Go Try Play Write February 2025
Winners will receive $100 and a subscription to Bamboo Ridge Press.
The prompt for February 2025 is:
A hell of a prompt. Write a 10-page maximum scene or an 8-page maximum monologue where you send someone to hell. This is as open as can be—all that matters is that someone did something or a number of things that receives eternal punishment. Writers, consider this prompt primal scream therapy.
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Strongbox Theater Short Plays Festival 2025
This short play festival is in keeping with STRONGBOX's mission to:
Foster a partnership between the arts and our community at large to raise the visibility of the arts in East Rockaway, NY and its surrounding Long Island area;
- Assist new playwrights in getting their talents seen by and shared with our local audiences, and to
- Cultivate an appreciation of theater by new patrons.
$100 royalty will be paid to each playwright
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Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Performing Artist in Residence program allows artists and visitors to experience the Garden through a different lens.
The theme for the 2025 residency is Natural Connection.
Explore the relationship between humans and nature and their dynamic and sometimes fraught interdependence. Highlight how human actions reshape the environment, while nature’s responses and constant shifts influence human lives, ideas, emotions, and futures. Challenge the audience to think about their role and responsibility within this cycle, examining the human-nature relationship here in Brooklyn or beyond.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THE KENNEDY CENTER ***
In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed bipartisan legislation creating a National Cultural Center in the nation’s capital. In November of 1962, President and Mrs. Kennedy launched a $30 million fundraising campaign for the Center’s construction. Former President Eisenhower and his wife Mamie participated in the event which demonstrated the bipartisan support for a world-class center for the performing arts in D. C. In 1963, President Kennedy signed legislation to extend the fundraising deadline for the Center.
Two months after President Kennedy’s assassination, by an Act of Congress signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on January 23, 1964, the nation’s National Cultural Center was designated as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. By this Act, President Kennedy’s devotion to the advancement of the performing arts in the United States was recognized.
The Center’s mission is established in its authorizing statute: present classical and contemporary music, opera, drama, dance, and other performing arts from the United States and other countries; promote and maintain the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as the National Center for the Performing Arts; strive to ensure that the education and outreach programs and policies of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts meet the highest level of excellence and reflect the cultural diversity of the United States; provide facilities for other civic activities at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and provide within the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts a suitable memorial in honor of the late President. To fulfill the mission as the nation’s cultural center, the Kennedy Center presents world-class art by the artists that define our culture today, delivers powerful arts education opportunities nationwide, and embodies the ideals of President Kennedy in all the Center’s activities provided throughout the living memorial.
More...
https://theatrewashington.org/venues/kennedy-center
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In September of 1971, the nation was cracking in half.
The front pages of The Washington Post were aflame with violence and conflict: the ongoing catastrophe of the Vietnam War, political upheaval in Latin America and, here at home, racial unrest as busing foes boycotted schools. The bad news was unrelenting.
That is until the edition of Thursday, Sept. 9, when The Post’s lead story took a markedly different tone: “Bernstein’s Mass,” read the headline, “A Reaffirmation of Faith.”
This good news topping A1 was the previous evening’s official premiere of “Mass,” composer Leonard Bernstein’s genre-hopping magnum opus. “Mass” was Bernstein’s response to a request from Jacqueline Onassis for a piece to honor her first husband and inaugurate the soon-to-open John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a $66.5 million colossus overlooking the Potomac River and declaring the arts as central to American life — if not to D.C. pedestrians.
More...
https://archive.ph/iGRJM#selection-553.0-553.461
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Donald Trump got himself declared chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after purging the board of everyone appointed by President Joe Biden. In their stead, he appointed his own political allies, donors, and their wives, including second lady Usha Vance and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. He also appointed loyalist Ric Grenell as interim executive director. Other celebrities affiliated with the Center, including Shonda Rhimes (appointed by former President Barack Obama), have announced their resignation in the wake of Trump’s announcement.
Although generally not a hotbed for controversy, the Kennedy Center, as the US’s national cultural center, is an important tool for the country’s cultural soft power. During the height of the Cold War, the Kennedy Center hosted American and Russian ballet dancers performing together, a symbolic act that paid enormous diplomatic dividends. It’s run in public-private partnership, which means all presidents have the right to appoint members to the board of trustees.
More...
https://www.vox.com/culture/399885/trump-kennedy-center-shonda-rhimes
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The Kennedy Center has quietly removed a highly anticipated National Symphony Orchestra concert celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride from its website, intensifying fears that federally affiliated cultural institutions could be the next battleground in President Donald Trump’s war on the LGBTQ+ community.
The event, “A Peacock Among Pigeons: Celebrating 50 Years of Pride,” was scheduled for May 21–22 as part of the center’s acknowledgment of WorldPride 2025 inWashington, D.C. A centerpiece of the Kennedy Center’s Conflux initiative—its flagship social impact partnership program—the concert was designed to celebrate LGBTQ+ identity and visibility through music.
More...
https://www.advocate.com/politics/kennedy-center-trump-worldpride-concert
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Yes, Donald Trump could destroy the Kennedy Center. Or worse.
