Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Foible
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OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS
***
For spring/summer 2023, City Fox Books is looking to publish a limited series
of full-length plays written for stage. We would like to see plays which are
unconventional, and are particularly interested in plays which are surreal,
experimental, absurdist, existentialist or politically subversive in nature.
Plays must have at least 2 characters.
***
Emerging Artists Theatre (EAT) is seeking submissions for their Fall Spark
Theatre Festival NYC. The festival is scheduled to run October 30th through
November 19th.
Spark Theatre Festival NYC showcases polished works-in-progress. Many of the
pieces that are showcased at the festival are being presented in front of an
audience for the first time. Each participant is given the option of doing a
talkback following their performance, where they are given the chance to ask
the audience for feedback on their work.
***
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, and a workshop presentation. If you are a playwright
and your play is chosen to participate in the Advance Theatre Festival, Ruby
Slippers Theatre in partnership with The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts will
cover the costs of all rehearsals prior to the day of the reading, your
technical rehearsal, promotion, theatrical venue, and all artists’ fees.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** PULITZER PRIZE IN DRAMA 2023 ***
You are a writer, and you wrote a play about language. What did you learn about
words?
I feel incredibly insecure about both my English and Farsi speaking abilities —
I feel like I know 50 percent of each language, and I feel like I’m always
bombing job interviews because the words never come to me in the way that I
want them to come to me. This play was, of course, so much about my parents and
immigrants and hoping that we can extend grace to people who are trying to
express themselves in a language they didn’t grow up speaking, but I think it
was also a reminder to be kind to myself.
What is it like to watch the play with audiences who are, presumably, mostly
not Iranian Americans?
It’s light torture to watch your play with an audience around you. I just watch
them watch the play. I remember in New York when we did it, it was hard to feel
like we were getting the wrong kinds of laughs some nights. But I also have
been really moved by the non-Iranian audiences who have come to see the play
and have found themselves in it. That’s what you ask of an audience, and that’s
beautiful.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/theater/sanaz-toossi-pulitzer-prize-english.html
***
“Someone said to me once, when they were talking about [Wish You Were Here],
they were like, ‘The way these women talk, you’re making a point, right? That
Muslim women, Middle Eastern women, speak this way,’” Toossi recalls, visibly
perturbed. “Is it making a point when you’re just representing your own life? I
don’t know. I just feel like that’s only something that would be tagged on a
playwright of color, like, ‘Oh, you’re making a point talking about the very
basic aspects of your life.’” And then she said something that was both
brutally accurate and entirely unexpected, given the calmness of her tone:
“People are more comfortable seeing, in a Middle Eastern play, a sexual assault
onstage than a woman having her own period.”
That kind of out-of-left-field-but-so-truthful-it-hurts sensibility peppers
Toossi’s plays too. Her breakout hit English takes place in a classroom in
Iran, where citizens of different ages are learning English. It’s a concept
rife for laughs, linguistic misunderstanding being well-worn fodder for comedy.
Audiences do laugh initially: at students playing word games or having basic
conversations in accented English about their favorite color. This lulls us
into a state of comfort, though, for simple but powerful truths that knock us off
our axis. As when the teacher, Marjan, remarks on the difficulty of keeping two
languages in her brain: “My English, my Farsi—these two languages, they [war]
in my head. And the Farsi is winning. Do you know, sometimes I think you can
only speak one language? You can know two but…I feel like I’m disappearing.”
Here, the bracket represents a word the character cannot find—a hyper-realistic
flourish that mirrors how in real life, unlike in a play, it’s not always
possible to find the right words.
