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*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
For many years Steppenwolf Theatre Company has accepted unsolicited
submissions every July and August from Chicagoland writers only, but as of two
years ago, we now accept unsolicited submissions from unrepresented talent
everywhere, which has greatly increased our pool. In recognition of our
commitment to fostering unrepresented voices, during the months of July and
August, we invite unrepresented writers to submit a sample of their work to the
Steppenwolf Literary team using the form below. We look forward to learning
more about you and your artistry!
***
Calling all thespians! Harwood Museum of Art seeks 10-minute original plays on
the theme of “Harwood 100: Reflecting on Our Legacy. Envisioning the Future”
for production in January 2024.
The performing arts have been an integral part of the Harwood since its early years.
John Gaw Meem’s 1938 building addition included a communal theater room on the
second story. For over seventy years, this theater hosted hundreds of locally
created events and plays. The Harwood 100 Playwriting Competition is an homage
to this tradition and a community invitation to be part of telling the story of
the Harwood, its collections, and Taos history.
***
As Urban Stages (NYC) celebrates its 40th-anniversary season, we are thrilled
to announce a new play festival and invite submissions.
We are now accepting full-length plays that require 2 actors. Winning plays
will receive a staged reading in January-February 2024 and will be seriously
considered for a full production on our Off-Broadway stage.
Cast and Character Size: For this festival, we are interested in plays that
work within the confines of a two-actor cast. However, there is no limit to the
number of characters a play can contain as long as there is doubling, and two
actors can perform the entire play. es who will grace our stages for years to
come.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** THE FABULOUS INVALID ***
In just the past few months, major regional theaters in Chicago and Los Angeles
have suspended performances until at least next year, while New York’s famed
Public Theater canceled its beloved Under the Radar festival and laid off 19
percent of its staff.
These losses and many others have inspired renewed calls for the government to
save America’s nonprofit professional theaters. What strikes me about these
calls isn’t that they’ve been sounded time and again to no avail. It’s that
there are still people who believe that these institutions — struggling in
cities big and small across the country — should be rescued in their current
form.
That’s not to say the government shouldn’t fund the arts. Of course it should,
especially in times of profound crisis such as these. Art is a vital national
concern: It gives us meaning It’s the food of the soul. And we’re going to need
well-fed souls in the years ahead.
But too many theaters have ceased to serve this function. The closings,
cancellations and plummeting ticket sales — only worsened by the pandemic —
attest to that. Theater leaders should read the writing on the wall instead of
continuing to beat on a closed door.
More...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/09/how-to-save-american-theater/
***
Seattle’s ACT Contemporary Theater has reduced the length of each show’s run by
a week. In Los Angeles, the Geffen Playhouse will no longer schedule
performances on Tuesdays, its slowest night. Philadelphia’s Arden Theater
Company expects to give 363 performances next season, down from 503
performances the season before the pandemic.
Why is this happening? Costs are up, the government assistance that kept many
theaters afloat at the height of the pandemic has mostly been spent, and
audiences are smaller than they were before the pandemic, a byproduct of
shifting lifestyles (less commuting, more streaming), some concern about the
downtown neighborhoods in which many large nonprofit theaters are situated
(worries about public safety), and broken habits (many former patrons,
particularly older people, have not returned).
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/theater/regional-theater-crisis.html
***
Theater has always been a risky endeavor. Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Dangling
Conversation” asked “Is the theater really dead?” back in 1966. The current
situation, however, risks building to an unprecedented crisis: the shuttering
of theaters across the country and a permanent shrinking of the possibilities
of the American stage. For those of us in New York, it might be easy to look at
Broadway’s return to pre-Covid audience numbers and think it signals something
like normal. But Broadway in its current form depends on nonprofit theaters to
develop material and support artists. Nonprofit theaters are where many recent
hits — including “A Strange Loop” and “Hamilton,” both of which won Pulitzer
Prizes — started out.
So how do we avoid this catastrophe? Just as in other areas of recent American
life where entire industries were imperiled — banks, the auto industry — this
crisis requires federal intervention.
That’s right: The American nonprofit theater needs a bailout.
