Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Freeze Frame seeks flash drama, the weirder the better
So first and foremost, we want a story. A complete, interesting story. 1000
words or less, any genre, no content restrictions. We want your science
fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, drama, literary works, satire, bizarre
fiction, or anything else you can come up with or mix together. The more
original, the better. The weirder, the better.
***
Mountain Community Theater is currently welcoming and accepting plays for
consideration for our 2023 Season! Anyone interested in MCT productions can
submit a play for possible production including MCT members, subscribers, and
the public.
We typically choose four plays for our season, plus a new play by a local
playwright for our “New Works Night,” (see below). We are looking for comedies,
dramas, musical theatre, winter holiday plays, and other plays that might not
fit in these categories. Is there a great play that you know of that you would
like to see produced on our stage?
***
Quannapowitt Players, Inc. is seeking new plays for Suburban Holidays XI for
2022, our popular annual holiday themed play festival and fundraiser. We are
proud to be presenting our eleventh year of holiday shows. Play submissions
should be between ten and twenty minutes in length and focus on a holiday.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** THE GOD OF VENGEANCE ***
When God of Vengeance first premiered in English on Broadway in 1923, the
entire cast was brought to court on charges of indecency for featuring a
lesbian kiss—a Broadway first. The prolific Polish-Jewish writer Sholem Asch,
who wrote the play, defended his art by insisting that the question wasn’t
whether the play was moral, but whether it was any good. And good it was. And
still is.
God of Vengeance... might not be as scandalous as it once was, but it is
certainly still powerful. The story of Yankl and Soreh, pious Orthodox Jews who
run the brothel downstairs from their apartment, and their beloved, “pure”
daughter Rivkele, burns with immediacy.
Rivkele, in whose name Yankl funds a Torah—which he imagines may be useful one
day as a dowry—is “corrupted” by Manke, a prostitute. In fact, the two women
are in love—and it’s this love that ran the public wild in the 1920s.
More...
https://www.jta.org/jewniverse/2017/this-hot-yiddish-play-brought-broadway-its-first-lesbian-kiss
***
Responding to allegations yesterday that Sholem Asch’s drama “God Of
Vengeance,” currently presented in English at the Apollo Theatre, is immoral, a
grand jury released an official complaint against the actors and actresses
performing in the drama as well as the theatre’s manager and owner.
In all, 16 individuals received complaints for performing “God Of Vengeance,”
including acclaimed actor Rudolph Schildkraut, in the lead role, lawyer Harry
Weinberger, the play’s manager, and one of the Selwyn brothers, owners of the
Apollo Theatre.
Since the Sholem Asch drama began being performed in English, those dedicated
to “defending morality” are in agreement that the play is immoral and have
sought means to suppress it. Finally, they were able to convince the District
Attorney’s office to investigate and file official complaints against the
actors and actresses, as well as the management.
At 10:30 they must all appear before District Attorney O’Neil in his office,
where it’s expected that warrants will be issued immediately to the accused,
demanding they then appear before Judge Crane at the General Sessions Court.
More...
https://forward.com/culture/359668/broadway-cast-of-god-of-vengeance-arrested-on-obscenity-charges/
***
Open Letter by Sholom Asch
Because of the wrong interpretation of my play, The God of Vengeance, now
running at the Apollo Theatre, I wish to make the following statement:
I wrote this play when I was twenty-one years of age. I was not concerned
whether I wrote a moral or immoral play. What I wanted to write was an artistic
play and a true one. In the seventeen years it has been before the public, this
is the first time I have had to defend it.
When the play was first produced, the critics in Germany, Russia, and other
countries, said that it was too artistically moral. They said that for a man
like “Yekel Shepshovitch,” keeper of a brothel, to idealize his daughter, to
accept no compromise with her respectability, and for girls like Basha and
Raizel, filles de joie, to dream about their dead mother, their home, and to
revel in the spring rain, was unnatural. About two years ago I was approached
by New York producers for permission to present the play in English. I refused,
since I did not believe the American public was either sufficiently interested
or adequately instructed to accept The God of Vengeance.
More...
https://web.uwm.edu/yiddish-stage/an-open-letter-by-sholom-asch-author-of-got-fun-nekome
***
David Mandelbaum, artistic director of New Yiddish Rep, admits frankly that
mounting Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, a 1906 play that explores religious
hypocrisy, prostitution, and lesbianism, was in large part a business decision.
