Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Pegasus PlayLab is a new play festival at the University of Central Florida dedicated to developing new works by MFA Playwriting candidates or emerging playwrights. We are seeking four full-length plays, including devised works and Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) pieces, which we will rehearse for two weeks in collaboration with the playwright and subsequently present as workshop productions. There is a possibility that one play will be fully mounted into a production.
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This year we are asking playwrights to submit a new 10-minute play inspired by the characters in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It.
PROMPT: After the Curtain: Where are they now?
At the end of As You Like It four couples marry (Rosiland & Orlando, Celia & Oliver, Phoebe & Silvius, Audrey & Touchstone), Jacques is off to pursue a religious life of contemplation, and Duke Senior, his crown newly restored to him, plans to return from exile and create a new court.
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The Sauk, located in Jonesville, Michigan, is seeking scripts to consider for production as part of SAUK SHORTS 2023.
Scripts may be original works or published works that you would like us to consider. Scripts should have a performance time no longer than 15 minutes.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** CLYDE'S ***
Theaters around America appear to be staging fewer shows than they were before the pandemic, but a lot of the work they are doing is by Lynn Nottage.
An annual survey by American Theater magazine, conducted this year for the first time since the start of the pandemic, found that Nottage’s sandwich shop comedy, “Clyde’s,” will be the most-produced play in the country this season, with at least 11 productions. The survey also found that there were 24 productions of Nottage plays planned this season, which ties her with the perennial regional theater favorite Lauren Gunderson for the title of most-produced playwright in America.
“Clyde’s,” which had a well-reviewed Broadway production starring Uzo Aduba that opened late last year, is peopled by characters who previously served time in prison, and its mix of laughter and social commentary, plus Nottage’s stature as a two-time Pulitzer winner, apparently appealed to those who program theater seasons. Among those staging the play are the Arden Theater Company in Philadelphia, the Arkansas Repertory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Center Theater Group in Los Angeles and TheaterWorks Hartford.
“‘Clyde’s’ just hit the sweet spot — it has a multiracial cast, it addresses issues of incarceration and racial tension, it’s a comedy, and it’s really smart, and it’s by a Pulitzer winner,” said Rob Weinert-Kendt, the editor in chief of American Theater and an occasional contributor to The New York Times. “It’s a comedy, but it’s not turning away from the world.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/theater/most-popular-plays-playwrights.html
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Clyde's: Turning Art Into Justicd
Second Stage Theater
A conversation between playwright Lynn Nottage, director Kate Whoriskey, and Ford Foundation president Darren Walker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRYT6djNjv4
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Nottage describes Clyde's as magical realism, and says it's set both in the kitchen of a sandwich shop and a liminal space. All the play's characters are formerly incarcerated, including the shop's owner, who's kind of the boss from hell.
Uzo Aduba, best known for her Emmy Award-winning role of Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren in Orange Is the New Black, plays the devilish Clyde. She admires Nottage's choice of topics: "She has done the very hard thing of giving space to faces, voices and stories that are often forgotten."
When Nottage went to Reading, Penn., to research Sweat, her play about struggling blue collar workers, she also spoke with many people who were trying to resurrect their lives after leaving prison. So, while the characters in Clyde's work a dreary, repetitive job, they dream of a better future... and a better sandwich.
More...
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/14/1072902297/two-time-pulitzer-winner-lynn-nottage-turns-a-triple-play-in-new-york-city
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What melts away as you get to know the characters are the monumental stigmas attached to jail time. Donovan’s Jason is inked to the max with prison tats, some of them racist symbols, but the story behind them reveals something unexpected. Letitia, here called Tish, in Young’s smashingly vibrant turn, is all adolescent energy and adult anxiety, the latter brought on as a single mother caring for a sick child. Salazar’s hyper Rafael needs an emotional home for his nurturing instincts, as an alternative to his weakness for drugs.
