*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Missouri Baptist University Theatre's Musical Theatre Showcase
Featuring Missouri Baptist University Theatre's Musical Theatre Bachelor of Fine Arts majors, this showcase features music from beloved productions as well as some new and original work from New York composers, including an opener by Alyssa Payne.
Monday, May 12 · 2 - 3:30pm EDT
The Theater Center
210 West 50th Street New York, NY 10019
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/missouri-baptist-university-theatres-musical-theatre-showcase-tickets-1325235959429?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
All playwrights, regardless of military affiliation, are invited to enter Salem State University’s 10-Minute Playwriting Contest. However, preference will be given to those with a direct military connection. This includes active-duty military, reservists, National Guard, Veterans, and direct family of any of these.
The theme of the play should directly touch on military service and/or how military service affects a community. The contest and festival look to recognize and celebrate those that have served and currently serve. We are looking to bring together a variety of voices exploring both the challenges and the victories and positive influences that Veterans have on our community.
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Vidalia Winter Yield seeks 10-minute plays
We're accepting submissions for our Winter Yield collection of 10-minute plays to be produced in January 2026. The setting for this show is the airport. It can be at the gate, ticket counter, baggage claim, etc… as long as it’s in the airport (not on an airplane).
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The inaugural Green Mountain New Play Festival is now accepting submissions for its summer 2025 festival, taking place August 8-10, 2025 as part of the brand-new Green Mountain Shakespeare Festival, a division of Plainfield Little Theatre at The CreativeCampus@Goddard in Vermont.
This exciting new venture is dedicated to fostering bold, original voices in contemporary playwriting. Selected playwrights will receive a staged reading with professional directors and actors.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER & EMPATHY ***
My favorite of Mr. Kushner’s characters is the woman who delivers the monologue that is the entire first act of “Homebody/Kabul,” his 2001 drama about Afghanistan. She is identified only as the Homebody, and her section of the play, delivered from a chair “in a pleasant room in her home in London,” is nothing more nor less than a sustained act of empathy, as she tries to envision what it must be like to live in Afghanistan, and how that country came to be as it is. Her point of view is both questioning and affirmative, enriched by a passionate longing to understand an exotic worldview.
That monologue mirrors Mr. Kushner’s own, deeply emotional curiosity about lives beyond his own. I won’t say he is a nonjudgmental writer. He has as strong and righteous a sense of morality as any contemporary dramatist I can think of. But he works hard at trying to enter the minds (and mind-sets) of alien sensibilities. This is integral to his talent as a playwright, and I assume it is a large part of what was being honored by CUNY (specifically, by John Jay College). As far as I can see or read, nothing he has said or done publicly is a violation or contradiction of that spirit that is the basis of his talent.
More...
https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/theater-talkback-the-honorable-tony-kushner/
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Can attending live theatre improve empathy by immersing audience members in the stories of others? We tested this question across three field studies (n = 1622), including a pre-registered replication. We randomly assigned audience members to complete surveys either before or after seeing plays, and measured the effects of the plays on empathy, attitudes, and pro-social behavior. After, as compared to before, seeing the plays, people reported greater empathy for groups depicted in the shows, held opinions that were more consistent with socio-political issues highlighted in the shows, and donated more money to charities related to the shows. Seeing theatre also led participants to donate more to charities unrelated to the shows, suggesting that theatre's effects on pro-sociality generalize to different contexts. Altogether, these findings suggest that theatre is more than mere entertainment; it can lead to tangible increases in empathy and pro-social behavior.
More...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002210312100038X
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Podcast: Mark Phelan on The Role of Theatre in Invoking Radical Empathy
In this episode of Talking about Methods, Professor Linda Mulcahy talks to Dr Mark Phelan (Queen's University Belfast) about the role of theatre in invoking radical empathy. He explains how playwrights and practitioners are effectively dealing with the legacies of political violence and traumatic history and demonstrates their importance for public memory.
For more information on this episode, please visit frontiers.csls.ox.ac.uk.
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/talking-about-methods-3983408/episodes/mark-phelan-on-the-role-of-the-212408153
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Race and the Classics: An Argument for Empathy
In Pearl Cleage’s Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous (2019), the character Anna creates a radical solo show in which she performs August Wilson’s monologues in the nude. Her sister comments, “You stopped doing Naked Wilson because you didn’t want to live in your rage and then you made your reputation doing Lady Macbeth, Medea, Clytemnestra, Hedda Gabbler. Those are some very angry women.” Anna replies, “That’s different. It’s not my personal rage, so it comes from a different place altogether” (Cleage 13). The gap between lived and imagined experience—a crucial distance—allows Anna, a Black woman in the United States, to access and convey “rage” in her staging of ancient Greek and late nineteenth-century Norwegian characters without causing continual distress to herself.
