Don McCann Playwriting Contest 2024
The Oswego Players were established in 1938 as a non-profit community theater organization dedicated to live theater productions and theater education for Oswego area residents. Consistent with those goals, a playwriting contest was established to promote the creation of original, one-act plays by contemporary authors.
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GATHER BY THE GHOST LIGHT will be doing a live recording of horror audio plays in October at Le Chat Noir Theatre in Augusta, GA! And we want you to submit your scripts - we want scripts that allow for immersive sound fx - chainsaws, monsters snarling, jump scares, gore, haunting ghosts, etc. Creepy dialogue is fun and all but we have a foley guy. Make us use him.
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KDC Theatre’s new writing competition and summer show returns as a Festival of New Writing of rehearsed readings - we are asking you to submit your short plays, with the winning scripts making up our Festival of New Writing show, “The Plan”; a great opportunity to see directors and actors bring your words to life. This year we’re asking for submissions with the same opening line: “It’s not like we planned it.”
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BAD MUTHAS ***
This weekend as you celebrate Mother’s Day, count your blessings that you aren’t in the predicament faced by Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
In one of the opera’s most recognizable arias, “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen“ (“Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart”), Pamina’s mother, the Queen of the Night, flies into a fit of vengeful rage. Placing a knife in her daughter’s hand, the Queen of the Night tells Pamina that if she fails to assassinate Sarastro, she will be cursed and disowned. The librettist Emanuel Schikaneder concludes the aria with words which suggest that the Queen of the Night is almost certainly one of opera’s most deranged mothers. (Bellini’s bloodthirsty Norma is a close competitor).
More...
https://thelistenersclub.com/2019/05/10/the-queen-of-the-night-operas-most-deranged-mother/
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Set in Leenane, a small town in Connemara where it pours with rain and the sight of a cow loping across a field is a major event, strange and terrible events take place in the stifling, rural backwater. Mag Folan, the mother from hell, a bullying old gnarled hag maliciously emptying her pisspot into the kitchen sink, and her daughter Maureen, bone-tired at 40, an eternal spinster eternally trapped, live together in mutual hatred and petty primal feuds about lumpy porridge and foul-tasting biscuits.
More...
https://observer.com/1998/03/how-to-murder-your-mother-the-oldfashioned-way/
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Whether you call her Madame Rose or Mama Rose, she's the stage mother from hell. In the dazzling score, by composer Jule Styne and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and in Laurents' coruscating script, Rose is a woman boiling over with her own frustrated ambition. And she channels all her energies into turning her daughters into stars -- woe be to anyone who gets in her way. She's horrifying. She's mesmerizing.
More...
https://www.npr.org/2008/04/13/89512165/stage-mother-from-hell-needy-greedy-mama-rose
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Aubrey had better get used to feeling conflicted. Playing the role of Mrs Wormwood in Matilda the Musical, the ballroom dancing-mad mother of the hit musical's title character, she will be screaming into the upturned faces of pint-sized performers eight times a week for the foreseeable future.
"It's a bizarre thing to come to work every day and shout at nine-year-old girls," agrees Daniel Frederiksen, who plays Mr Wormwood, Matilda's used-car-dealing, book-hating father. "It's a form of child abuse, basically. I thought we would be booed at the end of the show. But so far we're being cheered. Australian audiences are endorsing abuse! People actually seem to find us very funny."
More...
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/musicals/are-matildas-the-wormwoods-the-worst-stage-parents-of-all-time-20150805-giqzas.html
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Of particular interest for this paper is the juxtaposition of conflicting traits in her character. On the one hand, she is characterized as the good mother and perpetuator. On the other hand, she is the terrible, cruel mother and perpetrator. These different characteristics seem to be directly connected to Amanda’s relationship to her children. For her daughter she is the good mother, trying everything to ensure her daughter’s security in the future. Her son experiences his mother’s treatment as suffocating and restricting for his dreams and ambitions. Yet, both of these different attitudes seem to be motivated by the same disposition in Amanda: the love and devotion of a mother for her children. Consequently, there must be other reasons that motivate Amanda’s behavior.
More...
https://www.grin.com/document/71873?lang=en
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Arguably the poster girl for bad mothers is Medea, the antihero of the Greek playwright Euripides’ eponymous play. According to Greek mythology, Medea was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis and the granddaughter of the sun god Helios. She features in the story of Jason and the Gold Fleece in which she plays a central role in Jason’s success. In Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica, Medea promises to help Jason reclaim his inheritance and throne if he agrees to marry her afterwards. It is largely thanks to Medea that Jason is able to complete the otherwise-impossible tasks that her father sets for him. Subsequently, Medea and Jason marry and (if this was a different kind of story) should have lived happily ever after.
More...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/happy-mothers-day-meet-the-worst-mothers-in-history
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I just put a tune in your head that will probably linger the rest of the day, but I had to: It's the prosecution exhibit for those who see Bloody Mary as a horrible old Broadway caricature: a Tonkinese who curses like a sailor, sells grass skirts and shrunken heads at inflated prices and offers her dearest possession - her teenage daughter, Liat - to an American lieutenant for nothing.
"South Pacific" is back. It opened Thursday night at Lincoln Center in New York in its first Broadway revival since its 1949 premiere. Daring then for its treatment of racism and interracial love, it has returned to a nation that is having - or thinks it is having - its most enlightened discussion of race and gender, thanks largely to the presidential campaign.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/opinion/04iht-eddownes.1.11676690.html
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