Every month, Kumu Kahua’s artistic director Harry Wong III will select a
writing prompt on or by the first day of that month. We’re looking for 5-page
monologues or 10-page scenes based on that prompt; the due date for submissions
will always be the last day of the month. The prompt for the month of August
2022 is: An initial meeting between 2 college freshmen in their dorm room from
different parts of the USA. For example, a local girl leaves Hawaiʻi for
college where she shares a room with a girl from Sudbury, Massachusetts.
***
Canthius is an intersectional feminist magazine that publishes poetry and prose
by writers of marginalized gender identities, including trans, Two Spirit,
non-binary, agender, cis women, genderqueer, GNC, and intersex writers. We are
committed to publishing diverse perspectives and experiences and strongly
encourage Indigenous women, Black women, and women of colour to submit. We also
welcome submissions in Indigenous languages.
***
DGF’s Fellows program 2022 - 2023
The Fellows program is a year-long New York City-based intensive for
professional dramatists who are looking to develop their existing work in the
next level of their careers. The Fellows is a free program, hosted by the
Dramatists Guild Foundation, to eliminate historical barriers of entry for many
emerging dramatists. This cohort of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and
librettists will work together under the guidance and leadership of
Award-winning dramatists to develop their current work in pursuit of further
development and production.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** ESPIONAGE & TREASON ***
Debate remains about Rosenberg’s complicity in spying by her husband, Julius.
But the play never really examines any of the contradictions of the testimony,
nor does it consider the implications of aiding the Russians at the dawn of the
Cold War. Instead, Ms. Beber, a cousin of the Rosenbergs, depicts Ethel (Tracy
Michailidis) as a blameless wife and mother, guilty of nothing worse than
feeding her son ice cream for dinner and worrying about her weight.
The set never wavers from Ethel’s prison cell, even as the play tours her past
and present. Like a morbid episode of “This Is Your Life,” the play runs from
her days as a high school thespian (she starred as St. Joan) right up to the
electric chair. Loraine (Adrienne C. Moore of “Orange Is the New Black”),
Ethel’s imaginary cellmate, guides these recollections. A figure in flowing
clothes and hoop earrings, Loraine is prone to statements like this: “I’m
multicultural, endlessly dimensional, exuding, including but not excluding
anything.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/theater/ethel-sings-revisits-the-mccarthy-era-rosenberg-execution.html
***
Certainly, this is an explosive subject. Arnold was not only the hero of the
Battle of Saratoga who stood up to his superiors, but also a corrupt war
profiteer. And his motives for betraying his emerging country are intriguingly
ambiguous.
Nelson's true concern is not so much Arnold's treason, but the hypocritical,
bone-chilling, self-righteous patriotism of politicians who evoke God at every
opportunity. Obviously, the playwright is commenting on our present-day
leaders, down to their demand for blind loyalty.
Only one scene has real power. It comes toward the end when the British
commander, Sir Henry Clinton, tries to get Arnold to agree to be exchanged for
Major John Andre, whom the Americans have captured and threatened with hanging.
Thanks to the sophisticated, lively playing of Nicholas Kepros as Clinton, a
man with a sexual yen for Andre, the scene is compelling. For once, dramatic
forces are joined and the outcome, although historically known, is filled with
suspense.
More...
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/general-america-35585/
***
Hugh Whitemore’s PACK OF LIES the new play at the Royale, tells a cold war spy
story about KGB agents and purloined NATO secrets, but its author won't settle
for entertaining the audience with anything as trivial as a suspense yarn. This
is a play about the morality of lying, not the theatrics of espionage, and, in
Mr. Whitemore's view, lying is a virulent disease that saps patriots and
traitors alike of their humanity.
More…
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/12/theater/theater-pack-of-lies-at-the-royale.html
***
Plenty of playwrights try to draw parallels between America’s past and present.
So it can take a minute watching “André,” a play about the Revolutionary United
States that opened on March 10 at the Metropolitan Playhouse, to remember that
this is not a stilted look back at history through the lens of hindsight. “André”
is the story of the British officer who helped Benedict Arnold to turn his
coat. It was written in 1798, when the events it dealt with were still fresh,
and the question of how the Republic should behave in wartime was crucial to
the still-forming identity of a new nation. Plus ça change. ...
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/theater/reviews/16andr.html
***
The past year has seen a significant surge in the number of spies and informers
plying their trade in new English-language plays. Doug Wright's "I Am My
Own Wife," about an East German transsexual who may have acted as an
informer during the Cold War, is currently on Broadway. This fall, the George
Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J., launched the world premiere of Charles
Evered's "Wilderness of Mirrors," about agent recruitment at Yale in
the 1940s. Evered, who teaches writing at Emerson College, based the piece in
part on Robin W. Winks's 1987 book "Cloak & Gown."
More…
http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/12/28/spies_onstage_the_rise_of_the_espionage_play/
***
Mike Bartlett’s curious blank-verse drama Charles III became an international
hit. His new effort examines the cut-throat world of dark-web espionage. An
American traitor named Andrew (Edward Snowden presumably) is hiding out in a
Moscow hotel. Enter a flirty, giggling Irishwoman played by Caoilfhionn Dunne,
who claims to be British and who teases Andrew over his betrayal of his
homeland’s secrets. She evinces an interest in Oscar Wilde and the pair lock
horns over footling minutiae. Andrew points out that Barbie dolls are called
Sindy in the UK and this seems to demonstrate his familiarity with Britain. But
he fails to spot the false cadences of her accent and he doesn’t query her use
of the strange term ‘British Metropolitan Police’. And the name ‘Nick Leeson’
means nothing to him.
More…
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/a-spy-thriller-by-a-writer-with-no-knowledge-of-spying-or-thrilling-hampstead-theatres-wild-reviewed/
***
In
the opening moments of a play called “Treason,” the poet Ezra Pound, dressed
flamboyantly in cape, sombrero, flowing cravat, and ruffled shirt, speaks into
a microphone at a broadcast studio in Rome in 1941. “Kike Rosenfelt,” he
exclaims, “that snotty barbarian … If ever a nation produced efficient
democracy it has been in Germany … Eliminate Roosevelt and his Jews, or the Jews
and their Roosevelt … ”
In the middle of the play called “Treason,” Pound, now at St. Elizabeth’s
Hospital for the Insane in Alexandria, Virginia, is visited in 1955 by a young
American agitator named John Kasper, who does Pound one better with: “This ain’t
about poetry, Pops, this is about the Mission: Cleansing the Anglo-Saxon race
of befouling elements – Nigs, Yids, and the rest of the gutter trash. Write
that, Pops!”
More...
https://www.amny.com/news/poet-in-a-cage-long-before-guantnamo/
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