Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Sundog Theatre's longtime, interrupted-by-the-pandemic series "The
Originals" continues this winter on MakerPark Radio's internet-based
station in NYC. Sundog is seeking plays that actors will read, broadcast live
on the web, and heard/seen throughout NYC, the US, and worldwide in January
2023.
***
The West Side Show Room is seeking new 10-minute works which will be presented
in a staged reading on January 19-21, 2023 in Rockford, Illinois. We accept
spoken word poetry, plays, monologues, stories— or anything written for live
performance.
***
The Atlanta Shakespeare Company is launching a new playwriting initiative for
historically marginalized artists. The "Muse Of Fire Playwriting
Festival'' invites playwrights of the global majority to create a full-length
play that reimagines Shakespeare’s themes and plots through the lens of BIPOC
America.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** DEMOCRACY ***
In the Sophocles play “Antigone,” King Creon, after ordering the execution of
his niece for betraying him, asks, “Am I to rule for others, or myself?”
Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s lover, in his shock and grief, replies, “A
State for one man is no State at all.”
This simple exchange, written around 441 B.C., demonstrates how one character
came to challenge the autocracy of another in early Greek theater, and how
Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides nurtured the idea of fairness and
representation for all during the brief two centuries of Athenian democracy.
Their plays, among the 32 that survive from what are thought to be thousands
from this era among many writers, are the earliest representations of how
democracy helped change Western civilization.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/world/europe/greece-democracy-theater.html
***
Frayn's play is densely historical, an information-fat study of the
"Guillaume affair" that upturned German politics in the 1970s. The
dialogue about coalitions – met with knowing titters on press night – comes
early, when West German chancellor Willy Brandt (Patrick Drury) is struggling
to hold together his government. As in real life, Brandt and his advisers
(William Hoyland's party elder Wehner; David Mallinson's ambitious cabinet
member Schmidt; Aidan McArdle's oily yes man Guillaume) come to have bigger
problems. East Germany, with which left-leaning Brandt seeks an entente, has
put a spy in Brandt's government. It's Guillaume, a man so close to his boss
the two share evening wine and confidential telexes. They even holiday
together.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jun/24/democracy-frayn-review
***
Theater and democracy were born in the same place at the same time – in Athens
2,500 years ago — and that is no coincidence: One led to the other.
The creation of theater festivals in the 6th century BCE brought the four
warring tribes of Athens into a common space to share a common experience,
which engendered a new sense of unity, and of community. ( “In a characteristic
attempt to ensure full participation by the citizens,” one source notes, “those
eligible were paid to attend the dramatic performances.” !!)
Democracy took root shortly after these festivals began. Athens’ unprecedented
period of citizen power and engagement developed simultaneously with its
unmatched burst of theatrical creativity led by the playwrights Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides.
More...
https://newyorktheater.me/2021/01/10/theater-and-democracy-born-together-both-now-under-attack/
***
When exploring the benefits and limitations of representative democracy through
art, what better way could there be to do so than by having the audience of
said art engage in that kind of democracy themselves? Students used this unique
format during “Democracy Theater — City Council Meeting,“ a play born out of
the fall freshman seminar FRS 143: “Is Politics a Performance?”
Staged as part of Wintersession on Monday, Jan. 25, the play was a reenactment
of a city council meeting in Trenton, N.J., in which the audience itself
participated as actors. It was meant to invite reflection on the character of
representative democracy and the power imbalance it creates between those who
are represented and those who represent them.
The play opened with a recorded video of an apolitical person expressing their
dissatisfaction with electoral politics. The narrator tried, through his use of
persuasive rhetoric, to convince him that democratic institutions are worth
participating in. The video then cut to black as the creative team called on
members of the audience to participate as actors in the play. Some of the
actors became councilors, while others became members of the public, and all
volunteers were given scripts. The rest of the play was about the interaction
between these two groups of people.
More...
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2021/03/democracy-theater-politics-local-gov-freshman-seminar-review
***
The earliest instance we have of the Greek term for demagoguery (demagogia)
appears in the Knights. It meant initially no more than “leading the demos,”the
demos being the largest political class that is by definition the poorest and
so the least educated. But “demagoguery” soon came to have the same odor it has
for us. A demagogue is an unscrupulous master of slippery rhetoric who, for his
own ends, plays the crowd like a cheap fiddle. As a character in the Knights
puts it, “demagoguery no longer belongs to a man acquainted with the things of
the Muses or to one whose ways are upright / But to somebody unlearned and
loathsome.”
In the play Cleon is dubbed “Paphlagon” (roughly “Blusterer”), a servant of the
Athenian people who are presented as a single householder, Mr. Demos. (Think
Uncle Sam.) Athens’s two greatest generals at the time, Demosthenes and Nicias,
also appear as servants of Mr. Demos and so see first-hand the dirty tricks
Paphlagon-Cleon is up to. In cooperation with the upper-class knights, these
great military men plot to restore Athens to something like the grandeur of its
past. Make Athens Great Again!
More...
https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/52300/demagogues-democracy-an-ancient-comedy-for-modern-times/
***
“The Minutes” had its official opening Sunday at Broadway’s Studio 54, in a
juicily subversive production directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Taking place during
a closed city council meeting in mythical Big Cherry in Almost Anystate,
U.S.A., this sterling comedy-drama starts in unassumingly sedate fashion.
Ninety minutes later, it explodes like a meticulously wrapped gift that had
been hiding a live grenade. What unfolds in between is a scathing satire of the
American way — which is to say, the official predilection for denial, denial,
denial of the country’s historic sins, particularly as they concern the cruel
treatment of its original inhabitants.
“Democracy’s messy,” Big Cherry’s mayor, played with impeccable control
freakiness by stage and film actor Letts himself, opines to the council’s
dissenting member, Mr. Peel (an outstanding Noah Reid). That declaration is a
smokescreen for the ongoing effort to perpetuate Big Cherry’s Big Lie —
concerning the town’s origin story — which playwright Letts exhilaratingly
brings to light, point by mendacious point.
More...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/04/18/the-minutes-tracy-letts-broadway/
***
Theater is the essential artform of democracy...truth comes from the collision
of different ideas and the emotional muscle of empathy are the necessary tools
of democratic citizenship.”
Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of The Public Theater in New York, speaks to
the importance of dialogue in theater to give perspective and empathy, that
truth is not held within one person, but by the conflict of various points of
view.
https://live.stanford.edu/2020-digital-season/oskar-eustis-why-theater-essential-democracy
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