OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Submissions are now open for the 2024 cycle of PlayList, a short play development series from The CRY HAVOC Company.
Each participating playwright will complete the project with a submission-ready 10-minute play. The 2024 PlayList project will culminate with a public presentation of the play collection.
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City Theatre is looking for the best short plays from all over for our upcoming 2024-25 season that furthers our mission to identify, acknowledge, and award excellence in dramatic writing. Having produced hundreds of plays, we want scripts that are lively and timely, hilarious, provocative, poignant, and surprising. We look for plays that span style and genre. We will consider bilingual scripts and ten-minute musicals. We have no restriction on the age range of the characters. In other words, we are seeking compelling plays that rise above the ordinary.
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The 2024/25 Theatre503 International Playwriting Award aims to identify and champion debut/early career playwrights.
You are an eligible writer if you have not already had a full-length play of more than 65 minutes produced for 3-4 weeks or more in any theatre, and two weeks or more in a major subsidised theatre/organisation including a national tour. You only have limited international credits where longer runs are not part of a country’s ecology and/or limited screen credits.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE ***
There are four mysterious areas of Marlowe's life: his homosexuality, his atheism, his involvement in espionage, and the circumstances of his death. The evidence about them is suggestive but inconclusive, which helps explain the endless fascination of his life, character, and connections.
After his death Marlowe was damned as a homosexual who supposedly said "all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools" and as a "lewd lover" of women who'd been stabbed to death by a bawdy rival. Evidence for both (he may have been bisexual) can be found in his works. The dalliance of Jupiter and Ganymede in Dido, Queen of Carthage, of Henry III and his minions in The Massacre at Paris, of Neptune and Leander in Hero and Leander, and of Edward and Gaveston in Edward II, which exalts notable homosexuals ("The mightiest kings have had their minions," 1.4.390-396) suggest the former. His sexy translation of Ovid's Fifth Elegy ("all liked me passing well; / I clinged her naked body, down she fell. / Judge you the rest: being tired she bade me kiss; / Jove send me more such afternoons as this"), publicly burned in 1599, and intensely erotic passages in Hero and Leander suggest the latter. A sexually ambiguous couplet in this poem—"She swore he was a maid in man's attire, / For in his looks were all that men desire"—complicates the confusing question.
More...
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0042.306;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg#:~:text=There%20are%20four%20mysterious%20areas,life%2C%20character%2C%20and%20connections.
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A controversial document in which the playwright Christopher Marlowe reportedly declared that Christ was gay, that the only purpose of religion was to intimidate people, and that “all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools” is to go on show online for the first time.
The so-called “Baines note”, a star item in the British Library’s Renaissance manuscript collection, offers tantalising evidence about the private life of Marlowe, one of the most scandalous and magnetic figures of the Elizabeth period.
Compiled in May 1593 by the police informant and part-time spy Richard Baines, it claims to record a conversation between the two men in which the playwright airs a long list of what Baines describes as “monstrous opinions”.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/mar/31/christopher-marlowe-spy-baines-note-gay-christ-british-library-online
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There are those who believe King Edward II was a homosexual, and those who believe he was not. A very few extant descriptions, centuries-long rumor, and Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play have led to Edward II becoming known in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a homosexual, a sodomite, and a sexual deviant.1 Accounts of the historical Edward’s “brotherly” relationships convince some that he engaged in intimate sexual relationships with men, while others insist that the absence of firm evidence and the fact that he produced children mean he could not have had sex with men.2 That Marlowe himself is thought to have had male sexual partners only adds to Edward’s mystique.
More...
https://journals.ku.edu/jdtc/article/view/4400/4128
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MARIO DiGANGI, a professor at the City University of New York and the author of ''The Homo erotics of Early Modern Drama,'' said in an interview, ''People who have been uncomfortable with the homoerotic element in Shakespeare -- such as the sonnets -- have tried to rescue Shakespeare from homosexuality by displacing it onto Marlowe.'' In the Victorian era, he suggested, critics argued that ''one of the things that made Shakespeare a better dramatist was that Shakespeare's sexuality was more 'normal' than Marlowe's.''
For today's theater and film artists, however, the sexuality issue makes Marlowe more approachable, helping to bridge the gap between the world of Armani suits and one of taffeta doublets. That was the attitude behind Derek Jarman's 1991 film ''Edward II,'' which was filled with references to antigay prejudice in Britain. Similarly, Michael Elias, who wrote the screenplay for ''Dead Man in Deptford'' and is expected to direct it, said he admired the author of ''Edward II'' because: ''He's gay in a contemporary way; that is, he considers it his nature. He has no guilt about it.''
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/21/theater/theater-a-400-year-old-bad-boy-stages-a-comeback.html
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One of 16th century English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s major and final works, Edward II focuses on the relationship between the titular King and his favorite nobleman, Piers Gaveston and how it led to both of their murders at the arrangement of military head Roger Mortimer. It had endured as a stage production up through the present, but Jarman was the first (and to date, only person) to attempt a feature film of it. While Marlowe’s prose subtly acknowledged the intimacy between Edward and Gaveston, Jarman’s adaptation places it at the forefront—gleefully, defiantly homoerotic, his Edward II is a story of a King (Steven Waddington) and his male lover, Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan), the threat it poses to the straight establishment headed by Mortimer (Nigel Terry) and Queen Isabella (Swinton) and the ensuing seizure of the throne by said establishment, whose murders of Edward and Gaveston are equated to hate crimes.
The notion of lending an explicitly queer slant to Marlowe’s prose is expected coming from an openly gay filmmaker/activist in 1991. From his casting of hunky actors to play his two queer leads to the inclusion of such imagery as two naked men engaged in sexual intercourse in the background of one scene for no reason germane to the plot, Jarman holds nothing back in this regard; in an era where the sight of two men lying in bed together on the TV series Thirtysomething provoked mass indignation, being so out, loud and proud felt more daring and radical than it might now.
More...
https://hauntedjukebox.com/tag/christopher-marlowe/
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Hylas and Hercules are not referenced here without purpose, although it is a rather implicit one. According to Summers (1992), the relationship between these two classical figures is one of the most famous examples of homoeroticism in ancient Greek (p. 9) — by comparing his mourning to Hylas’, Edward would be implicitly setting the tone of his own relationship with Gaveston as one of homoeroticism. There are other clear references to the Greek mythology, one of the most interesting present in Gaveston’s beginning monologue:
“May draw the pliant king which way I please
Music and poetry is his delight;
Therefore I’ll have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns
Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay
Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape
With hair that gilds the water as it glides
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms
And in his sportful hands an olive tree
To hide those parts which men delight to see”
More...
https://medium.com/@lucasfernandes_1652/homossexuality-in-marlowes-edward-ii-a8cae30aedd5
***
Had wild Hippolytus Leander seen,
Enamour'd of his beauty had he been.
His presence made the rudest peasant melt,
That in the vast uplandish country dwelt;
The barbarous Thracian soldier, mov'd with nought,
Was mov'd with him, and for his favour sought.
Some swore he was a maid in man's attire,
For in his looks were all that men desire,—
A pleasant smiling cheek, a speaking eye,
A brow for love to banquet royally;
And such as knew he was a man, would say,
"Leander, thou art made for amorous play;
Why art thou not in love, and lov'd of all?
Though thou be fair, yet be not thine own thrall."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44674/hero-and-leander
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