Until a week ago, it was unthinkable that the president of the United States would take direct control of the nonpartisan Kennedy Center for the Arts, fire board members not deemed personally loyal to him, replace them with members of his inner circle and install a widely disliked political operative with little experience in the arts as interim director. But now the thought has been thought, so two more previously unthinkable things must also be considered: Can Donald Trump destroy the Kennedy Center? Or will he use it in the usual way that authoritarians have used the arts in the past, as a vehicle for Trumpian propaganda?
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To understand what is going on, it is necessary to consider Trump’s favourite European authoritarian, Viktor Orbán. Hungary’s prime minister has chipped away at his country’s constitution and judiciary. But a no less powerful tool has been his attention to parts of society often regarded as unimportant compared with a country’s constitution. Alongside crushing independent media, Orbán’s government has co-opted the arts, appointing right-leaning directors to theatres, and instigating nationalist art exhibitions. Orbán understands that culture creates the climate for emotion and memory, imprints national myths, and – often intangibly – acts on politics.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/14/trump-chair-kennedy-center-washington-president-authoritarian
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It was just last week that Mr. Trump announced his plan to purge the Kennedy Center’s board of its Biden appointees and to install “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” He named one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, interim president and proclaimed that there would be no more “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA” shown. He complained about drag queens performing there and said it had all become too “wokey.” Some artists canceled shows. “Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!” Mr. Trump said on social media, posting an A.I.-generated image of himself waving his arms like a conductor in a concert hall.
Most of the people who turned up at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night to see performances in its various theaters had purchased their tickets long before any of that was set in motion. Now they found themselves at an arts center on the cusp of becoming something different — something Trumpian.
Some speculated what that might look like.
“I feel like we might just have ‘Cats’ on rotation moving forward,” said Pamela Deutsch, a documentary film producer who once worked as an usher at the Kennedy Center. (Mr. Trump, who once had dreams of becoming a Broadway producer, is a longtime fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber.) She was there to catch a set by the comic W. Kamau Bell. So was Louis Woolard, a 73-year-old psychotherapist from Maryland. What sort of cultural programming did he envision under the artistic stewardship of the 47th president? “I don’t know,” said Mr. Woolard. “I guess country music.”
...“You know, Trump took over, he’s the new chairman of the Kennedy Center,” (W. Kamau Bell) said at the top of his set. The audience let out a low boo. “You shouldn’t call it the Kennedy Center anymore,” he said. “Let’s call it the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center.” More booing. “If you’re going to have people running it with no expertise at all,” he continued, “you might as well have it named after the guy with no expertise at all.” (Earlier that day, Mr. Kennedy had been confirmed as health secretary.)
Mr. Bell tore into the president and talked about white supremacy, nationalized health care, oligarchy, fascism, socialism, transgender rights, slavery, kale chips, Nazidom and other such topics that would presumably qualify as “wokey” under new management. The comic also guessed at what sort of changes were in store.
“How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?” he wondered as the audience groaned.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/arts/music/kennedy-center-donald-trump.html
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To understand what is going on, it is necessary to consider Trump’s favourite European authoritarian, Viktor Orbán. Hungary’s prime minister has chipped away at his country’s constitution and judiciary. But a no less powerful tool has been his attention to parts of society often regarded as unimportant compared with a country’s constitution. Alongside crushing independent media, Orbán’s government has co-opted the arts, appointing right-leaning directors to theatres, and instigating nationalist art exhibitions. Orbán understands that culture creates the climate for emotion and memory, imprints national myths, and – often intangibly – acts on politics.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/14/trump-chair-kennedy-center-washington-president-authoritarian
***
It was just last week that Mr. Trump announced his plan to purge the Kennedy Center’s board of its Biden appointees and to install “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” He named one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, interim president and proclaimed that there would be no more “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA” shown. He complained about drag queens performing there and said it had all become too “wokey.” Some artists canceled shows. “Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!” Mr. Trump said on social media, posting an A.I.-generated image of himself waving his arms like a conductor in a concert hall.
Most of the people who turned up at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night to see performances in its various theaters had purchased their tickets long before any of that was set in motion. Now they found themselves at an arts center on the cusp of becoming something different — something Trumpian.
Some speculated what that might look like.
“I feel like we might just have ‘Cats’ on rotation moving forward,” said Pamela Deutsch, a documentary film producer who once worked as an usher at the Kennedy Center. (Mr. Trump, who once had dreams of becoming a Broadway producer, is a longtime fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber.) She was there to catch a set by the comic W. Kamau Bell. So was Louis Woolard, a 73-year-old psychotherapist from Maryland. What sort of cultural programming did he envision under the artistic stewardship of the 47th president? “I don’t know,” said Mr. Woolard. “I guess country music.”
...“You know, Trump took over, he’s the new chairman of the Kennedy Center,” (W. Kamau Bell) said at the top of his set. The audience let out a low boo. “You shouldn’t call it the Kennedy Center anymore,” he said. “Let’s call it the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center.” More booing. “If you’re going to have people running it with no expertise at all,” he continued, “you might as well have it named after the guy with no expertise at all.” (Earlier that day, Mr. Kennedy had been confirmed as health secretary.)
Mr. Bell tore into the president and talked about white supremacy, nationalized health care, oligarchy, fascism, socialism, transgender rights, slavery, kale chips, Nazidom and other such topics that would presumably qualify as “wokey” under new management. The comic also guessed at what sort of changes were in store.
“How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?” he wondered as the audience groaned.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/arts/music/kennedy-center-donald-trump.html