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/04/28/sanaz-toossi-can-we-talk/
***
In 2018, Sanaz Toossi, the playwright, emailed me and asked if I could read for
a part in her then thesis at NYU, called ENGLISH. I thought it was a beautiful
role. I’ve done multiple readings of it throughout the years, including a zoom
reading during the pandemic. Then in 2021, I saw the news that it was coming to
the Atlantic. While I was not certain that the role would go to me, I was proud
that the world was going to experience this play. Then, I was asked to come in
for a work session with the creative team, and while it’s intimidating to have
15 people, in masks, silently judging your work, I thought to myself that I
will do the role as I had done it before and live in its truth as I felt and
experienced it. I approached the audition from the point of view that “this is
what I’d do in the role if you give me the opportunity,” which frees you to be
who you see the character to be in that moment, while giving you the freedom to
change and receive direction as though you’re in rehearsal.
That’s how I like to approach my auditions. Working on an audition as though
you’re already working on the project and not just auditioning for it, gives
you more ease, confidence, and openness to be present and guided.
More...
https://frontmezzjunkies.com/2022/02/15/actress-activist-pooya-mohseni-on-her-role-in-sanaz-toossis-english/
***
If you were to peruse Sanaz Toossi’s Instagram you would find a recent headshot
with the tongue-in-cheek caption, “i am an extremely serious artist.” She
stares into the camera, head tilted, with a wistful gaze and with a gold
necklace pulling focus from her dark black hair. The pendant, hanging on the
gold chain, is Sanaz’s own name in Farsi.
When asked about her views on language, Toossi said “I love that language fails
us. It should.” She went on to describe her acceptance of the limitations of
language. “I’ve tried to learn to be comfortable with the inability to fully
encapsulate something”
Toossi’s writing beautifully makes space for the limitations of language. When
told by an interviewer that her use of language evokes a sense of homesickness,
she responded “I’ve been looking for that term for a really long time because I
think it defines all of my work. Homesickness.”
Sanaz Toossi grew up in Orange County, California, always aware of her family's
home in Iran. She was raised in a bilingual household, with parents whose
native language was Farsi. “I was a weird theatre kid,” she said of her youth.
“When I started writing plays, I was trying to bridge the gap between my
Iranian-ness and my American-ness.”
Toossi went on to earn an MFA in playwright from NYU and had two Off Broadway
plays premiere this year, at the age of 30. Toossi’s first play to receive a
major production was English, which was set to premiere in 2020, but was
postponed to 2022 due to the COVID pandemic. Called “a rich new play” by the
New York Times, English is set in Iran in 2008 and follows four adults in an
English language class as they anxiously prepare to take the Test of English as
a Foreign Language (commonly known as TOEFL). One student, Roya, is in the
class so she can learn English to speak with her granddaughter, who was raised
in “The Canada” and doesn’t know Farsi.
When the characters of English speak their native language, the audience hears
it translated as English, without an accent. Whenever the students speak
English, the audience hears English spoken with their accent. When asked about
this theatrical approach, Toossi said “I'd played with this conceit before when
trying to write a family drama. I grew up in a bilingual household, and I felt
that for an audience to truly empathize with my [native Farsi-speaking]
characters, I couldn't actually write dialogue in Farsi, because the Farsi
would act as a barrier to understanding the characters' inner lives.” English was
developed over multiple years, and Toossi’s perspective has shifted in this
time. “I've changed my mind about this. I love hearing different languages
onstage. It certainly does not keep me from engaging. And in a way, I was
re-enforcing the notion of non-English as ‘other.’" Ultimately, her goal
was to write a comedic and honest portrayal of the anxiety of trying to be
understood.
More...
https://www.studiotheatre.org/plays/play-detail/2022-2023-english/Sanaz-Toossi-profile
***
LEAH REDDY: What is your theatre origin story? How did you come to playwriting?
SANAZ TOOSSI: I was a weird theatre kid, so I had always loved and gravitated
to theatre. After I graduated college, I had a bit of a meltdown; I felt my
life going in a direction that scared me. So I decided to take a leap.
LR: What inspired you to write English?
ST: A lot: the disrespect for immigrants, my own insecurities over my English
and Farsi-speaking abilities, how devastating it is not to be understood.
LR: I’m struck by the approach you took to having the characters - all of whom
are native Farsi-speakers - speak unaccented English to indicate that they’re
speaking Farsi, and accented English when they’re speaking English in the play.
