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The Great Gatsby First Edition: Sold for $200,000 at Cannes Dinner at amfAR
The Great Gatsby First Edition: Sold for $200,000 at Cannes Dinner at amfAR
By
Shantanu Parmar
-
Saturday,
17 July 2021, 09:33 EDT
We
have all heard about the book called as The Great Gatsby. It is a legendary
novel by a legendary author F. Scott Fitzgerald. It seems that recently the
first edition of the book was sold at the Cannes Dinner auction for a whopping
$200,000. So, how did this come to happen?
Well,
the entire event happened at the Cannes Dinner. This event marks the end of the
Cannes film festival. It is filled with dinner where rich people sit and
bidding happens after a fashion show. This
is where they bid on things such as dresses made by amazing designers such as
Versace, Balenciaga and Givenchy. In the previous auction which coulnd not take
place during the COVID-19 pandemic. The number were not that good and hence the
pressure was felt this time to make sure that this was a successful event.
Before
we move to the deal that we are talking about, let us find out about why the
importance of Cannes amfAR dinner has been falling. This is because of a
scandal that had allegedly taken place. The previous chairman was accused was
said to have funnelled about $600,000 to one Mr. Harvey Weinstein.
The
theme of the night was The Great Gatsby. Hence to keep in light with the theme
Sharon Stone sought to auction off the first edition of the book. But, this was
not any first edition. It was the first edition which was signed by two of the
protagonists of the movie adaptation. Yes, you heard that right, it was signed
by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Redford.
Not
only this, it also came with some perks of itself. It featured the cufflinks
that these two men had worn. Moreover, it also featured a lunch with Ms. Stone
at the gala.
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
TWELFTH NIGHT
Thursday-Sunday evenings at 6pm from July 15th- August 1st Greenhouse Ensemble will be performing outdoors in two lovely areas on The Upper West Side. Thursday and Friday nights we will be in Central Park at Summit Rock (83rd and CPW) and Saturday and Sundays we will be at the Westside Community Garden. (89th between Amsterdam and Columbus) Tickets for this event are FREE*
To Reserve your tickets, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/twelfth-night-tickets-161227227979
At the moment reservations are *limited* due to COVID- It is recommended to reserve your seats as soon as possible. Capacity will be updated if/when we receive more information from the City of New York Parks Department
*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***
UNDER THE CARPET
by Jesse Bernardini, Diane Quinn and Bill Fuller
A creative life is interrupted by a traumatic event that not even her wealthy family can save her from. Can this artist’s determination to be true to her own voice get her back on track?
Unseen Theatre, an audio podcast showcasing original plays featuring female protagonists voiced by SAG-AFTRA actors is available at www.unseentheatre.nyc or anywhere you get your podcasts.
*** PRIMARY STAGES NEW WRITERS GROUP ***
Primary Stages New Writers Group - Applications Now Open!
Echoes Writers Group at Primary Stages is a year-long, educational program focused on finding, nurturing, and amplifying the voices of women, non-binary, and gender non-conforming artists. The Group participates in twice-weekly Mentorship and Sharing Sessions, with mentors including Theresa Rebeck, Chisa Hutchinson, Madhuri Shekar, AriDy Nox, Nikkole Salter, and more. Each Group member will receive a $500 honorarium and the program culminates with a public presentation of the Group members’ works in Spring 2022. We are looking for people who love to write but have not had the chance to fully explore their passion in a professional or academic setting.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
PlayZoomers, Inc., a leading U.S. online theater company, is seeking scriptssuitable for Zoom productions, for our upcoming season beginning January 2022. We produce live, monthly performances, featuring plays of different genres and lengths, with cast sizes ranging from 2 - 20. We are pleased to work closely with playwrights to adapt their work to a digital platform while reaching a new audience.
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In the pursuit of creating platforms for emerging artists and unique pieces, Lost and Found Theatre is thrilled to announce our new works series. Each month, a team of professional actors, directors, and designers across all backgrounds and locations will come together to tell new stories through the medium of virtual theatre. We will be in close collaboration with each artist and playwright, allowing for opportunities to develop the work further during their time with us on the digital stage.
