*** SCRIPTHEALER: NEW WRITING FOR TELEVISION WORKSHOPS WITH FRANCINE VOLPE
& AURIN SQUIRE ***
FRANCINE VOLPE (P-Valley, Tokyo Vice) packs everything she knows about
developing and writing TV content into this Zoom course.
AURIN SQUIRE (The Good Fight, Evil) shows you how to develop thoughts into
compelling ideas that meet industry standards.
Session 1: August 4-6, 6-9:30 ET
The right path to your original pilot script: craft a blueprint for pitching
your show.
Session 2: August 11-13, 6-9:30 ET
Interactive “mock writers’ room” ~ Francine and Showrunners listen to pitches
and offer mock general meetings and mock staffing interviews.
Pricing $900. More
HERE. Sign up: scripthealer@yahoo.com.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Attention Playwrights! Memoriam Development is seeking submissions for our
fifth production of ‘Nightshade’ a one act horror anthology show.
This year, in addition to the horror genre, we are adding the theme “Love Can
Be a Nightmare”. Delve into the darkest corners of your imagination, or just
draw from your own experiences dating in 2023 (it's scary out there) and submit
your most sinister, disturbing and macabre stories to our jury.
***
PLAYground Festival seeks TYA plays
The Purple Crayon Players are committed to expanding representation for young
people, and see PLAYground as an opportunity to to reflect the diverse
experiences of young people today.
Plays must be intended for audiences between 5 and 18 years old, though they
are not required to appeal to this entire age range.
***
The Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, is seeking plays for its
27th Annual Black Box New Play Festival to be held in January 2024. Each play
selected will be given a black box production with non-equity actors.
Playwrights must be available, if not in person, via Zoom or some other virtual
venue for rehearsals and use this as an opportunity to continue work on their
play.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** BARBENHEIMER ~ LIVE ON STAGE ***
Barbenheimer is an Internet phenomenon that began circulating ahead of the
simultaneous theatrical release of two blockbusters that have been widely
regarded as dissimilar in style and content, Barbie and Oppenheimer, on July
21, 2023...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbenheimer
***
When Nora Helmar slammed the door behind her and walked out of her husband’s
home in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the reverberation echoed through the succeeding
century. Since the play’s premiere in 1879, generations of feminists have drawn
inspiration from that act of rebellion. Did you know that one of those women
was Barbie?
The delightfully twisted vision of Nora in Barbie’s Dreamhouse is the central
image of Doll, a new production from Theater Couture, playing through November
19 at PS 122. The high-camp company has come up with equally perverse
juxtapositions on previous occasions: Charlie’s Angels working for Charles
Manson (Charlie!), for example, or the tabloid story of drag queen Dorian
Corey, who had a mummified corpse in her closet crossed with Edgar Alan Poe
(Tell-Tale). This time, Ibsen’s classic is dragged kicking and screaming into
the next century decked in the trappings of Mattel’s popular plastic toy.
“There’s going to be some serious pink!” promises Erik Jackson, the playwright.
“This is Barbie pre-Liberation,” explains Jackson, who also penned Charlie! and
Tell-Tale. The idea, he reports, came from the show’s director, Joshua
Rosenzweig. “He sees Barbie as the first independent woman,” Jackson continues.
“This woman was doing her own thing in the 50s and 60s. She was single, she was
a stewardess, an astronaut, and a beauty contestant. She owned her dream home
and had a dream car. Sure, she saw Ken–but only occasionally, when the mood
struck her!”
More...
https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/barbie-doll_1045.html
***
Ideas are monolithic in the Keen Company’s revival of “In the Matter of J.
Robert Oppenheimer.” Heinar Kipphardt’s 1969 play adapts the transcripts of the
1954 governmental inquiry that questioned whether Oppenheimer — known as “the
father of the atomic bomb” — was a true patriot or an unrepentant Communist
whose hesitancy about the development of U.S. weaponry constituted treason.
Trying to consider the entire McCarthy era, Kipphardt explores not only the
question of nuclear war but also the roles dissent and nonconformity can play
in American democracy.
The play never simplifies its arguments. Every character — including
Oppenheimer (Thomas Jay Ryan), the government attorneys arguing over his
patriotism and the panel of scientists who will judge him — delivers an
intricate speech on war, weaponry or the value of independent thought.
Beautifully wrought, these monologues demand close attention as they wend
toward their conclusions, and Kipphardt’s writing always offers the reward of a
surprising or inflammatory insight.
Everything about Carl Forsman’s production insists on the gravitas of the
words. Nathan Heverin’s four-tier, inverse pyramid set creates an imposing
chain of command, from judges to defenders to prosecutors to witnesses. Power
seems to crash down on Oppenheimer, a lone figure sitting at the bottom of the
heap.