The timing was irresistible.
After all, Paula Vogel’s Indecent, now heading for Broadway after successful
runs at Yale Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, and Off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre, is
based on the events surrounding Asch’s groundbreaking drama, from its birth in
Poland and its evolution throughout Europe and the Lower East Side to its
explosive run on the Great White Way in 1923, and beyond.
It was a controversial play—indeed, it sparked a mini-donnybrook—when it bowed
at the Apollo Theatre on 42nd Street, not least for featuring the first lesbian
kiss on a Broadway stage. The cast and producers were arrested and jailed on
obscenity charges.
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/12/21/but-is-god-of-vengeance-good-for-the-jews/
***
“It won’t sell out,” Clare wrote in December, as Kate insisted on pre-booking
the tickets to Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) promised in lieu of a
Christmas present. “This isn’t Warsaw in 1937.” As we crammed ourselves into La
Mama’s packed black box theater for the final weekend of Got fun nekome’s
January run, struggling to find two unoccupied folding chairs next to each
other, Clare was glad to eat her words. Back with a vengeance, the play will in
fact run for another two weeks this March.
Directed by Yiddish theater great Eleanor Reissa, New Yiddish Rep’s Got fun
nekome brings ageless tensions between sacred and profane, respectable and
shameful into stark contemporary relief. Yankl Tchaptchovich (Shane Baker) and
Sore (Eleanor Reissa/Caraid O’Brien) try desperately to present an upstanding,
observant household to the outside world and Jewish community while managing a
brothel beneath their house. Their daughter Rivkele (Shayna Schmidt) is their
key to absolution, a nice Jewish girl destined to marry into a good family and
fulfil all the social expectations her parents cannot. Rivkele’s purity
unravels as she forms a relationship with Manke (Melissa Weisz), a sex worker
at her father’s business who lives downstairs.
More...
https://ingeveb.org/blog/di-fester-shvester-review-got-fun-nekome-god-of-vengeance
***
Behind the Curtain: INDECENT
Go behind the curtain of the Tony Award-winning play Indecent with Writer Paula
Vogel, Director Rebecca Taichman, Producer Daryl Roth, and various cast members.
INDECENT is a story of a play called THE GOD OF VENGEANCE.
That was written in Poland in Yiddish in 1907.
Our play, Indecent, is about the history of The God of Vengeance.
This play will cause a sensation!
The play The God of Vengeance was an incredible and sort of tumultuous journey.
More...
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/indecent-behind-curtain-indecent/7732/
***
Formally, it’s essentially a biography of Asch’s play. It starts in Warsaw,
1907, when the youthful author and his wife Madzhe are giddy with excitement
about the possibilities of his new work. This horrifies the local Jewish
intelligentsia, who are alarmed that a drama set in a Yiddish brothel featuring
a lesbian love story is terrible PR for their embattled community.
Following the play’s eventual European success, ’Indecent’ sweeps on into the
’20s, when the Aschs uproot to New York. There, ‘God of Vengeance’ becomes a
hit on the Yiddish-language stage, then the English-language one, then finally
a bowdlerised version moves to Broadway, where a moral panic fuelled by fearful
local rabbis leads to the entire cast being arrested for indecency.
It’s a wonderful story, most of it true, including the final section where we
see ‘God of Vengeance’ illegally performed in Łódż ghetto, on the cusp of the
Holocaust. Yes, Vogel oversimplifies the arguments of the play’s detractors,
and focuses her vindication of it on the queer-heavy second act (generally held
as the best bit of an uneven work). And though Finbar Lynch is terrific as
Lemmi, a rube from the Polish shtetl who happens to be present at ‘God of Vengeance’s
first reading in a Warsaw salon and becomes its most ferocious champion, I’m
pretty sure the character is fictional. His Zelig-like appearance at every
stage of the play’s story strains credulity somewhat.
