*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, is seeking plays for its 29th Annual Black Box New Play Festival to be held in January (exact dates to be determined) 2026. Each play selected will be given a black box production with non-equity actors.
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Paris Junior College Department of Drama's 11th Annual Pyro PlayFest is looking for bold, original short plays that explore the heart of creativity — the human spirit, invention, imagination, and the drive to express. Whether you tackle these ideas literally, abstractly, or metaphorically, we want to experience the spark that fuels your storytelling.
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Nomad Theatre seeks 6-10 short plays to be a part of our upcoming show, Order in the Court in September 2025 in Normal, IL. Submissions will open on May 12th and close on June 16th, 2025. Selected plays must take place in a courtroom. We encourage you to use the space creatively. They must be unpublished and unproduced at the time of submission.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** SCIENCE, FICTION & THEATER ***
On a bare stage, actor Hank Stratton, playing the role of Werner Heisenberg in Michael Frayn's acclaimed play Copenhagen, muses on the impossibility of self-knowledge. The fictional Heisenberg is agonizing over his role in the Nazi effort to build an atomic bomb and finds himself unsure of his own motivations.
For four years on the London stage, two years on Broadway, and in cities across Europe and America, Copenhagen has defied the conventional wisdom that science and art cannot co-exist. Despite or perhaps because of its heady mix of quantum physics and moral dilemmas, it has been popular with critics and audiences alike; it won the Tony Award for Best New Play in 2000 and was filmed for presentation this fall to U.S. public-television audiences. As New York Times critic Ben Brantley put it, "Who would have ever thought that three dead, long-winded people talking about atomic physics would be such electrifying companions?"
Yet the success of Copenhagen has not been an isolated phenomenon. In recent years, science has become a surprisingly popular subject for playwrights. According to our best count, more than 20 plays on a scientific theme have opened in a professional production over the last five years, although none has yet matched Copenhagen's popular success. At the very least, science is in vogue on stage as it has never been before. The best of these plays go far beyond using science as an ornament or a plot device. They seriously embrace scientific ideas and grapple with their implications. In an era when traditional dramatic subjects such as dysfunctional families have become tired, playwrights have found the lives and discoveries of real scientists to be full of dramatic possibilities and thought-provoking metaphors.
More...
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/science-as-theater
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In the quarter century that followed, the Sloan Foundation has supported the development and dissemination of hundreds of plays on scientific and technological themes through commissions, rewrite grants, and production support.
Quick references to the program usually cite a pair of early, celebrated successes, both of which opened on Broadway in 2000: David Auburn’s Tony- and Pulitzer-winning Proof, whose Manhattan Theatre Club production was supported by Sloan; and Michael Frayn’s Tony-winning Copenhagen, which Sloan helped to introduce to U.S. audiences after its success in London by sponsoring a symposium about the piece’s creation, as well as giving PBS a $1 million grant to film the play.
What really sets the program apart is the sheer number of artists and audience members its grants have touched in some way. To date, the theatre program has funded more than 450 of the 3,000-plus proposals it has received for new plays, and has supported more than 100 productions, not just in New York (the heart of its operations) but at some 50 theatres around the world.
Many have been produced at the foundation’s closest partner theatres: Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST), Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and audio producer LA Theatre Works (LATW). (London’s National Theatre is another current partner; previous partners include Playwrights Horizons and the Magic Theatre, and seed grants administered through EST have recruited numerous other theatres across the U.S. to produce Sloan commissions.)
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2024/03/20/the-unpredictable-experiment-25-years-of-sloan-science-plays/
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Great plays about science do exist. I can think of no more eloquent evocation of the second law of thermodynamics than Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and in The Doctor's Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw used "an exact record of an actual discovery in serum therapeutics" to inspire a sprightly and affecting comedy. There are more, but not many more – Brecht's Galileo, Dürrenmatt's The Physicists. And several that are certainly very good: David Auburn's Proof, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, Rolin Jones's The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow. (And, yes, I realise how overwhelmingly male that catalogue is. Even more so than the sciences themselves.) So what makes for a successful play about science and why is it so difficult to achieve?
Taking the subway home after two and a half hours of Lovesong, I proposed this question and my friend said she thought that when confronted with what she called "the real", playwrights find themselves in thrall. They get so overwhelmed by actual laws of the universe that they forget those of dramatic construction. I'm not sure I agree. It seems to me that in most plays about science that I see – often those sponsored by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, an organisation with a nifty mission to encourage playwrights to tackle science, but with indifferent results – any actual science is little more than name-checked in favour of some soap opera about the struggles of its diviner. Such a method ignores the fact that though new discoveries are inherently interesting, the same cannot be said of the discoverers themselves.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/jul/26/science-plays-stoppard
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The Internet Science Fiction Theatre Database (ISFTDB) of Cyborphic primarily consists of contemporary plays, i.e. published and/or produced in the 21st Century. Some key texts of sci-fi theatre from the 20th Century are included in a separate section. For a more complete list of 20th Century science fiction plays, see Ralph Willingham’s appendix in his 1993 book Science Fiction and the Theatre.
Our Database is primarily focused on science fiction theatre, yet also features related genres; in short, everything that falls under the umbrella terms Speculative Fiction and Fantastika (such as Horror, Contemporary Fantasy and the Weird) and works of Science Theatre as well are also of interest. Finally, a bibliography of related studies and articles is included in its own section. For the reader’s convenience these are mostly non-academic sources readily available online, but some academic studies are included as well.
Abbreviations: SF (Science Fiction), H (Horror), F (Fantasy), W (Weird. Works considered “Lovecraftian” will be in this category), AF (Afrofuturism) and ST (Science Theatre)
A Number by Caryl Churchill. Royal Court Theatre. UK. 2002. SF
The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones. South Coast Repertory. US. 2003. SF
Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley. Plymouth Theatre Royal. UK. 2005. SF (dystopian)
A Disappearing Number, co-written by the Théâtre de Complicité and Simon McBurney. Theatre Royal, Plymouth. UK. 2007. ST
More...
https://www.cyborphic.com/database
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