Mixing It Up Productions encourages playwrights to take this opportunity to showcase their work to professionals in the theatre industry. Our company is always looking for plays that show potential in the commercial market as well as in the performing arts.
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Feels Blind Literary welcomes submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, plays, and art from new and emerging writers and artists who identify as women.
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The PEN/Heim Translation Fund provides grants to support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English in print or have appeared only in an outdated or otherwise flawed translation.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** LARRY KRAMER ***
Tony Kushner:
For many years Larry Kramer and I were good friends.
And then we weren’t — that was Larry’s decision. It was also Larry’s decision that the time had come to reconcile, a few years after a rift that was and remains heartbreaking for me. I hadn’t spoken to Larry in five years; I was standing in the Greenwich Village bookstore Three Lives, reading something, when I heard a soft, sad whispered “Anthony,” and I turned to see him, looking older and frailer than he had the last time we were together, staring up at me through thick lenses.
He said, “I miss you.” I said, “I miss you too, Larry.”
I really had missed him, a lot. Larry was great fun to be with, to dish dirt with over the phone or at lunch. When he was in a good mood, as he often was, he was just a grand old New York queen. He seemed to have known practically everyone, and knew or claimed to know many of their spiciest, darkest secrets.
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In 1997, my younger daughter, Sarah, and I were both invited to contribute essays to an anthology called “We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer.” Mine began like this: “When I was asked if I could write about some aspect of Larry Kramer’s life for this book, I said, ‘I might be able to write a piece about Kramer as a pain in the ass, but I suppose you have too many of those as it is.’ ” In Sarah’s essay, titled “Christmas Dinner with Uncle Larry,” she said that the angry person she saw on television—someone who had been called “the most belligerent man in America”—was nothing like the sweet Larry Kramer she knew.
In nearly fifty years of friendship, our family saw a lot of both Kramers. (I tended to call him Kramer, or Nedster, after Ned Weeks, the pain-in-the-ass character in “The Normal Heart” that he based on himself.)
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The day that Larry Kramer died of pneumonia, the powers that be took one last swipe at him. The AIDS activist, author, and playwright had never pulled punches: He saw cowardice and brutality and called them by their names — sometimes screaming, often through a megaphone. In plays, in interviews, in street demonstrations, he named and shamed politicians and media (particularly the New York Times), and the sting of those accusations clearly still lingers. The abstract for his obituary in the Times on May 27 read: “He worked hard to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency. But his often abusive approach could overshadow his achievements.” If you watched the article over the course of the day, you’d see the word “abusive” change — editors adjusted it first to “aggressive,” then to “confrontational.”
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Frank Rich, April 1985:
THE blood that's coursing through ''The Normal Heart,'' the new play by Larry Kramer at the Public Theater, is boiling hot. In this fiercely polemical drama about the private and public fallout of the AIDS epidemic, the playwright starts off angry, soon gets furious and then skyrockets into sheer rage. Although Mr. Kramer's theatrical talents are not always as highly developed as his conscience, there can be little doubt that ''The Normal Heart'' is the most outspoken play around - or that it speaks up about a subject that justifies its author's unflagging, at times even hysterical, sense of urgency.
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A long and vituperative essay appeared on the front page of the March 14, 1983, issue of a weekly newspaper called the New York Native. The Native was the city’s only significant gay publication at the time, and anything printed there was guaranteed to attract attention. This piece did considerably more than that. Entitled “1,112 and Counting,” it was a five-thousand-word screed that accused nearly everyone connected with health care in America—officials at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, in Washington, doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in Manhattan, and local politicians (particularly Mayor Ed Koch)—of refusing to acknowledge the implications of the nascent aids epidemic. The article’s harshest condemnation was directed at those gay men who seemed to think that if they ignored the new disease it would simply go away.
“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble,’’ its author, Larry Kramer, began. “If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get. . . . Unless we fight for our lives we shall die.’’ The piece became perhaps the most widely reprinted article ever published in a gay newspaper. “I am sick of closeted gay doctors who won’t come out to help us fight. . . . I am sick of gay men who won’t support gay charities. Go give your bucks to straight charities, fellows, while we die.” He went on, “Every gay man who is unable to come forward now and fight to save his own life is truly helping to kill the rest of us.”
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It seemed like Larry Kramer might live forever and yet here we are, mourning his death by pneumonia at the age of 84. Kramer—a writer and activist, although both of those terms seem somehow too small for him—survived AIDS, survived the death of so many he knew, survived the heartlessness of president after president, and never lost the white hot rage that felt like it could fuel not only him but perhaps a small sun or two. He alienated many with his uncompromising, confrontational style, but he saved the lives of countless more with his fearless, never-ending advocacy for people with AIDS.
Not even becoming a respected elder statesman could calm his drive, or his rage. Kramer was the kind of man who stood outside his own Broadway show in 2011, handing out leaflets to audience members about how the AIDS crisis wasn’t over. Earlier this year, during a New York Times photo shoot commemorating ACT UP, an organization he co-founded in 1987, he helped lead his fellow activists in a rousing chant of, “Fuck the New York Times!
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“Nobody lives,” we’re told toward the conclusion of The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact. “In the end that is the short and simple. Nobody lives. Talbott is sick. Norman is sick. Cal is sick. Hobart is sick. Mark B. is sick. Randolph is sick. Manolo is sick. Frank is sick. Robert G. is sick. Ted is sick. Myron is sick. Alfred is sick. There are more, overwhelmingly more. I can’t recall all their names. My memory is sick.” No writer has been able to chronicle the horrible, maddening, delirious depths of the AIDS epidemic in America like the 84-year-old activist, writer, and gay icon Larry Kramer. For him, it is not his memory that is sick, but the country itself—particularly its conscience. The longtime New Yorker has spent most of his life standing up, shouting from the top of his lungs, blocking doors, and naming names for the purpose of saving lives. After clocking time as a burgeoning Hollywood screenwriter in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Kramer returned to Manhattan, and so began one of the most radical, trailblazing careers in American letters. In 1978, he wrote the controversial gay-life novel Faggots, incendiary for its frankness even among its own community. When AIDS began to devastate that very community in the early 1980s, largely due to the cruel indifference of the culture at large, Kramer penned a play, his third, that soared and raged and howled about the suffering and losses of this new disease while the politicians looked away and the medical experts wringed their hands. The Normal Heart is a bellwether work in its power of art and provocation. By the time it came out, Kramer had already co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis and, in 1987, he took his anger and defiance to the streets with the formation of ACT UP. The heroism of that movement, with its strategies for civil disobedience, has not been matched to this day.
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