Well said............

 

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

  

 

Now in our 30th season, Obie Award-winning Metropolitan Playhouse is accepting submissions for its 17th presentation of East Village Chronicles, a festival of new one-act plays inspired by the diverse population, culture, and history of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There is an honorarium of $100 for each script accepted for production.

Plays must pertain specifically, even if not exclusively, to the character, reputation, and/or history of the East Village and/or Lower East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan. Creative responses to this broad theme are encouraged, but plays that do not address the neighborhood’s history and/or character will not be considered.

 

***

New Circle Theatre Company’s Second Annual L.B. Williams BIPOC writers new ten-minute play contest for NYC- area playwrights

New Circle Theatre Company is a NYC company devoted to the development of new plays. In furthering the company’s commitment to foster diversity, we announce our second annual playwriting contest for new, ten minute plays by playwrights of color, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, etc. This contest is different from many out there, in that we are seeking, not so much new plays, but potential new members of our company, who wish to work with us continuously in the future to develop their new plays.

 

***

We are so incredibly excited to announce the submissions for the 2022 Intensive Mentorship officially open! It has been a long road this past year, full of uncertainty for artists, as well as complex conversations on what American Theater is and who American Theater Audiences are. We at the Latinx Playwrights Circle are enthusiastically committed to our community. We are so thrilled at the prospect of taking four experienced peers in our community, partnering them with four amazing emerging playwrights, and facilitating the development of four new plays.

 

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***

 

 

*** MOOSE/TURKEY ***

 

MOOSE MURDERS

The owners and a group of guests at a hunting lodge in the Adirondacks discover that a murderer is among them.

https://www.playbill.com/production/moose-murders-eugene-oneill-theatre-vault-0000004709

 

***

We should not still be talking about Moose Murders. That’s the first thing Ricka Kanter Fisher, the play’s associate producer, tells me when I ask about Broadway’s most infamous flop. (Well, after she demands to know how I got her number.) Thirty-seven years have passed since it opened and closed at Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre in the span of a single Tuesday night in 1983. This is not a singular badge of honor. Plenty of productions in theater history — as recently as 2008’s Glory Days and way more from the decades when mounting a Broadway show did not require Disney-size budgets and carried a much better shot at a return on investment — have also met the same 24-hour doom.

 

Yet the Moose has come to stand for them all. “It was a long time ago, and I think that there are an infinite number of stories to pursue and research and interview and reminisce about. But I don’t have any interest these many years later to talk about this show,” Fisher told me as she declined, obviously, to comment on the fate of the Moose.

 

But we are still talking about Moose Murders. Its story is hard to resist: A young playwright’s Broadway debut headlined by an aging Hollywood icon as she tries to return to relevance. A first-time no-name director who cast his wife with top billing. A vanity production backed by Texas oil money. Holland Taylor ex machina in a desperate attempt to save a ship both sinking and aflame. A critic who found himself seated behind a vomit-covered patron brought in off the street to paper the house. And then there’s the name itself. Moose Murders. An alliterative and very literal title that all but ensured its place on the wall of shame at Joe Allen’s. (In 2019, that theater-district restaurant introduced a cocktail, “The Murdered Moose,” on the show’s birthday. “A drink so bad you never wanted another,” it was made with sambuca and lime juice and garnished with a pearl onion and a cherry. It’s disgusting.) Moose Murders had what Springtime for Hitler wanted.

 

More...

https://www.vulture.com/article/moose-murders-biggest-broadway-disaster.html

 

***

FROM now on, there will always be two groups of theatergoers in this world: those who have seen ''Moose Murders,'' and those who have not. Those of us who have witnessed the play that opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theater last night will undoubtedly hold periodic reunions, in the noble tradition of survivors of the Titanic. Tears and booze will flow in equal measure, and there will be a prize awarded to the bearer of the most outstanding antlers. As for those theatergoers who miss ''Moose Murders'' - well, they just don't rate. A visit to ''Moose Murders'' is what will separate the connoisseurs of Broadway disaster from mere dilettantes for many moons to come.

 

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/23/theater/stage-moose-murders-a-brand-of-whodunit.html

 

***

It is generally not a good sign for a Broadway show when people leave the opening-night party early. That is what Arthur Bicknell noticed at the celebration for the premiere of his play. As soon as the dessert forks were down, there they went, acquaintances, cast members, even family, out the door of Sardi’s restaurant. A friend finally approached with a report on the reviews.