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Strange Trace is pleased to announce our second annual Stencils Festival! We’re seeking proposals for short (up to 20 minute) works of chamber opera to be workshopped and produced by Strange Trace throughout our 21/22 season for inclusion in the Stencils Festival, to be held in the first weekend of June, 2022. If you’re a composer, librettist, playwright, or theater-maker and you’ve got an idea for us, we’d love to hear from you!
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** STORMY WEATHER ***
Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), like so many of his later plays, features an intense storm scene which profoundly restructures the plot and characters within their dramatic universe. Through his “so potent art” (5.1.50), Prospero causes a shipwreck at the outset of the action, marooning on his island not only his two most bitter enemies, but also the future husband of his beloved daughter, Miranda. Suspended between his lust for revenge and his need for regeneration and renewal, Shakespeare’s magician-hero forgives his adversaries, bestows his daughter upon the future king of Naples, and then abjures his “art” by breaking his magic staff and drowning his book of charms “deeper than did ever plummet sound” (5.1.56).
Not surprisingly for a play so devoted to tempests both physical and emotional, Shakespeare’s comedy has elicited a storm of controversy from a number of different sources during the past four centuries. Even the long-accepted conventional interpretation of the play as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, complete with Prospero as playwright renouncing his theatrical magic, has recently come under close scrutiny by bibliographers who believe the script was written before Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen and may even have preceded The Winter’s Tale. So much for dramatic tradition!
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Final preparations for two outdoor stage comedies took a dramatic turn when a fierce thunderstorm rolled through North Jersey on Tuesday, destroying the set and damaging facilities of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey's outdoor stage at Saint Elizabeth University.
Opening night, previously scheduled for Friday, will be delayed a few days. But the shows will go on, said Artistic Director Bonnie J. Monte, who has experience dealing with tempests that threaten her productions.
"It's getting downright Biblical here," said Monte, whose award-winning professional company was preparing to premiere the first of its two outdoor productions on Saturday. The performances would have been the first seen on either of its primary stages since the pandemic turned both dark for 2020.
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In its heyday, Shadowland, a New Orleans dance hall, bar and hotel, provided its Black clientele, many of them visiting jazz musicians, with the dignity and amenities (including air conditioning) they were barred from enjoying at whites-only establishments.
But on the day that Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s floridly powerful new play “shadow/land” begins — Aug. 29, 2005 — that heyday is long gone, and the place is in bad disrepair. Mostly memories live there now.
If the date doesn’t ring a bell, that’s part of the reason Dickerson-Despenza must have felt the need to write “shadow/land” in the first place. It is the opening salvo in a planned 10-play sequence about Hurricane Katrina and its long, too often invisible tendrils of disaster.
That the disaster is literally invisible here, in a thrilling Public Theater production that renders the play as a podcast, is all to the good. As directed for the ear by Candis C. Jones and performed by actors with extraordinary voices, “shadow/land,” may be better in your headphones than it would have been onstage.
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Sturm und Drang, (German: “Storm and Stress”), German literary movement of the late 18th century that exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and sought to overthrow the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism. Goethe and Schiller began their careers as prominent members of the movement.
The exponents of the Sturm und Drang were profoundly influenced by the thought of Rousseau and Johann Georg Hamann, who held that the basic verities of existence were to be apprehended through faith and the experience of the senses. The young writers also were influenced by the works of the English poet Edward Young, the pseudo-epic poetry of James Macpherson’s “Ossian,” and the recently translated works of Shakespeare.
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Jared Anderson and Derek Arey face each other, leaning forward in folding chairs on the stage at Sweet Briar College’s Babcock Theater.
They’re rehearsing a scene from Endstation Theatre’s “The Bluest Water,” an original play about the impact Hurricane Camille had when it hit Nelson County in 1969.