Regional and nonprofit theaters were in trouble well before 2020 and the force
majeure of the pandemic. Most regional and nonprofit theaters were built on a
subscription model, in which loyal patrons paid for a full season of tickets
upfront. Foundation grants, donations and single ticket sales made up the
balance of the budgets.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/opinion/theater-collapse-bailout.html
***
One morning last August I visited Williams College in Massachusetts to teach a
workshop on “building a life in the arts” with a group of racially,
geographically, and economically diverse young people working at the
Williamstown Theatre Festival. Later that night I attended a show at the
theater, where I saw these idealistic apprentices taking tickets from,
ushering, and selling merchandise to an overwhelmingly white audience—mostly
over 60 and, judging by appearances, quite well-off. The social and cultural
distance between the aspiring artists at Williamstown and their theater-going
audience couldn’t have been more pronounced. This gulf is quite familiar to
most producers and practitioners of the performing arts in America; it plays
out nightly at regional theaters, ballets, symphonies, and operas across the
country.
The current state of the arts in this country is a microcosm of the state of
the nation. Large, mainstream arts institutions, founded to serve the public
good and assigned non-profit status to do so, have come to resemble exclusive
country clubs. Meanwhile, outside their walls, a dynamic new generation of artists,
and the diverse communities where they live and work, are being systematically
denied access to resources and cultural legitimation.
More...
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/the-state-of-public-funding-for-the-arts-in-america/424056/
***
The Great White Way has already become a kind of Disney World with dirt and
real crime, an attraction that the people who used to support it can afford to
visit only once a year. Even if Broadway is cleaned up, the author argues, the
changes in New York City guarantee that it will never be what it was
A CITY IS A MACHINE THAT WORKS BY INERTIA. By virtue of their solidity and
expense, large buildings act as a brake on social change. Each one, from the
most squalid tenement to the ritziest hotel, represents a way of life that has
jelled into just this form and is jealous of its right to continue as is. Thus
neighborhoods in the process of gentrification acquire graffiti threatening
death to yuppie invaders, and all bastions of privilege hire doormen to defend
them from riffraff. Finally, however, no single building, no street, no
neighborhood, can hold its own against the glacial advance of larger social
forces.
Right now such a social glacier is poised at the edge of New York City’s
already much eroded theater district. For many decades inertial real-estate
values, abetted by landmark-designation legislation, have earned Broadway the
dubious epithet “Fabulous Invalid.” In the nineties the Fabulous Invalid is
destined to become the Inglorious Corpse, and the Great White Way to become a
graveyard for great white elephants, as, one by one, the thirtysix theaters
left in the Broadway area find themselves unable to attract either shows or
audiences.
More...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/03/the-death-of-broadway/669591/
***
The most conclusive evidence that the source of the theater's financial
problems is to be found elsewhere is the proportion of the budget allocated to
the stagehands' unions. When we examined actual accountants' statements for a
sample of Broadway productions, we found that outlays for stage crews
constituted well under per cent of either production operating costs in every
case, and in fact were closer to 2.5 per cent of total operating costs. In
effect, if one could eliminate not only featherbedding outlays but the entire expenditure
for stage crews, it would mean only a 3 or 4 per cent reduction in total
costs—certainly not the difference between a hit production and one that is a
financial catastrophe.
A second symptom which has misled some diagnosticians is the notion that greedy
theater owners and/or producers keep audiences away by charging astronomically
high admission fees in order to rake in excessive profits. In the first place,
it must be said that even commercial theater is no gold mine for most of its
entrepreneurs and investors. Those in the business estimate that no more than
one in six or seven productions ends up as a “hit.”
In the second place, the charge of profiteering is not substantiated by the
level of ticket prices, although there is no question but that the price of
theater seats has risen. An orchestra seat at a musical comedy now costs from
$12 to $15, while in 1926.27—Broadway's heyday in terms of total number of
productions—the same seat cost about $4.50, or a third of what it costs today.
However, in 1926 the dollar was worth about 2⅔ as much as it is today. Thus,
after inflation, the present price of theater tickets has hardly risen at all
relative to the general price level. Indeed, since per capita income has risen
some 2½ times in purchasing power during this period, it is certainly not true
that potential patrons are less able to afford the theater today than they were
in the “good old days.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/02/archives/what-ails-the-fabulous-invalid-its-not-what-you-think-what-really.html
***
Kaufman and Hart coined the phrase "the fabulous invalid" to describe
the resilience of the theater despite continual pronouncements of its demise.
In 1940, The New York Times referred to it as "a fond phrase that will
probably stick," and the phrase has indeed entered the vernacular.[9][8]
In his 2001 biography of Hart, Steven Bach wrote that the play's title was
"the most enduring thing about it."[6]
More...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Invalid
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