 

Two words: “the worst.”

 

Indeed they were. The play was “Moose Murders,” and even now, 25 years later, it is considered the standard of awfulness against which all Broadway flops are judged.

 

“Was it really that bad?” asked Mr. Bicknell, who now lives in Springfield, Mass., and is the chief publicist for Merriam-Webster. “The simple answer is yes.”

 

Things weren’t so grim at the L & M bowling lanes in Rochester, N.Y., on Friday night, when a cast of nonprofessional — most barely even amateur — actors had just finished a second performance of “Moose Murders” at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center. The show, a staged reading but with original music, was put together by John Borek, 58, a self-described “part-time conceptual artist” who works by day as an aide to a Rochester city councilman. The first performance was on Feb. 22, the 25th anniversary of the play’s Broadway opening, and closing, night.

 

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/theater/21moos.html

 

***

It was the night a 28-year-old writer named Arthur Bicknell opened his first (and last) Broadway play, a mystery-farce called “Moose Murders.” Previews had been . . . well, “rocky” doesn’t do them justice. Better to use Bicknell’s own description: “an amazing stew of magnificent incompetence.”

 

The leading lady quit, a man sitting alongside the critics at a matinee vomited all over himself and a woman leaving the theater one night shouted to a policeman, “Arrest this play!”

 

On opening night, Bicknell awaited the reviews at Sardi’s, where he sensed the show hadn’t gone over well, especially since the “semi-celebrities” at the party declined to meet him.

 

(“They ate the food, though,” he recalls.)

 

But nothing prepared him for the reviews, which came like bullets from a machine gun:

 

“If your name is Arthur Bicknell, change it.” — Dennis

Cunningham, WCBS.

 

“So indescribably bad that I do not intend to waste anyone’s time by describing it.” — Clive Barnes, the New York Post

 

“I will not identify the cast pending notification of next of kin.” — Associated Press.

 

“A visit to ‘Moose Murders’ will separate the connoisseurs of Broadway disaster from mere dilettantes for many moons to come.” — Frank Rich, the New York Times.

 

“Moose Murders” closed that night, and instantly became the yardstick by which all Broadway fiascos would be measured.

 

More...

https://nypost.com/2012/09/07/moose-is-loose/

 

***

“From now on, there will always be two groups of theatergoers in this world: those who have seen ‘Moose Murders,’ and those who have not.”

 

So began Frank Rich’s legendary review of the legendary flop, a 1983 farce by Arthur Bicknell that closed on opening night and after some of the most gobsmacked notices in Broadway history.

 

With a revised version of the play opening off Broadway Wednesday night, that first group might get larger. But among those unlikely to return is Holland Taylor, who played Hedda Holloway in the original production.

 

As it happens Ms. Taylor — who went on to a lengthy TV career that included an Emmy nomination for “Two and a Half Men” and a win for “The Practice” — is back in New York, rehearsing “Ann,” her one-woman show about the late Texas Gov. Ann W. Richards, which opens on Broadway in March.

 

More...

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RujlhV_Jl7EJ:https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/remember-moose-murders-she-was-there-on-stage/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

 

***

The Script Library Podcast - Episode One - Moose Murders

Discussion and review of MOOSE MURDERS

https://anchor.fm/thescriptlibrary/episodes/Episode-One---Moose-Murders-by-Arthur-Bicknell-etq0cb

 

***

Somehow I let yesterday’s anniversary slip by that marked the historic opening of Moose Murders, the one-performance comedy/mystery which overnight was enshrined for all eternity; its title synonymous with the word “flop.” As Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote in one of his most memorable reviews: “Those of us who have witnessed the play that opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theater last night will undoubtedly hold periodic reunions, in the noble tradition of survivors of the Titanic.”

 

I was not one of those survivors. I threw away my shot at seeing the show even though I had caught wind of what was transpiring (soon to be expiring) on West 49th Street as the rumors drifted their way uptown to West 85th Street where I was living at the time. In the days before email and texting, my phone was ringing with friends telling me that “If I knew what was good for me, I had better get down to see Moose Murders, because not only wasn’t it going to be there very long, but it simply had to be seen to be believed.”

 

More...

https://ronfassler.medium.com/moose-memories-6be15330d8e

 

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 When your head hits the pillow tonight, remind yourself that you’ve done a good job. Be patient with yourself.  Remember that things aren’t achieved all at once - but one day at a time.