Call for Submissions: Appalachian State University Department of Theatre and Dance
We are seeking a full-length play that explores/utilizes/showcases non-western theatre tradition for our 2021-22 mainstage season. While we continue to work hard to expand the diversity of our university, our student population is predominantly white. We are putting out a call for a play that is castable with our student demographic and performable without cultural appropriation, cultural erasure, or diversity tourism.
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TNP Readers Theatre “Evening of New Plays” contest is an annual event designed to give playwrights an opportunity to have their one-act plays presented to an audience in a staged reading. Entries must be one act, non-musical, and no longer than 30 minutes. We suggest that the cast not exceed seven characters. Writers may submit only one play.
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Carrollwood Players Theatre announces an open call for submissions of original monologues and original songs for QUARANTINE: THE MUSICAL a collaborative project for writers, actors, singers, and musicians. While it is possible this performance MAY be presented on stage for a live audience, we anticipate this original work will be presented as a live virtual online performance.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** RADIO DRAMA ***
For Your Ears Only: Broadway’s New Stage Is a Mic
With theaters shuttered, a host of audio dramas and musicals have popped up, and actors are honing a skill: creating characters with just their voices.
“You have to make your voice do everything,” James Monroe Iglehart said. If you have seen Iglehart onstage — as the genie in “Aladdin,” say, or as Jefferson in “Hamilton” — you will have admired his nifty footwork and kinetic facial expressions. Those don’t matter now. In his apartment, in front of his “really expensive” microphone, he creates characters with vocals alone.
Since theaters shut down in March, some Broadway actors have found a new stage. Over the last month, a host of audio dramas and musicals have appeared: “Little Did I Know,” about recent college grads who take over a summer theater; “Bleeding Love,” about a post-apocalyptic city in which people are afraid to go outside; “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” about well, Dracula; “Closing the Distance,” an anthology series about quarantine; and “The Pack Podcast,” another anthology series.
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When you think about radio dramas, you probably recall War of the Worlds or picture a nuclear family hanging out in their living room wearing ’30s fashion. But radio dramas are still around. In fact, we’re entering something of a golden age of radio dramas, thanks to the podcast boom.
Welcome to Night Vale, often considered the quintessential modern radio drama, has been downloaded more than 170 million times since it first premiered in 2012. It’s currently on tour in the U.S. and Europe. In 2015, The Message, a sci-fi drama about a group of scientists and a graduate student who runs her own fictional podcast trying to decode an alien message, hit No. 1 on the iTunes podcast chart.
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In 1997 a short radio drama brought swaths of the UK to a standstill. Spoonface Steinberg, by Lee (Billy Elliot) Hall, was the internal monologue of a seven-year-old girl fighting cancer: funny, salty, immensely moving, it had car drivers pulling over into lay-bys and listeners weeping in their kitchens.
It was an example of what radio drama, at its best, can do: there’s a particular intimacy in listening in to a character’s thoughts with just their words and your imagination to build on. And radio drama, often seen as the less glamorous relation of all its screen cousins, has experienced an upswing recently as the growing popularity of podcasts and radio apps has both broadened access and raised the bar. The audio equivalents of box-sets — mammoth all-day broadcasts of classics — have allowed audiences to soak themselves in story. Meanwhile, more sophisticated technology means radio drama can play to its strength — the dramatic potential of sound — and use texture and binaural recording to plunge you deeper into the action.
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The radio play “May 4th Voices” features first-person narratives and reactions to events leading up to, during and after the tragic shooting. Author David Hassler, using the Kent State Shootings: Oral Histories project's over 1,200 pages of transcripts, assembled accounts from townspeople, students, protesters, faculty, National Guardsmen and others to provide diverse viewpoints from those most intimately affected at Kent State and the surrounding community. The play was originally staged on the Kent State campus on May 2, 2010, for the 40th Commemoration and was published by the Kent State University Press in 2012.
Twenty-two professional actors, including Tina Fey, Jeff Richmond, Ron West, Steve Byrne and more, all with a connection to Kent State either through their degrees, as faculty or other association, have come together under the direction of Joe Gunderman, national voice artist and WKSU’s senior producer, to bring these eyewitness accounts to life.
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Welcome back to Dramaturgy 101! As Encore rolls out our line-up of virtual Spring classes and camps, we’re excited to continue to bring creativity and storytelling into the lives of our students, families, friends, and community. This month, we’re excited to debut our Radio Drama classes with our Artistic Director Susan Keady. Susan will be leading an ensemble of performers in a virtual class focusing on the production and performance of radio plays.
Radio drama first started gaining popularity in the 1920s. As more people could afford radios in their living rooms, the demand for programming beyond news announcements grew. In 1922, Station WGY in Schenectady, New York, began producing weekly staged readings of plays. Soon, major radio stations all over the country began producing readings of plays with live music, sound effects, and troupes of actors. Many people who would later be pioneers of film and television, like both Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Lucille Ball, and Rod Serling, got their start writing, performing, and producing radio plays.
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The ninth episode of Star Wars blasts into theaters this weekend, more than 40 years since the release of George Lucas' original hit movie. Back then, NPR got in on Star Wars saga action, creating a radio drama of that original episode.
In 1981, George Lucas sold the radio rights for $1, and the network partnered with the University of Southern California theater program to produce it. The production was an overwhelming success, and NPR went on to do radio versions of all the movies in the original trilogy.
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Ten tips for writing a play for radio
How do you turn your ideas into a play for radio?
1. Grab the audience from the start
Don't take too long to get started into the main action of the play. Some of the plays we read had a great opening scene, but didn’t push forward the story enough through the rest of the play. Some plays we read were more like novels and used too much narration.
Radio Drama thrives on strong narratives. Whether you’re writing a tragedy, a comedy or a play to change the world, a great storyline will keep your audience listening. However, don’t make the story too complicated with too many themes, characters and plotlines, or the listener will get confused. Watch our video on How to Start Writing.
2. Write about something that is personal to you
Think what you are trying to tell the world. Why does your play matter?
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The Strange Survival of Radio Drama
Despite speculation its days were numbered, newly-released BBC oral history interviews help us to understand how the battle to save BBC radio drama was won
It was in the 1960s that W.H. Auden declared radio drama to be a “dying art”. He wasn’t alone in doubting its future. It was the kind of radio that demanded proper attention from its listeners – the kind you simply wouldn’t expect to survive radio’s reinvention as a background medium. Yet, far from dying, Radio drama thrived. And newly-released BBC oral history interviews help us to understand how the battle to save the genre was won.We might start the story in 1963. For it was then that the long-serving and conservative head of Radio Drama, Val Gielgud, was replaced with the more cosmopolitan figure of Martin Esslin.Gielgud, in charge since the pre-war days of Reith, had liked good plain stories, the classics, Shakespeare. Esslin, born in Budapest and educated in Vienna before coming to Britain as a refugee from the Nazis, was multi-lingual, prodigiously well-read, a world-leading expert on the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ - a category which encompassed the work of playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. In short, he was far more in touch with contemporary developments – someone poised to bring energy and change.
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