The play is the cornerstone of the Amherst-based company’s Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival, one of our area’s first. It wraps up this weekend with one already sold-out performance of “The Bluest Water” and two performances of “Romeo and Juliet,” an outdoor production set in front of Sweet Briar’s Benedict Building. Tickets to both of those shows are still available.
In “The Bluest Water,” Anderson and Arey play Emory and Neddy, who are, in this particular scene, at odds over whether Neddy should close down a Lovingston liquor store after the storm. Emory is a state policeman, and Neddy is his ne’er-do-well little brother.
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Art dealing with natural disasters tends to focus on the phenomenon itself and the ways in which it affects the characters in the story. There's usually a lot of planning and preparation, endurance, and eventual survival or mourning. But most of the time this art chooses to leave audience members with a smidge of hope; not so in David Thigpen's Hurricane Party a deliciously nihilistic take on disaster art opening on September 11 at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village.
Thigpen lays out his plot in sensual strokes, we first meet Dana (Kevin Kane) and Macon (Sayra Player) as they make love. The intimacy of the moment almost enough to makes us want to look away: should we be even witnessing something so precious? As the lovers unwind, we learn they're married, but not to each other. Dana's wife is Caroline (Booker Garrett) who is a few months pregnant and spends her time daydreaming about everything she'll get to do with her "new best friend," as she calls her unborn child. Macon's husband is the volatile Todd (Michael Abbott Jr.) who also happens to be Dana's best friend, and suspects his wife has taken a lover.
We also learn there's a hurricane coming their way, and the four friends have decided the best way to make it through the storm is by having a party and drinking the night away. Thigpen's ingeniously lurid setup makes one think of the play as a cross between Body Heat and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the secrets that haunt four people will come to the surface when they find themselves trapped in a house.
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There’s a rain-soaked scene in “Indecent” that looms over the play, appropriately enough, like an impending storm.
Paula Vogel’s 2015 fact-based play follows a theater company as it prepares a 1923 Broadway production of playwright Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” a provocative Yiddish drama about two women’s sexual awakening that, on the show’s opening night, leads police to arrest the cast on obscenity charges. The primary source of controversy: a scene featuring a passionate kiss in a downpour between the two women — a prostitute and the daughter of a brothel owner.
Best of The Post: Our TV critic's top 10 shows from 2021 so far
Versions of the sequence are rehearsed and discussed throughout “Indecent,” which runs at Arena Stage through Dec. 30. Eventually, rainwater spills from the rafters and the scene from the play-within-the-play is staged in full.
“It’s not just beautiful because water comes out of the sky, which is theater magic at its best,” says Susan Lynskey, who plays Halina, the actor playing the prostitute. “It’s beautiful because it represents love and tenderness and joy.”
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
CRITICAL CARE, or REHEARSALS FOR A NURSE
July 31 – September 12
Free! In The Streets!
Saturday and Sundays @ 2 PM; Friday Performance in Coney Island @ 6:30 PM (full schedule below)
Writer and Director, Crystal Field
Composer, Joseph Vernon Banks
CRITICAL CARE, or REHEARSALS FOR A NURSE is about a young lady named Rose, who is studying to be a Nurse. She takes a job in a Nursing home so that she will be able to pay her tuition, books, and living expenses. But COVID-19 rears its Ugly Head, and Rose has a big fight on her hands, to help to save her city and her own future as a pediatric nurse. In this beautiful Street Theater Story, the old and the new, the old and the young, all come together, to assure us that this Pandemic will end, and together, we shall survive. Like the phoenix, we will rise from the ashes. As the juggler/clown, working in the local Hospital Clown Care Unit predicts: “When we wear our masks and wash our hands – grab that vaccine and deeply care for each other, we are unstoppable.”
SCHEDULE
Saturday, July 31@ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Outside Theater for the New City at E. 10th Street & 1st Ave.
Sunday, Aug 1 @ 2:00 PM: BRONX -- Pontiac Playground at St. Mary's Park, 350 St. Ann's Ave.