We propose that this gap requires further exploration, especially when classic texts are reenvisioned through the casting of actors whose lived experiences of race differ from those of the characters they play. Centering on the corporeal and identarian distance between racialized (and ethnicized) adaptations of classics, we contend that these spaces between the lived (the actor), the performed (the character), and the witnessing (the theatregoer) exist as zones of potential empathetic connection. These connections are multidirectional and, as suggested in Cleage’s play, can be restorative.
Telling Our Stories
In 1996, August Wilson famously stood before the attendees at the Theatre Communications Group annual convening and critiqued the professional theatre community—notably major regional and Broadway theatres—for failing to stage stories by Black artists about Black life. He confronted a system in which nonwhite actors of color were restricted mostly to roles not originally envisioned for them:
To mount an all-black production of a Death of a Salesman or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large. (“Ground”)
More...
https://www.jhuptheatre.org/theatre-topics/online-content/issue/volume-34-issue-2-july-2024/race-and-classics-argument-empathy
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The first time I cried at the theatre, I was eleven. It was a local production of West Side Story, and after being altogether unimpressed by the film, I wasn’t expecting much. Yet, when I could clearly see the tears on Maria’s face as she held Tony’s lifeless body, even from my cushioned seat, I was right there with her. I had never been in love. I had never lost someone I loved. I was not a Puerto Rican immigrant from the 1950s. I was sure the actress didn’t necessarily share the same history as well, but there she was embodying that pain. There I was, feeling my heart wrench with everyone else’s in the room, audience and performer alike, and understanding a mix of emotions I had never encountered. It was education. It was connection. It was power.
Years, and hundreds of plays later, I found myself studying at length the science behind the importance of performance. Why is the experience so significant? I approached this question from both a cognitive scientific and an artistic perspective. As a result, my work consisted of theoretical and applied research, beginning with the creation of a 2016 documentary theatre production entitled The Stories We Are. The show was devised at Hampshire College by seven ensemble members who were asked to explore personal storytelling through a variety of performance mediums.
More...
https://howlround.com/plays-thing-0
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An article in Medical Science Monitor suggests that empathy can be neurologically explained through two modes of processing: social mirroring and perspective-taking.
Social mirroring suggests that when we observe someone experiencing an emotion, our autonomic and somatic responses activate our own neural network connected to that emotion. Through this mirror neuron system (MNS), we can share an emotional state with someone by witnessing their experience in that state.
Perspective-taking involves a level of understanding that first requires us to distinguish ourselves from others. In doing this, we begin to understand someone else's unique desires, intentions and beliefs. Prefrontal areas of the brain responsible for mentalizing then activate, allowing us to develop a cognitive inference of someone else's mental state (also known as having a theory of mind).
Jenny Toutant, chief of engagement and education officer at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, says the live nature of theater is part of its power — a part that can facilitate these reactions.
"There's a dynamic and an ephemeral experience that is happening between the performers on stage and the audience members," Toutant says. "The way you breathe effects how somebody watching you breathes. There's some way that you're really connecting with people on a human level."
Lear says other artistic theatrical elements can heighten emotions evoked during the experience, unlike recorded mediums such as written text or film.
"When you are in a theater, you're feeling the vibrations of the music in your body; you are close to the actors; you are hearing them," Lear says. "That kind of embodied approach helps make it more of an emotional experience, as opposed to just an intellectual experience.”
More...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/research-links-increased-empathy-with-live-theater-experience
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Actors develop a heightened affinity for empathy compared to the average person. Our craft revolves around the profound understanding and portraying of human emotions and experiences. Research from Boston College has shown that individuals receiving acting training exhibit "significant gains in empathy scores," suggesting that acting is a potent conduit for enhancing empathy.
Great actors possess a unique ability to astutely observe the world around them and emotionally relate to the experiences of others very quickly. This deep emotional connection enables us to immerse ourselves in unique characters and bring authenticity to their performances. Through awareness and emotional alchemy, actors are able to perceive and express empathy in a way that is both nuanced and powerful, often setting us apart from the “average person” in their capacity to understand and convey the complexities of human emotions and relationships.
More...
https://howlround.com/evolving-our-world-through-power-actors-empathy
