** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
On November 21, 2026, we will host the 8th Annual Faces of America Monologue Festival at The Marjorie S. Deane Theater in NYC.
Each year we celebrate the diverse stories that make up America by inviting writers to submit two minute monologues that showcase the broad spectrum of what it is to live, work and play in America. Our aim is to collect unique, captivating and beautiful stories and share them so that we learn, grow and hear each other.
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South Street Players (southstreetplayers.org) is seeking original, short (10 mins preferred, 15 mins maximum) plays for its 16th Annual Tri-State Theatre Festival. The event will take place November 6-8, 2026 in Spring Lake, NJ.
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2027 Lamoise New Works - MOXIE Theatre seeks plays by women:
- Four (4) ten-minute plays
- Two (2) full-length plays that will receive a workshop and undergo a short development process with the actors and creative teams.
- And one (1) full-length play that will be performed as-is, will be selected for a staged reading.
- All playwrights of full-length works will be provided travel and housing for the duration of the festival weekend (not including the workshop process).
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** OSKAR EUSTIS ***
Oskar Eustis has been running theaters his entire adult life.
He co-founded one, called Red Wing, when he was 17. He has led companies in Zurich (Das Labor), San Francisco (Eureka), Los Angeles (Mark Taper Forum), and Providence (Trinity Rep). And, for the last 21 years, he has been the artistic director of the Public Theater in New York, stewarding Free Shakespeare in the Park, nurturing “Hamilton” and becoming one of the most influential figures in the American theater.
Now, he says, he is ready to do something else. On Wednesday, he will announce that he plans to step down from his position at the Public on July 31, 2028, which is his 70th birthday. His departure will signal a transition — in what direction, no one can be sure — not only for the Public, but also for theater in New York, where Eustis is among the last of a group of long-serving artistic directors who for decades oversaw the city’s biggest nonprofits.
The Public, the birthplace of “A Chorus Line” and “Hair,” is one of the country’s most storied theaters. And it has a big footprint: the recently renovated Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the six stages at the former Astor Library in Lower Manhattan, a spiffy new set of rehearsal studios and a mobile program that tours Shakespeare plays around the city.
More...
https://archive.ph/2CLH0#selection-4033.0-4049.185
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I graduated from high school early and then spent a year hitching around the country, hooking up with theater companies and festivals along the way. I’d arrive in a city, sleep in the park or find someone with a couch and eagerly participate in the festival. The work I tended to like was abstract — difficult, often impenetrable pieces whose formal complexity seemed to elevate the art to something more than the mundane. Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and the amazing Lee Breuer and JoAnne Akalaitis of Mabou Mines — these were the artists who inspired me most.
But in May 1975, I found myself at the second Invitational Festival of Experimental Theater in Ann Arbor, and I met the Living Theater.
The Living Theater, founded and run by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, was the legendary mother of us all. Founded in 1947 in New York as a European-style art theater, the Living (as it was known) soon morphed into one of the most politically radical and boldly adventurous theaters in American history. Its productions of “The Brig” and “The Connection” were landmarks, as were its Brecht productions. Since the early 1960s, its members had been living in Europe in tax exile, an anarchist collective as pure in its political passions as it was committed to its alternative lifestyle.
In Ann Arbor, the Living presented the first site-specific piece I had ever seen: “The Legacy of Cain.” It brought the audience on a procession through Ann Arbor, stopping at buildings, from the R.O.T.C. to the police station, which it saw as representative of the military-industrial complex. At each building, it led a ceremony, formal and almost religious, to reject the building and all it stood for. At the bank, the Living handed out Monopoly money to ceremoniously burn, representing our rejection of the commodity-driven financial culture of capitalism.
The audience burned the play money; I burned my real money, all of it. It was a foolish, even silly gesture — although I don’t remember how much, I’m sure I had to borrow from a friend just to get back to Minnesota. But I’d had an experience that would stay with me forever: The seed had been planted that my radical artistic impulses could be connected to my political engagement.
https://archive.ph/xBen8
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Eustis talks about collaborating to find the right form, along the way articulating the reason that so many of America’s best writers, composers, and directors are lining up to work at the Public. “We’re taking artists we believe in and letting their visions become as individual as they are,” he says. “That’s the thing I’m proudest of about Fun Home. It isn’t trying to imitate any other show. It’s not trying to look like some commodity. The idea was, let it become itself. And if you do that well enough, that’s what people are going to respond to. And, you know, we’ve been on a pretty good streak recently.”