Can you tell us how you landed on this approach?
ST: I'd played with this conceit before when trying to write a family drama. I
grew up in a bilingual household, and I felt that for an audience to truly
empathize with my (native Farsi-speaking) characters, I couldn't actually write
dialogue in Farsi, because the Farsi would act as a barrier to understanding the
characters' inner lives. I've changed my mind about this. I love hearing
different languages onstage. It certainly does not keep me from engaging. And
in a way, I was re-enforcing the notion of non-English as "other."
Still, this conceit works for English, because to understand the difficulty of
the English, you really have to understand the comfort of the Farsi and thus
the tragedy of being robbed of your mother tongue.
More...
https://www.roundabouttheatre.org/get-tickets/upstage-guides-current/english/playwright-sanaz-toossi/
***
Of course, that’s the difference between language as hobby and language as
destiny. These Iranian students’ future depends on passing the TOEFL (Test of
English as a Foreign Language). The anxiety and fear of failing permeates the
actors’ performances, and there’s something else they’re even better at
communicating: resentment. “English” was conceived as Toossi’s MFA thesis, and
running around the edges of her play is the inherent patriarchy of formal
education. Toossi tweaks that indictment by having the teacher be female, but
the subjugation of the students by an illiberal force propagating Western
culture remains. That’s tyranny. The other choice is chaos — let the students
run the classroom and no one learns. “English” explores the tyranny, but fudges
the chaos. For example, left unexplained is how one incompetent student
eventually aces her test.
Theatergoers should know that “English” breaks through the shackles of that
language by having the entire final scene spoken in Farsi. Surtitles are not
provided. The last time I saw an English-language work with an entire scene
performed in another language was Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’ otherwise
wonderful “The Light in the Piazza” in 2005. The idea is to put us in the
uncomfortable position of the character(s). But we’re not in Italy, we’re not
in Iran. We’re in a theater, and the feeling communicated is “I could be home
watching ‘Jame Jam’ instead.”
More...
https://www.thewrap.com/english-off-broadway-review-sanaz-toossis-play-gets-lost-in-translation/
***
Marjan, who lived in the U.K., in the northern English city of Manchester, for
nine years, tries to defuse the hostility, claiming, “English is not to be
conquered. Embrace it. You can be all the things you are in Farsi in English,
too. I always liked myself better in English.” But, she admits, for those nine years
she was called “Mary,” not her real name, even though she said she liked it.
“Marjan is not hard to say,” says Elham. “Our mothers get to name us. Not
foreigners,” says Roya.
Marjan persists, sensing her pupils’ frustration at inviting “a foreign language
into your body,” but she asks that in this classroom “we are not Iranian.” She
wants them during the classes to “let go” of their Iranian-ness.
This isn’t easy. We see Roya trying to call her son, and not only stumbling
over words, but over the distance—geographical and emotional—those stumbling
words have come to emblemize. It is too much for her, asking Marjan why she
treats Farsi like “a stench after a long day’s work.” She refuses to play along
in a show-and-tell, defiantly bringing traditional Iranian music into class.
“This is my song,” she says, sitting ramrod straight in her chair.
Elham wishes for a global history that had led to the primacy of the Persian
Empire. Instead of being told to speak American, “All of us would speak Farsi.”
They may agree about this, but Roya also says Elham is so obnoxious personally,
in an English context she will have “no redeeming qualities.” This may be true,
but Ashe adeptly makes all of Elham’s jagged edges—and there are many—totally
understandable. Indeed, we cheer for her when she finally beats know-it-all
Omid in a game of “Things you find in a kitchen.”
There are various twists as the play moves towards its conclusion, not cravenly
deployed, but in the quiet, wry spirit of the play itself as it continues to
question the relationships of language, identity, and place. It does not reach
firm or didactic conclusions.
More...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/english-is-one-of-the-best-plays-in-new-york-right-now
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