the highly wrought performance of Claudia McNeil as the unyielding matriarch have solid footing in the script. Everything is of a piece - writing, staging and acting.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1959/03/29/archives/raisin-in-the-sun-vivid-drama-about-a-poor-negro-family.html
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Lorraine Hansbery Interview (1959) audio only
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry discusses her play "A Raisin in the Sun" and theater in general; last 10 minutes is a reading of "Chicago: South Side Summers" from "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black."
Credit to: Studs Terkel Radio Archive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkFR_6DGJ3o
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This week, Basic Black discusses legendary playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Panelists: Lisa Simmons, director of the Roxbury International Film Festival; Tracy Heather Strain, producer of 'Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,' a documentary about Hansberry; Kim McLarin, associate professor at Emerson College; and Michael Jeffries, associate professor at Wellesley College.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahYuoC1bbk
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