Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

 



The Henley Rose Playwright Competition for Women was founded by Yellow Rose Productions, with permission of Beth Henley, to encourage and recognize the new works of female playwrights. The Henley Rose Playwright Competition for Women aims to give voice to the stories of this generation and to bring into the spotlight important works that have been crafted.

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Theatre Viscera: We accept plays written by queer (LGBTQIA+) playwrights, about queer characters, for queer performers. We have a preference for plays about/by transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folx. You may send us full length plays, one acts, or collections of ten minutes. Total submissions must be at least 30 minutes long when read.

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In November 2022, we will host the 4th Annual Faces of America Monologue Festival.
To submit your monologue for consideration there are just a few simple rules:
Your monologue must be less than two minutes in length.
We can't stress this enough. If we think your monologue is longer it will not be considered. 

Your monologue should represent America's incredible diversity. (BIPOC, AAPI, Latine, and LGBTQIA+ artists are all strongly encouraged to apply). Monologues can be historical or futuristic, cultural or political, comedic or tragic, spoken or signed!
Include the word "kindness" somewhere in your monologue.
If this word does not appear in the monologue it will not be considered.


*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** FIVE ACT PLAY | STRUCTURE ***

Think of the play like a journey; your characters are the travellers, your plot is what happens along the way and your structure is the road. You could write an infinite number of stories which take place along a similar road.

Because the five act structure is so versatile, it’s also a useful tool when analysing the works of others. Almost every film produced by Hollywood follows a predetermined structure, to the point where you can often predict how a film will end. Don’t think of this as a prescriptive or limiting template though, absolutely anything can happen within the confines of the structure. It’s really a way of making sure you hit a series of plot developments which, if used correctly, can add depth to your characters and story.

I’m still getting my head around this structure stuff myself, and there are so many different versions and theories behind it that it can get very confusing. For the purposes of an example I’ll try to stick to a very simplistic version. Forgive me if your knowledge is already beyond this point.

I’m using the film The Matrix* as an example to illustrate each point, mainly because I re-watched it fairly recently and can remember (fairly accurately) how the plot unfolds. If you haven’t seen the film this will be a good excuse to check it out. (*Spoiler alert – plot points revealed below.)

Act I – Exposition
This act is essentially where you set up the story; we meet your protagonist and other major characters, we see their normal situation and see that something needs to change. The protagonist needs to learn something about themselves or their situation in order to resolve a problem. The protagonist is given an opportunity to see outside their normal world at some point during this act, which they need to take (or there will be no story…)

More...
https://londonplaywrightsblog.com/pursued-by-a-bear-i-cant-make-sense-of-five-act-structure/


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From Renaissance to Neoclassical this was the standard. Theatre at this time was based on Aristotle's and Horace's works (as they were understood at the time) since Classical theatre was considered ideal. The five act structure was incredibly strict (especially in the Neoclassical period), it wasn't until Romanticism and Melodrama that this structure fell out of fashion. Few modern productions have a full-length intermission between every act (though they may give a couple minutes to stretch while the scenery is changed), although this wouldn't have been done at the time either. The older five act plays tend to be fairly long, and are often somewhat abridged in modern performances.

Now might be a good time to discuss scenes: The modern convention, and also that used by a lot of older writers, is that a scene change is only marked when there's a change in location, or the time frame moves forwards a significant amount. However, particularly around 1700, during the period known as the Restoration, you get plays such as William Congreve's five-act The Way of the World, where each act takes place in a single location, but every time a character joins or leaves a conversation, a new scene is declared and numbered. This can be very, very confusing if you're used to the more standard model. This is referred to nowadays as "French Scenes."

More...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurActsAreDifferent


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The five acts consist of the following, which I have paired with how each act perfectly corresponds to each of Breaking Bad’s five seasons:

Act 1: Something happens to spark the story into motion, and the characters begin making choices that will set everything else spinning along. (In Breaking Bad season one, Walter begins cooking meth and realizes he kind of likes it.)

Act 2: The characters still have a chance to escape their fates, but something in their psyches keeps driving them forward. (In Breaking Bad season two, Walter delves deeper and deeper into the Albuquerque underworld, meeting figures like Saul Goodman and Gus Fring for the first time. The season ends with a “warning from God,” in the form of a plane crash.)

More...
https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/20/16910760/breaking-bad-10th-anniversary-birthday-structure


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The three act structure is the most famous in the last 50 years because of screenplay greats like Syd Field who taught that it was the golden mean of simplicity for the writer needing guidance. I've tried this system. I think it doesn't work. It tries to be too simple and leaves an enormous part of the story unmarked as "act two". Act two is then propped up and given a "midpoint climax" as well as a dramatically different character from part one to part two. I think there's a better way. It's the way Shakespeare broke up Hamlet. And I think it makes the process simpler and more effective for the writer. That way is the five act structure. Below I'm going to break down how I see it, using Hamlet as a guide.  

Act 1
Mystery in the wasteland
A scene is set where the main character is struggling to thrive in a mature, decadent place. Things feel unchangable. Like a little person can't make a difference. But a cataclysmic event occurs that demands the hero accept the mantle of "changer" if for no other reason than to restore the status quo.

More...
http://www.davidcarrberry.com/2015/09/the-power-of-five-act-not-three-act-play.html


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For most of my twelve years teaching high school English, I’ve taught a lesson on the 5-act structure of Shakespeare’s plays.
I even put it in a book.
But I don’t think any of it is right.
Two weeks ago, as we waited in a church pew for our oldest son’s preschool graduation ceremony to begin, my wife, Liz, and I got into a debate about the climax of Hamlet, said debate beginning with my above-repeated admission that what I’ve been saying to students about Shakespeare’s 5-act structure I no longer believe to be true.

More...
https://bhjames.com/2018/06/14/rethinking-shakespeares-5-act-structure/


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Many people talk about Aristotle and his treatise Poeticsas the originator of the five act dramatic structure, but anyone who says that hasn’t read Poetics (you can, though, right here). It mentions that there should be a beginning, middle, and end to a story, but says little more about dramatic structure (and even less that makes sense for modern storytelling). That’s okay. Aristotle was a smart person, but that doesn’t have to mean he perfectly understood story structure.
Some claim that Shakespeare was the inventor of the five act dramatic structure. But while Shakespearean dramas have five acts, the act and scene breaks were written in after the fact, in 1709 by Shakespeare’s first editor, not by Shakespeare himself.

It was likely the Roman playwright Horace who first advocated for five act plays. In his essay on drama, Ars Poetic, written in 19 BC, he said, “Let a play which would be inquired after, and though seen, represented anew, be neither shorter nor longer than the fifth act.” Though in the same paragraph he advocates using deus ex machina and a cast of no more than three members, so I’m not sure he’s a good literary role model.

The biggest promoter of the five act structure in modern history, though, is a German playwright and author from the mid-1800s named Gustav Freytag, the originator of Freytag’s Pyramid.

More...
https://thewritepractice.com/five-act-structure/

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WHAT HAPPENED
by Gertrude Stein

A FIVE ACT PLAY

ACT I

(One.)

Loud and no cataract. Not any nuisance is depressing.

(Five.)

A single sum four and five together and one, not any sun a clear signal and an exchange.

Silence is in blessing and chasing and coincidences being ripe. A simple melancholy clearly precious and on the surface and surrounded and mixed strangely. A vegetable window and clearly most clearly an exchange in parts and complete.

More...
http://ustheater.blogspot.com/2010/08/getrude-stein-what-happened.html