Third Annual Fern Street Play Festival
Known locally as the church on Fern Street, The Universalist Church of West Hartford, Connecticut has a history of using theatre to build connections across our own progressive congregation and the local community. We continue to widen the circle of this tradition by inviting voices from far and wide to be part of our third annual play festival. Our mission is to uplift and examine the human condition through theatre. To that end, we invite playwrights to submit short plays, new or old, published or unpublished, to our no-fee juried play festival.
This year, selected plays will receive a $100 honorarium. One grand prize will be awarded in the amount of $250.
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Thrown Stone Theatre Company invites playwrights to submit short plays for the inaugural CT Short Play Fest, hosted in conjunction with the SoNo Arts Festival on Saturday, August 2, 2025.
The CT Short Play Fest gives playwrights the opportunity to see their work performed and adjudicated before a live audience at the SoNo Arts Festival. In its inaugural year, the Fest will feature five plays in the afternoon session focused on teen and young adult playwrights, the winner of which will advance to the evening session to compete against five additional selections.
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321 Plays for Trans Futures is an 11-hour long performance art show centering work & artists within the gender expansive community. You do not need to identify as trans/gnc/nonbinary in order to submit, but we will prioritize work centering trans+ experience for this piece.
We are seeking writers, artists, and musicians to submit work responding to the following prompts: Birthplaces, Homes, Memorials, Creation for Survival, & Futures. These prompts are the themes of each ~2-hour long movement within the show. We are specifically seeking work that can be performed in 2-5 minutes, but are also open to longer and non-temporal works. These prompts are meant to serve as an inspiration-- if your work lives outside the scope of these themes, please submit it anyways.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** SELECTED IRISH PLAYS ***
Recent London revivals of THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD have tended to treat it as a dark rural tragedy. Refreshingly, John Crowley's new production, which includes a band of itinerant musicians, emphasises its roots in folk-comedy. But, although this is a perfectly creditable revival, it never achieves the right ecstatic quality.
Synge's play is part of the problem. In 1907 it caused riots at the Abbey theatre, not least because it shows how Christy Mahon achieves the status of a sex-symbol when it is assumed he has killed his father. And there is still fun to be had from Synge's comic invention and attack on the Irish propensity for myth-making: as the publican's daughter, Pegeen Mike, finally tells Christy, "There's a great gap between a gallows story and a dirty deed." But, even in its own day, Synge's play was outshone by Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, which offers a far more subversive satire on Irish role-playing. Synge's ideas have also been absorbed, and pushed to wilder extremes, by Martin McDonagh: The Lieutenant of Inishmore, especially, still angers many Irish people for its suggestion that sentimentality goes hand in hand with violence.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/sep/28/playboy-of-the-western-world-review
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An unremarkable, middle-aged man addresses the audience from a farmhouse kitchen nestling in a grassy glade: "When I cast my mind back to the summer of 1936 …" His tone suggests that what follows will be buffed-up memory, evoking an endless summer, full of blackberries and nostalgia. Wrong.
There is indeed something burnished about Brian Friel's semi-autobiographical story (DANCING AT LUGHNASA) about the five unmarried Mundy sisters living in rural Donegal. But appearances are deceptive. These women are fighting to keep body and soul together, and the shadows are lengthening around them. Coming war and creeping industrialisation spell doom for Agnes (Gráinne Keenan) and her sister Rose's (Sarah Corbett) small glove-making business. The return of their missionary brother Jack (Christopher Saul), disgraced in Uganda pushes the family to the brink. His nephew Michael (Colm Gormley), now middle-aged, is not chronicling endless summer, but its brutal end.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/jun/04/dancing-at-lughnasa-review
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A compelling Irish play called ECLIPSED brims over with darkness and light, rising from Ireland’s boggy soil like a wailing banshee.
In many ways, this West Coast premiere about young, unwed Catholic mothers banished to virtual slavery in Ireland’s former church-run laundries is a remarkable playwriting debut by painter and short-story writer Patricia Burke Brogan from Galway City.
The production is imaginatively directed by Sean Branney and co-stars seven fine ensemble players with rich (but not too rich) Irish accents. Opening last weekend, it also marks a challenging first play by the aptly titled Theatre Banshee at the Gene Bua Theatre in Burbank.