Indeed, under Eustis, the Public—which runs five theaters and a nightclub, Joe’s Pub (where Adele had her recent launch party), from its home in the former Astor Library, on Lafayette Street—has been shaking up the entire theatrical landscape. It followed the sleeper success of Fun Home with the explosion of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary hip-hop musical about the least-known Founding Father, which has become a once-in-a-generation cultural phenomenon and, since transferring to the Richard Rodgers Theatre, a monster hit. This month, those shows are joined by the Broadway transfer of Eclipsed, Danai Gurira’s searing play about the plight of women during the Second Liberian Civil War, featuring a superb ensemble cast led by Lupita Nyong’o. Showstopping lesbians, multiracial rapping immigrants, and West African sex slaves: This is not your parents’ Broadway.
Off-Broadway, too, has the Public’s influence written all over it. At Playwrights Horizons, the Zimbabwean-American Gurira (you may know her as The Walking Dead’s samurai sword–wielding Michonne) also has Familiar on the boards. And two playwrights from the Public’s Emerging Writers Group have new plays this season: Skeleton Crew, by Dominique Morisseau, just ended its run at the Atlantic Theater Company, and War, by the unstoppable Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon; Gloria), starts performances at Lincoln Center Theater in May. It’s no wonder that the Public has come to be considered the closest thing we have to a national theater. “The core idea behind the Public is democracy,” Eustis says. “Who gets to see the art and who gets to make the art—and how can we be a place where marginalized groups get to take center stage and validate their part in the larger story of America. And I think with both Fun Home and Hamilton you see that really succeeding. They’re both beautiful shows, but they’re also moving the needle on the culture in really interesting ways.”
More...
https://archive.ph/TIBNa#selection-735.0-861.141
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Why theater is essential to democracy | Oskar Eustis
Truth comes from the collision of different ideas, and theater plays an essential role in showing us that truth, says legendary artistic director Oskar Eustis. In this powerful talk, Eustis outlines his plan to reach (and listen to) people in places across the US where the theater, like many other institutions, has turned its back -- like the deindustrialized Rust Belt. "Our job is to try to hold up a vision to America that shows not only who all of us are individually, but that welds us back into the commonality that we need to be," Eustis says. "That's what the theater is supposed to do."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5foou7mIA0w&t=2s
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Oskar Eustis: Bringing “Hamilton” to the Stage and Making Theater Accessible to All
Oskar Eustis is the Artistic Director at the Public Theater in New York City. He sits down with Guy to talk about “falling into the avant-garde rat hole” early in his career; convincing Lin-Manuel Miranda that Hamilton was more than a concept album; bringing theater to senior centers, women’s shelters, and prisons; and why he believes performing arts are essential to democracy.
https://www.thegreatcreators.com/episodes/eustis
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Eustis met Papp only once, in 1976, when he auditioned for a spear-carrying role in a production of “Henry V.” At the time, Eustis was enrolled in New York University’s experimental-theatre program, and, at eighteen, was already the co-director of his own experimental-theatre company, called Red Wing, which produced impenetrable performance pieces based on the works of Peter Handke and Heiner Müller. “Papp asked me to do some Shakespeare, and I said I didn’t know any,” Eustis told me. “I said I had this piece I’d been working on, based on a poem by Kenneth Koch, called ‘Sleeping with Women.’ He said, ‘Well, why don’t you show me a bit of it?’ I did this twenty-minute performance piece, and by the end I had flop sweat—when you know it’s a disaster—running down my face. When I had finished, he said, ‘What was that?,’ and I said, ‘It was a poem called “Sleeping with Women,” ’ and he said, ‘I suggest you keep doing that.’ ”
The lack of a personal relationship with Papp, however, has permitted Eustis to develop a relationship with Papp’s legend. “He constantly pays tribute to the legacy,” Gail Merrifield Papp, Papp’s widow, says. “I know Oskar is inspired by some of the principles by which Joe operated. He is passionately devoted to free Shakespeare, and the democratic nature of the audience.” Papp’s rallying cry was “Shakespeare for All”—evidence of his genius for combining populism with public relations. (The neighborhood groundlings who watched Papp’s actors rehearsing in East River Park in 1956 could hardly have been persuaded to pay for a ticket.) Upon arriving at the Public, Eustis displayed a Pappian touch when he declared that all of the theatre’s tickets, not just those for shows at the Delacorte, should be free. This proposal has not yet made the transition from manifesto to policy, to the palpable relief of those of Eustis’s colleagues for whom logistics must loom larger than symbolism. “We have to figure out what ‘free’ means,” Andrew Hamingson, the Public’s executive director, told me, cautiously.
More...
https://archive.ph/TS42n
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We continue our Angels in America at 20 Years Video Series with a video interview with Oskar Eustis, the current Artistic Director of the Public Theater in New York City. Mr. Eustis commissioned Angels In America and served as the dramaturg on the show while at the Eureka Theater Company in San Francisco, and was the co-director of the Los Angeles production of the show. He discusses how effective the characters of Angels In America are in representing the American Culture as a whole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuHwgwC3u48