More...
https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/indecent-review
***
GOD OF VENGEANCE - script in English
https://images.shulcloud.com/946/uploads/PDF-Files/God-of-Vengeance.pdf
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The photographer of Susan Bank
From Wikipedia
Susan Bank (born 1938) is an
American photographer. A documentary photographer, she is known for photos she
took on regular trips to Cuba. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, she did not
take up photography until the age of 60. She studied photography under Mary
Ellen Mark and Constantine Manos. Her work is included in the collection of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
.jpg)
.jpg)
NGC 1466
This ancient,
glimmering ball of stars called NGC 1466. It is a globular cluster — a
gathering of stars all held together by gravity that is slowly moving through
space on the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our closest
galactic neighbors.
It has…this
is the amazing part…..a mass equivalent to roughly 140 000 Suns and an age of
around 13.1 billion years, making it almost as old as the Universe itself.
It takes time…….
Remember this. You’re not
going to climb out of bed one morning and suddenly be able to master everything
about this life.
It doesn’t work that way.
Hell, almost nothing
works that way.
How it works is a day at
a day.
You master a day at a time and eventually and eventually after many, many, many days, you’ll find that you are able to master some aspects of your life. But the rule remains; it’s a day-by-day thing.
Gabriella Mistral nebula by AstroCapetown.
The architecture of Gordon W. Lloyd (1832–1905)
.jpg)
All buildings are located in Detroit, unless otherwise
indicated.
Those marked NRHP are listed on the National Register of
Historic Places.
• Christ Church
Detroit, 1863, NRHP
• Central United
Methodist Church, 1866, NRHP
• Cathedral of
St. Paul (Erie, Pennsylvania), 1866
• St. James
Episcopal Church, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1867, NRHP
• Thomas A.
Parker House, 1868, NRHP
• Trinity
Episcopal Church, Columbus, Ohio, 1869, NRHP
• Chapter House
for Trinity Anglican Church, London, Ontario, Canada, 1872-1873
• Church of the
Holy Spirit, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, 1871
• Saint Mary of
Good Counsel Catholic Church, Adrian, Michigan, 1871, NRHP
• Grace Episcopal
Church, Galion, Ohio, 1875, NRHP
• Newberry
Building, later named Equity Building, 1879
• Parker Block,
1883
• St. Luke's
Episcopal Church, Kalamazoo, 1885
• Bishop
Worthington Residence, Omaha, Nebraska, 1885
• "Building
50", (formerly Northern Michigan Asylum), Traverse City, Michigan, 1885,
NRHP
• D.M. Ferry and
Company Warehouse, 1887
• Dowling Hall,
University of Detroit, 1887
• Wright-Kay
Building, 1891
• David Whitney
House, 1894, NRHP
• Brown Brothers
Tobacco Company building, 1887
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Greetings
NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
& THE ADVENTURES OF PERICLES
Hip to Hip Theatre Company
In repertory to twelve parks from July 27th to August 21st
http://hiptohip.org/current-production.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Yale Drama Series is seeking submissions for its
2023 playwriting competition. The winning play will be selected by the series’
current judge, Jeremy O. Harris. The winner of this annual competition will be
awarded the David Charles Horn Prize of $10,000, publication of their
manuscript by Yale University Press, and a celebratory event. The prize and
publication are contingent on the playwright’s agreeing to the terms of the
publishing agreement.
***
Cimientos Play Development Program 2022
Playwrights accepted to the program, IATI Theater’s artistic staff and other
specially invited theater professionals will converge in workshop meetings to
discuss the new works that make up the particular season. Every meeting will be
dedicated to a single playwright in the program, the focus being in further
advancing the text before it is presented in front of a live audience.
***
Artistic Director David Winitsky and Contest Dramaturg Heather Helinsky are
proud to announce that submissions are currently open for the 12th Annual
National Jewish Playwriting Contest.
We are currently seeking unproduced full-length (65+ minutes) plays and
musicals that focus on aspects of 21st Century Jewish identity, culture, and
ideas, and the complex and intersectional nature of contemporary Jewish life.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** THE BOYS IN THE BAND ***
NYTIMES review 1968
As the conventional thing to say about Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the
Band" will be something to the effect that it makes Edward Albee's
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" seem like a vicarage tea party, let
me at least take the opportunity of saying it first.
The play, which opened last night at Theater Four, is by far the frankest
treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on stage. We are a long way from
"Tea and Sympathy" here. The point is that this is not a play about a
homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual milieu, and the homosexual way
of life, totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis of human
experience. Thus it is a homosexual play, not a play about homosexuality.