Saturday. Aug 7 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Wise Towers, 117 West 90th Street
Sunday, Aug 8 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Central Park Bandshell, 72nd Street Crosswalk
Friday, Aug13 @ 6:30 PM: BROOKLYN -- Coney Island Boardwalk @ W. 10th Street
Sat, Aug 14 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Abe Lebwohl Park @St. Marks Church, E. 10th St. & 2nd Ave.
Sunday, Aug 15 @2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Jackie Robinson Park, W. 147th St. & Bradhurst Ave.
Saturday, Aug 21 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Washington Square Park
Sunday, August 22 @ 2:00 PM: QUEENS -- Travers Park, 34th Avenue Between 77th and 78th Street
Saturday, August 28 @ 2:00 PM: BROOKLYN -- Sunset Park, 6th Ave. & 44th Street
Sun, Aug 29 @ 2:00 PM: BROOKLYN -- Ft. Greene Park, Myrtle Ave. bet. N. Portland Ave. & St. Edwards St.
Saturday, Sept. 4 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Outside Theater for the New City at E. 10th Street & 1st Ave.
Saturday, September 11 @ 2:00 PM: STATEN ISLAND -- Tappen Park at Canal, Bay and Water Streets
Sunday, September 12 @ 2:00 PM: MANHATTAN -- Tompkins Square Park at E. 7th St. & Ave A
*** FREE FEEDBACK FOR PLAYWRIGHTS***
Trade A Play Tuesday (#TAPT) has been operating every Tuesday for seven years and offers one-to-one trading for same-day feedback on ten-minute plays or scenes only.
Get complete details and guidelines here:
Playwrights Offering Free Feedback (#POFF) is for full-length plays and is more of a credit system; you must read one to get one read.
Get complete details and guidelines here:
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
“Take Flight” Festival
Full-length OR one-act plays in any genre: comedy, drama, multimedia, etc.
An inspiring, interactive weekend of new plays that address the ideas of growth, change and transformation.
Our team of readers select the shows but the festival audience votes for the one script that will 'take flight' with a full production in our next season.
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Veterans Repertory Theater (VetRep) is launching a 10-minute audio play competition for playwrights who meet one of the following criteria:
- current or former US military, law enforcement, fire, EMS, foreign service, or intelligence service veteran
- immediate family member of a current or former military, law enforcement, fire, EMS, foreign service or intelligence service veteran
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Stay True, An LGBTQ+ Theatre Company based in New York City is seeking submissions for a holiday play to be produced as part of their 2021/2022 Season. The play should take place around one of the major winter holidays and center LGBTQIA+ characters. Special considation will be given to works that celebrate queer joy or feature characters with intersectional identities.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PLAYS ***
COWBOY MOUTH
Cowboy Mouth is a surreal, poetic piece dreamt up by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith in a war of words that lasted for two nights. Every reference in the play is infused with the true character of these two icons and the dynamic of their volatile love affair. Their performance on April 29, 1971 at the American Place Theater is shrouded in mystery and intrigue, with Shepard presenting a double bill of his plays: Back Bog Beast Bait, starring his wife O-Lan, followed by Cowboy Mouth with Smith. According to his friends, it was "one of the wildest autobiographies he ever produced and one of the most exciting performances they'd ever seen."
However, on the third night, unable to cope with the goldfish effect of playing out his reality on stage, Shepard vanished, forcing the show to close.
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COME BLOW YOUR HORN
In Neil Simon's 'Come Blow Your Horn,' the author's alter ego, a character named Buddy Baker, tells his father he is thinking about writing plays for television or the theater. His father would prefer him to go into the family's wax-fruit business, and warns him: 'Plays can close. Television you turn off. Wax fruit lays in a bowl till you're a hundred.'
Ignoring the father's dire prophecy, Mr. Simon turned his back on wax fruit, metaphorical or otherwise. In the play, Buddy's future is, as yet undetermined. Mr. Simon's future was to become America's richest, most popular playwright.