Aduba, in one of the best roles of her career, swans in and out of the kitchen, her Clyde never letting the employees forget her power over them. She’s their new matron, and they have traded one kind of prison for another. Like the sandwiches they fuss over, though, Nottage wants us to know that their fates remain in their own hands. The fun of “Clyde’s” is waiting to see which way that realization cuts.
More...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/clydes-nottage-broadway-play/2021/11/23/608fe630-4c69-11ec-b73b-a00d6e559a6e_story.html
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Often, the sessions lead to bouts of confession—all the employees give up the goods on why they did time, even, eventually, Jason. This is supposed to deepen the bonds among them, and, perhaps, to offer a well of complexity not often granted to working-class people chewed up by the system and given a harsh set of choices: eat shit, starve, or go back in. But the life stories come between slapstick riffs on sandwich-making and kitchen etiquette—a bunch of well-performed gags—and as a result the play has trouble finding its tone. It’s hard to figure out how seriously to take the putatively tough moments in “Clyde’s,” or what to do with the biographies we’re offered. (Clyde’s own answer to anybody else’s suffering is to dismiss it. “I don’t do pity,” she says.) The lighting, by Christopher Akerlind, tries to indicate emotion—when Montrellous is rhapsodizing, he gets a fuchsia glow—but nothing that any character says steers the play in a new direction. Sad tales are divots for us to navigate between laughs.
Much of the problem lies with Clyde herself. In an early private moment, Clyde and Montrellous—who have a history that remains shrouded throughout the play—are arguing about the future of the shop. Montrellous lets slip that Clyde has fallen into “gambling debt,” and that the shop is somehow mixed up in the trouble. That’s the only thing we ever really learn—or, at least, think we learn—about Clyde. She rings a bell when new orders come in, appearing at the window to the kitchen all of a sudden, like a poltergeist at the climax of a horror flick. She rages through the kitchen, spewing just enough bile to get the objects of her tyranny complaining again, but she’s never subjected to the kind of scrutiny that makes watching a character worthwhile.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-search-for-justification-in-clydes-and-trouble-in-mind
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Food is more than a plot point in Clyde’s–it’s the show’s foundation. “I was thinking about the tension of opposites in food, like savory and sweet,” Nottage tells me, recounting the writing process. “Things that are dissonant and harmonious, and how they shouldn’t work, but somehow when combined, they do.” By juxtaposing slice-of-life workplace comedy with precise social commentary, Nottage showcases her ability to mine the painful nuances of everyday life for much needed nuggets of humor. “After what we’ve been through this last year, people want to laugh,” Nottage says candidly. “People want to be reminded that, at the end of the tunnel, there is hope and joy.”
“Baby eggplant parmigiana with puttanesca on an olive and rosemary ciabatta,” Rafael pitches to the group in one scene. “Bacon, lettuce and grilled squash on cornbread with molasses butter,” Letitia responds. “Curried quail egg salad with mint on oven-fresh cranberry pecan multigrain bread,” Montrellous declares, getting the final word in before Clyde yells for American cheese on white, snapping everyone back to work.
More...
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/clydes-lynn-nottage
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Nottage, the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice — the first in 2009 for “Ruined,” and the second in 2017 for “Sweat” — has often been accused of being insufficiently commercial for Broadway; here it feels like she’s deliberately satirizing that judgement with an allegorical cattle prod that likely will still be fun for audiences who are blissfully oblivious to all of the insider stuff that has riven Broadway in recent months.
It’s a very clever play, buoyed by lively performances and a director willing to take risks. I suspect “Clyde’s” will be talked about for a good while among Broadway insiders.
The allegory has its limits. The restaurant ends up a big hit, thanks to Montrellous’ work, and it’s never logical why Clyde is so opposed to the great but still simple sandwiches that apparently are making her so profitable. I think Nottage is trying to say that producers (and maybe capitalist Broadway itself) constantly underestimates the public and that if only the artists were in charge, success and good art would come out of the oven.
More...
https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/broadway/ny-clydes-second-stage-broadway-review-20211124-a7ukn4crg5egvp52uioa2jpjpq-story.html
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