Just as you do not have to be Negro to appreciate a play about the Negro
experience, you do not have to be homosexual to appreciate "The Boys in
the Band." On the other hand, it would be equally idle to pretend that,
just as a Negro will see the plays of LeRoi Jones differently from the way I
do, so some of my best friends (as Alan Brien wrote in The Sunday Times of
London the other week, "some of the best homosexuals are my friends")
will be able to identify with its specifics more closely than I can
myself.
More...
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/04/15/issue.html
***
WATCHING the film version of Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band,"
which opened yesterday at the Loew's State I and Tower East theaters, I
experienced the same sensation I'd had when I saw the Off Broadway play two
years ago. It was a feeling of time disorientation, as if, in 1970, I were
looking at a well-made Broadway play from the late thirties or early forties,
something on the order of Clare Boothe's "The Women" or Joseph
Fields's "The Doughgirls."
This is in spite of the fact that "The Boys in the Band" is about
male homosexuality, a subject that had to be treated with carefully metered
ellipses in "The Green Bay Tree," and in spite of the fact that the
film uses four-letter words that once (honest!) were more shocking than glimpses
of stocking.The reasons for this are two. One is obvious: "The Boys in the
Band" is a well-made play, a little too well-made, too mechanical to be
especially interesting. Not as obvious, perhaps, is the fact that many
conventions of contemporary stage direction (so evident in both the play and
the film), as well as the mannerisms of a certain kind of fake-elegant,
American homosexual, are patterned after fashions set 30 or 40 years ago on the
Broadway stage.Thus one can understand why William Friedkin, the director, has
transferred the play's consciously archaic theatricality so faithfully to the
screen— with the original Off Broadway cast, and almost every line of bitchy,
fake-elegant dialogue, intact.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/18/archives/screen-boys-in-the-bandcrowley-study-of-male-homosexuality-opens.html
***
ONE EVENING NOT long after “The Boys in the Band” had its Off Broadway premiere
in April 1968, Laurence Luckinbill, who played Hank, brought his tool kit to
work. Theater Four, as the joint was called, was a dowdy old converted church
in a part of Manhattan that the play’s author, Mart Crowley, called a
“senseless-killing neighborhood.” But Luckinbill wasn’t lugging tools to make
repairs. Instead, he drilled a hole in a piece of the set called a tormentor
flat, about waist-high, so that he and his eight castmates, standing backstage,
could get a glimpse of whoever was sitting sixth row center: the best seats in
the house. Over the coming weeks the actors took turns peeping at the likes of
Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx and Rudolf Nureyev. Even New
York City’s glamorous mayor, John Lindsay, showed up.
This was an unexpected turn of events. “The Boys in the Band” was very much a
ghetto play, a peephole aimed at gay men. In writing it, Crowley had deliberately
taken up the challenge tossed down by the theater critic Stanley Kauffmann, who
in a 1966 New York Times essay headlined “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises”
asked why that era’s most famous gay playwrights — meaning Edward Albee,
Tennessee Williams and William Inge — didn’t write about themselves and leave
straights alone. His premise was faulty: Characters like Martha and George in
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” are not, as he suggested, gay couples in
masquerade. Nor do homosexuals suffer from an “emotional-psychological
illness,” as he casually mentions — for this was an era in which such public
slurs were chic and permissible, especially in the guise of literary criticism.
(In The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth derided Albee’s 1964 drama “Tiny
Alice” for its “ghastly pansy rhetoric.”) Still, there was no denying that
frank plays about gay male life had never reached the mainstream, never
penetrated the circles in which Kauffmanns and Roths and socialites frolicked.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/t-magazine/gay-theater-history-boys-in-the-band.html
***
It’s hardly surprising that most queer actors were closeted in the late 1960s.
Few Americans at that time knew any out gay men or lesbians. Sodomy was illegal
in 48 states, with only Illinois and Connecticut the exceptions; Canada
wouldn’t decriminalize sodomy until 1969. In many places, including New York
City, it was illegal for two men to dance with each other. Gay and lesbian
characters were either tragic figures with little recourse but suicide, as in
1961’s The Children’s Hour and 1962’s Advise and Consent, or else—as in Alfred
Hitchcock’s Rope, from 1948, and The Detective, 20 years later—they were
demented killers.