More...
https://variety.com/2006/legit/reviews/in-the-matter-of-j-robert-oppenheimer-1200515667/
***
On April 29, 2002, the woman who created Barbie died. I guess I missed the news
that day. A New York Times op-ed written about Ruth Handler said that “perhaps
Barbie’s most significant attribute is her capacity to make people wonder what
she would be like if she were really human. But to imagine Barbie as a real
woman is to imagine her subject to time itself. It is to imagine her with real
politics, real worries, a constant struggle with the memory of her own once
ideal figure. Above all, it is to imagine her with a voice.”
I went to a play this past Friday night called “I Am Barbie,” and we no longer
have to imagine Barbie with a voice. She spoke, via actress Ivy Castle-Rush in
the titular role, and she had lots to say about her life & times.
Notes from the playwright, Walton Beacham, say:
“Barbie celebrates her 50th birthday by reminiscing about her careers, her
relationship with Ken and other characters from her life, who express their own
opinions about Barbie. An important motif is Barbie’s breasts as cultural icon,
symbol and statement of feminine status, power and vulnerability. Two of the
characters, Midge’s mother and Barbie’s creator Ruth, develop breast cancer.”
More on that in a sec.
The play was my introduction to Ruth Handler. I must admit, I’d never given
Barbie’s creator much thought. Although more than 1 billion Barbies have been
sold in more than 150 countries, and although Barbie even has her own Hall of
Fame, in Palo Alto, CA, I never thought much about her. I have bought
Barbie dolls, clothes, and accessories as birthday gifts for Macy’s friends,
but knew nothing of Barbie’s story or that of her creator.
More...
https://pinkunderbelly.com/2011/05/23/i-am-barbie/
***
The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Carson Kreitzer explores the life of
one of the greatest American scientific minds of the twentieth century. J.
Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist in the quest to unlock the secrets of
atomic energy in the 1940s, spent the latter part of his life trying to make
sense of the impact of his research. Under his direction, a number of the
greatest physicists of the day, some Jewish and exiled, where secluded in the
American South West and given unprecedented resources to pursue their research.
From their work emerged one of the most terrible weapons the world has ever
seen—the atomic bomb. Speaking about his work on the project, Oppenheimer famously
quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds.” What happens when the pragmatic forces of the military co-opt
unshackled scientific freedom?
More...
https://www.browntaps.org/the-love-song-of-j-robert-oppenheimer/
***
Barbie, it turns out, is a brunette. That is, Erin Elizabeth Coors, the actress
playing Barbie here, has short-cropped brown hair tucked under her flowing
blond wig.
That's right. After 47 years as a perky-breasted plastic prop, and six as an
animated fairy-tale princess on the small screen, the consummate pink icon of
little-girlhood is breathing, singing, dancing and even flying across the stage
in her first live show. Actress Barbie Has a Dark Little Secret
"This one talks and you don't have to press anything," Abby Reinhart,
9, said after the opening performance of "Barbie Live in Fairytopia"
here on Saturday at the 80-year-old Palace Theater, the start of a planned
two-year tour across 80 cities. "We've never known she would come to life.
Now I finally get to hear her in real life."
Taking product placement to new heights, the show -- called a
"kidsical" for combining traditional children's-theater interaction
with Broadway-caliber costumes and 12 original songs -- is Mattel's latest
effort to buttress a brand battered by competition in recent years. Nowadays, a
doll is never just a doll but a multimedia experience, so perhaps it was
inevitable that Barbie, whose Web site and DVD's already top the charts with
the under-6 set, would join Dora the Explorer, the Rugrats and Winnie the Pooh
on stages around the country.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/theater/actresss-dark-secret-remains-secure-in-barbie-live-in-fairytopia.html
***
The most gripping moments in “Oppenheimer,” the sprawling drama by British
playwright Tom Morton-Smith about the man dubbed “the father of the atomic
bomb,” are the brainstorming meetings of scientists racing against their German
counterparts during World War II to invent the most destructive weapon in the
history of humanity.
The play, a Royal Shakespeare Company hit that is receiving its American
premiere by Rogue Machine Theatre at the Electric Lodge in Venice, doesn’t need
any prerequisites. Theater and history majors will find as much to chomp on as
engineering students in a script that at times resembles an overstuffed course
catalog. While the science isn’t exactly sexy, it’s often dramatically
scintillating.
Physics is made fascinating as characters with PhDs and awkward social graces
gather to illustrate with their bodies the process of splitting the atom. These
eggheads have an electric current running through them as they map out
equations, their eyes agog not so much with patriotism as with math.
More...
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/theater/reviews/la-et-cm-oppenheimer-review-20181005-story.html
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