Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

 



Sundog Theatre's longtime, interrupted-by-the-pandemic series "The Originals" continues this winter on MakerPark Radio's internet-based station in NYC. Sundog is seeking plays that actors will read, broadcast live on the web, and heard/seen throughout NYC, the US, and worldwide in January 2023.

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The West Side Show Room is seeking new 10-minute works which will be presented in a staged reading on January 19-21, 2023 in Rockford, Illinois. We accept spoken word poetry, plays, monologues, stories— or anything written for live performance.

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The Atlanta Shakespeare Company is launching a new playwriting initiative for historically marginalized artists. The "Muse Of Fire Playwriting Festival'' invites playwrights of the global majority to create a full-length play that reimagines Shakespeare’s themes and plots through the lens of BIPOC America.


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


*** DEMOCRACY ***

In the Sophocles play “Antigone,” King Creon, after ordering the execution of his niece for betraying him, asks, “Am I to rule for others, or myself?”
Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s lover, in his shock and grief, replies, “A State for one man is no State at all.”
This simple exchange, written around 441 B.C., demonstrates how one character came to challenge the autocracy of another in early Greek theater, and how Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides nurtured the idea of fairness and representation for all during the brief two centuries of Athenian democracy.

Their plays, among the 32 that survive from what are thought to be thousands from this era among many writers, are the earliest representations of how democracy helped change Western civilization.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/world/europe/greece-democracy-theater.html


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Frayn's play is densely historical, an information-fat study of the "Guillaume affair" that upturned German politics in the 1970s. The dialogue about coalitions – met with knowing titters on press night – comes early, when West German chancellor Willy Brandt (Patrick Drury) is struggling to hold together his government. As in real life, Brandt and his advisers (William Hoyland's party elder Wehner; David Mallinson's ambitious cabinet member Schmidt; Aidan McArdle's oily yes man Guillaume) come to have bigger problems. East Germany, with which left-leaning Brandt seeks an entente, has put a spy in Brandt's government. It's Guillaume, a man so close to his boss the two share evening wine and confidential telexes. They even holiday together.

More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jun/24/democracy-frayn-review


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Theater and democracy were born in the same place at the same time – in Athens 2,500 years ago — and that is no coincidence: One led to the other.

The creation of theater festivals in the 6th century BCE brought the four warring tribes of Athens into a common space to share a common experience, which engendered a new sense of unity, and of community. ( “In a characteristic attempt to ensure full participation by the citizens,” one source notes, “those eligible were paid to attend the dramatic performances.” !!)

Democracy took root shortly after these festivals began. Athens’ unprecedented period of citizen power and engagement developed simultaneously with its unmatched burst of theatrical creativity led by the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

More...
https://newyorktheater.me/2021/01/10/theater-and-democracy-born-together-both-now-under-attack/


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When exploring the benefits and limitations of representative democracy through art, what better way could there be to do so than by having the audience of said art engage in that kind of democracy themselves? Students used this unique format during “Democracy Theater — City Council Meeting,“ a play born out of the fall freshman seminar FRS 143: “Is Politics a Performance?”

Staged as part of Wintersession on Monday, Jan. 25, the play was a reenactment of a city council meeting in Trenton, N.J., in which the audience itself participated as actors. It was meant to invite reflection on the character of representative democracy and the power imbalance it creates between those who are represented and those who represent them.

The play opened with a recorded video of an apolitical person expressing their dissatisfaction with electoral politics. The narrator tried, through his use of persuasive rhetoric, to convince him that democratic institutions are worth participating in. The video then cut to black as the creative team called on members of the audience to participate as actors in the play. Some of the actors became councilors, while others became members of the public, and all volunteers were given scripts. The rest of the play was about the interaction between these two groups of people.

More...
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2021/03/democracy-theater-politics-local-gov-freshman-seminar-review

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The earliest instance we have of the Greek term for demagoguery (demagogia) appears in the Knights. It meant initially no more than “leading the demos,”the demos being the largest political class that is by definition the poorest and so the least educated. But “demagoguery” soon came to have the same odor it has for us. A demagogue is an unscrupulous master of slippery rhetoric who, for his own ends, plays the crowd like a cheap fiddle. As a character in the Knights puts it, “demagoguery no longer belongs to a man acquainted with the things of the Muses or to one whose ways are upright / But to somebody unlearned and loathsome.”

In the play Cleon is dubbed “Paphlagon” (roughly “Blusterer”), a servant of the Athenian people who are presented as a single householder, Mr. Demos. (Think Uncle Sam.) Athens’s two greatest generals at the time, Demosthenes and Nicias, also appear as servants of Mr. Demos and so see first-hand the dirty tricks Paphlagon-Cleon is up to. In cooperation with the upper-class knights, these great military men plot to restore Athens to something like the grandeur of its past. Make Athens Great Again!

More...
https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/52300/demagogues-democracy-an-ancient-comedy-for-modern-times/


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“The Minutes” had its official opening Sunday at Broadway’s Studio 54, in a juicily subversive production directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Taking place during a closed city council meeting in mythical Big Cherry in Almost Anystate, U.S.A., this sterling comedy-drama starts in unassumingly sedate fashion. Ninety minutes later, it explodes like a meticulously wrapped gift that had been hiding a live grenade. What unfolds in between is a scathing satire of the American way — which is to say, the official predilection for denial, denial, denial of the country’s historic sins, particularly as they concern the cruel treatment of its original inhabitants.

“Democracy’s messy,” Big Cherry’s mayor, played with impeccable control freakiness by stage and film actor Letts himself, opines to the council’s dissenting member, Mr. Peel (an outstanding Noah Reid). That declaration is a smokescreen for the ongoing effort to perpetuate Big Cherry’s Big Lie — concerning the town’s origin story — which playwright Letts exhilaratingly brings to light, point by mendacious point.

More...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/04/18/the-minutes-tracy-letts-broadway/


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Theater is the essential artform of democracy...truth comes from the collision of different ideas and the emotional muscle of empathy are the necessary tools of democratic citizenship.”

Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of The Public Theater in New York, speaks to the importance of dialogue in theater to give perspective and empathy, that truth is not held within one person, but by the conflict of various points of view.

https://live.stanford.edu/2020-digital-season/oskar-eustis-why-theater-essential-democracy

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