Things weren’t much better in the theatre. Between 1926 and 1968, depictions of
homosexuality on stage were illegal in the state of New York under the Wales
Padlock Act. The law was passed after the casts of Sholom Asch’s God of
Vengeance and Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, two plays dealing with lesbianism,
were arrested for obscenity. Some gay dramatic characters slipped through, but
they were far from positive representations. Before The Boys in the Band
opened, one of the rare Broadway plays dealing with homosexuality was Meyer
Levin’s Compulsion, a fictionalized depiction of the Leopold and Loeb case
(which also inspired Rope) that treats sexuality as part of the men’s
motivation for murder.
More...
https://xtramagazine.com/culture/boys-in-the-band-50-181396
***
Over the years The Boys in the Band became something of a legend in the gay
community and was revived occasionally. In 2018 the play finally made it to
Broadway in a highly acclaimed production which featured an all-gay cast. Jim
Parsons of The Big Bang Theory, Zachary Quinto (Star Trek) and gay movie star
Matt Bomer headlined the revival, which was put together with the full
participation of Crowley. Now Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) has
produced a new film version of The Boys in the Band in which the entire 2018
cast reprise their roles. The film will premiere on Netflix on September 30.
It’s a stunning production, a reminder of what it meant to be gay a half
century ago. Homosexuality was not generally accepted by society in 1968, so
many gay men were forced to be “discreet” in front of their neighbors and
straight friends. Parsons and Quinto are revelations as two gay men, allegedly
best friends, who seem to be involved in an endless game of cat and mouse with
each other, each always trying to best the other. Parsons is heartbreaking as
Michael, a “bitchy queen” who turns to religion in the hope that he can become
straight. Quinto’s performance as Harold, a gay man who can barely stand
looking into a mirror, is a sad example of the shame that so many gay men lived
with at that time. Brian Hutchison is also memorable as Alan, a married man
living a seemingly straight life but who might also be gay. Or is he?
More...
https://inmagazine.ca/2020/09/ryan-murphy-hits-bullseye-with-new-the-boys-in-the-band/
***
Holy social anthropology! What is this strange and barbaric tribal ceremony
that our unsuspecting traveler has stumbled upon? Men are actually dancing with
— gasp — other men, in a wrist-flicking, hip-wriggling, keister-twitching
chorus line.
Perhaps they’re enacting some unspeakable mating ritual, the kind an
adventurous American couple of the mid-1960s might have seen (and recoiled
from) while watching a lurid documentary like “Mondo Cane.” But this is
definitely not the sort of activity Joe Average expects to encounter in the
apartment of his best friend from college.
That, more or less, is the point of view of a lone, presumably heterosexual man
when he arrives as an uninvited guest at the all-gay party of hedonism and hatred
that is Mart Crowley’s epochal 1968 drama “The Boys in the Band,” which opened
on Thursday night in a starry but disconnected revival at the Booth Theater.
And theatergoers, too, may feel an awakening shock at this moment.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/theater/the-boys-in-the-band-review-jim-parsons-zachary-quinto.html
***
As Michael abandons the wreckage of a party he hosted, and subsequently ruined,
he leaves the Upper East Side apartment that serves as the backdrop of The Boys
In The Band with a killer final line: "As my father said to me when he
died in my arms: 'I don't understand any of it. I never did.' Turn the lights
out when you leave."
These words, serenely delivered by Jim Parsons as he nears the end of a
downward spiral, have long haunted audiences of Mart Crowley's landmark play.
In a piece loaded with questions – of authenticity, of sexuality, of intention
– it seems to be the biggest mystery hanging over a play that has
intermittently pin-balled between Broadway stages, the West End and the big
screen.
Finding meaning remains difficult. Crowley, who sadly passed away earlier this
year, was happy to play co-pilot to the directors steering his work. "He
really encouraged me, and us, to make it our own," says Joe Mantello, the
director of both the 2018 Broadway revival and its latest Netflix adaptation.
"He wasn't dogmatic about a single approach to the material, and so he was
incredibly generous. I don't want to say he was surrendering, as he was part of
the process, but it was important to him that our version of this was unique to
us, and that he wanted to try capture something that happened 50 years
ago."
More...
https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/film/a34206822/the-boys-in-the-band-netflix-ending-explained/
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