A banshee, according to a program note, is a magical creature, either a fairy maiden (represented by the five girls in the laundry basement) or a withered hag (notably Rebecca Wackler’s curdling Mother Superior, whose shrieking demand for “Blind obedience!” sails like an ice pick through your heart).
More...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-04-21-va-57057-story.html
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Oh, the horror and the glory of being 17. That’s the age of the title characters of Enda Walsh’s “Disco Pigs,” which opened in a harrowing, exhilarating revival on Tuesday night at the Irish Repertory Theater.
Anyone who remembers the agonies and ecstasies of late adolescence is sure to feel a shudder of recognition — part nostalgia, part revulsion — watching this propulsive Irish drama from the mid-1990s. Be warned: You may find yourself unsteady on your feet, with a vicious vicarious hangover, when its mayhem has come to an end.
That’s because this portrait of two best friends on the crumbling cusp of adulthood, directed by John Haidar, is driven by a concentrated fuel of adrenaline and hormones, mixed with lethal quantities of alcohol. That, and a word-drunk poetry that zigzags between extreme, giddy feelings of power and powerlessness.
Performed by Evanna Lynch and Colin Campbell — a cast of two with the teeming energy of an angry mob — “Disco Pigs” lasts only 75 minutes. But it seems to take place in a perversely kinetic eternity, a twilight time when life seems to be moving both way too fast and too slow.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/theater/disco-pigs-review-enda-walsh-irish-repertory.html
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THE curtain is drawing down on ‘The Monto Cycle’, one of the most startling Irish theatre events of the past decade. Since 2010, in a series of exhilarating works of immersive theatre, Louise Lowe and Anu Productions have explored the social-history of ‘the Monto’, a once notorious sector of north inner-city Dublin.
The fourth and final play, Vardo, completes its run during the Dublin Theatre Festival this Sunday.
Where the previous three works — World’s End Lane, Laundry, and The Boys of Foley Street — had each centred on periods in the Monto’s past, Vardo depicts it as it is today. And what we learn is that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
A hundred years ago, as dramatised in World’s End Lane, the Monto was the site of one of the toughest red-light districts in Europe, until it was shut down in 1925 by Frank Duff and the Legion of Mary.
Today, a no less inhumane illicit sex trade is active in apartments in the area, this time via organised prostitution rings that hide behind the acceptable veneer of online agencies.
“Even in the two years that it took us to make Vardo, the rotation of the women in these places has changed very significantly,” says Lowe. “In 2012, they would be there for four days at a time. Now, they’re there for a rotation of 48 hours and then they’re gone.
More...
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-20290303.html
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While watching “I ♥ Alice ♥ I” at the Irish Arts Center, my attention kept shifting between the disarmingly shy lesbian couple portrayed onstage and the man and woman sitting in front of me, almost as if they were part of the performance.
Not that they were cellphone abusers or seat shifters or talkers or the usual theater-etiquette violators. They were an attentive middle-aged couple, who nudged each other throughout the play, exchanging what I read as smiles of recognition at the characters’ foibles. When one of the women onstage gently reprimanded the other for her lax recycling habits, the woman in front gave her companion an affectionate tap on the cheek.
In the context of this unassuming but captivatingly intimate pseudodocumentary, that silent affirmation seemed a testament to the universality of the playwright and director Amy Conroy’s relationship observations.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/theater/reviews/i-alice-i-by-amy-conroy-at-irish-arts-center.html
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I recently squeezed into a performance of the fresh and brilliant Boyfriends by Ultan Pringle and Lemon Soap Productions at Project Arts Centre. The piece had received Project Award funding from the Arts Council. Despite this, Ultan was having to live with his father while he worked on the play, and told me that he "still couldn’t make ends meet if my Dad didn’t shout me a four pack of beans in Lidl each week". These are the sacrifices playwrights make to get their work seen. Boyfriends was the kind of piece that transports you entirely for 90 minutes, and gives a window into, and understanding of, a generation other than your own. I sat post show, on one hand excited, and on the other, kind of panicked, because that show could very well be a creative cul-de-sac for Ultan. Where does talent like that go in Ireland? Where is it nurtured, housed, grown, celebrated?
More...
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2024/0802/1463190-where-are-all-the-new-irish-plays/
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