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HOW I LEARNED
By 2000, August Wilson had written eight of the 10 plays that would constitute his American Century Cycle, including “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the works that made him famous. It was then that Wilson started thinking about projects he might tackle after the cycle was finished. He had plans for a novel, a musical, a screenplay, some non-naturalistic theater, rewrites of his early apprenticeship plays and more poetry.
Wilson began working on many of these, but the only one he finished before he died from liver cancer at age 60 in 2005 was his one-man autobiographical show, “How I Learned What I Learned.” Wilson himself performed the piece during a two-week run at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2003. That production was directed and co-developed by Wilson’s longtime assistant, Todd Kreidler, who is giving “How I Learned” its Washington-area premiere at the Round House Theatre.
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THE GLASS MENAGERIE
Early in his career, Tennessee Williams often looked to his family and his own life experience for writing inspiration. Indeed, Williams’ first major success, The Glass Menagerie, is considered to be his most transparently autobiographical work, as it appears to mirror many aspects of his early adult life featuring characters based upon his mother, sister, and himself.
Edwina Dakin Williams, Tennessee’s mother, played a significant role in his upbringing. Because Williams’ father worked as a travelling salesman, and spent much time on the road, Edwina became primarily responsible for raising her children. The daughter of a strict minister, Edwina grew up in the South. When the Williams family moved to St. Louis, Edwina maintained traditional Southern values much like how Amanda hangs onto her past and Southern roots. While Williams spent a considerable amount of time with his mother as he grew up, his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, remained relatively absent. Cornelius struggled with alcohol abuse much like Tom’s absent father in the play. As a travelling salesman, he often expressed his frustration at feeling too tied down to his family. While Tom’s father in the play goes so far as to abandon Amanda, Tom, and Laura, Cornelius never acted on his frustration to that extent.
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WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME
Note the last two words in the title of Heidi Schreck’s hit show, “What the Constitution Means to Me”: This is a highly personal take, not a historical or legal lecture. Yet Schreck succeeds in widening her autobiographical play into a paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.
Like the recent captures of “Hamilton” and “American Utopia,” albeit on a much more intimate scale, “What the Constitution Means to Me” (streaming on Amazon) successfully preserves a Broadway experience for the screen. Schreck, who has the amiable presence, storytelling verve and pedagogical chops of an ideal schoolteacher, starts off by recounting how she paid for college with the money she earned as a teenager giving speeches about the Constitution in American Legion halls.
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THE NORMAL HEART
As the first sign of the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, Larry Kramer started ringing the alarm — loudly and with fury.
But he was often met with inaction, which drove him to get even louder and more furious.
It was that passion — and aggression — with which the playwright reacted to the onset of the AIDS epidemic in New York City that set him on a course in the 1980s and 1990s that would eventually help shift national health policy.
But early on in his fight, in the depths of his frustration with the lack of coverage by the media and lack of action by the government, he documented his own journey in the 1985 play The Normal Heart. While he was fictionalized as the character Ned Weeks, many of the events were autobiographical, as was the heart of the play itself.
“What inspires me is seeing things that are wrong,” he told the New York Times in 2014. “It’s wrong to be treated with such inequality. Considering how many of us there are, how much disposable income we have, how much brainpower we have, we have achieved very little.”
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LACKAWANA BLUES
Tony Award winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson returns to MTC for the Broadway debut of his brilliant solo play celebrating the strong, big-hearted woman who raised him: Miss Rachel. In a 1950s boarding house outside Buffalo, Nanny, as she was affectionately called, opened her doors to anyone and everyone in need of kindness, hope, compassion and care. Giving a tour-de-force performance accompanied by live music written by acclaimed composer Bill Sims, Jr. and performed by Blues Hall of Fame Guitarist Junior Mack, Santiago-Hudson embodies more than 20 vibrant characters, creating a richly textured reminiscence that’s inspiring, uplifting and right at home on Broadway.
PERFORMANCES BEGIN SEPTEMBER 14.
OPENING NIGHT SEPTEMBER 28.
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