*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Richard Rodgers Awards were created and endowed in 1978 by composer and member Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) for the development of new works of musical theater. These awards, created and endowed by Richard Rodgers in 1978 for the development of the musical theater, subsidize full productions, studio productions, and staged readings by nonprofit theaters in New York City of works by composers and writers who are not already established in this field. The winners are selected by a jury of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Women’s Work Project open for submissions
WOMEN'S WORK is an award-winning program comprised of two separate, dramaturgically-driven Labs: 1) The Short Play LAB (SPL) selects 6 emerging women playwrights each year and leads them through a rigorous, step-by-step process to create original 15-30 minute scripts in six-months, written to an assigned theme. The plays are then produced in an annual festival; 2) the Full-Length LAB is for selected alumnae of the SPL to develop longer works over an extended period, with the same guidance and production goals.
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Go Try Play Write August 2025
There will be one winner each month. Scripts will be submitted to the judges anonymously. Winners will receive $100 and a subscription to Bamboo Ridge Press. The prompt for August 2025 is:
A Pinocchio prompt. Write a ten-page maximum scene or an eight-page maximum monologue of a public figure who lies and whose body part either grows or shrinks with each lie. This is an ideal world where all lies are obvious to the public. Go big with your scenes… or small.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** PLAYWRITING AS THERAPY ***
Steve noted that AA, therapy, novels, and plays all break down isolation and enhance connections with others. In important ways, for both of us, our work in all arenas is largely about breaking down isolation. But the ways that therapists aim to do this seems to me to contrast in important respects to the ways that playwrights and novelists do. To begin with, whether individual therapists like it or not, psychotherapy operates in a context of pathologizing, focusing on which individuals are "sick" and need to be "fixed."
Most therapists can tell you that no matter how much they try to persuade the client that they do not consider them mentally ill, it is extremely hard to succeed in that effort. That, of course, does not arise for the reader of a novel or an audience member at a play. Too often these days, there is a chasm between therapist and patient because of the emphasis on classifying the latter's alleged pathology and focusing on that, on how the therapist presumably differs from the patient rather than on the commonalities between them. Some therapists even today consider a therapist who cares much about a patient or sees their commonalities to be inadequately professional, to have "countertransference" that is inappropriate or dangerous, to have "weak ego boundaries."
Related to this, therapy as too often practiced is not much focused on breaking down isolation and enhancing human connections, because in this culture, emotional maturity is likely to be defined as involving independence, autonomy, and separation without an equally important emphasis on connection. And then if, as is increasingly the case, the "therapy" consists primarily of psychiatric drugs, most people who take them will describe them as blunting emotions and making them feel more distant from others than before. Novels and plays are usually aimed to connect with readers/theatergoers; otherwise, it's too easy to put down the book or leave the theatre.
More...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-isnt-golden/201106/why-psychotherapists-write-novels-and-plays
The Richard Rodgers Awards were created and endowed in 1978 by composer and member Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) for the development of new works of musical theater. These awards, created and endowed by Richard Rodgers in 1978 for the development of the musical theater, subsidize full productions, studio productions, and staged readings by nonprofit theaters in New York City of works by composers and writers who are not already established in this field. The winners are selected by a jury of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
***
Women’s Work Project open for submissions
WOMEN'S WORK is an award-winning program comprised of two separate, dramaturgically-driven Labs: 1) The Short Play LAB (SPL) selects 6 emerging women playwrights each year and leads them through a rigorous, step-by-step process to create original 15-30 minute scripts in six-months, written to an assigned theme. The plays are then produced in an annual festival; 2) the Full-Length LAB is for selected alumnae of the SPL to develop longer works over an extended period, with the same guidance and production goals.
***
Go Try Play Write August 2025
There will be one winner each month. Scripts will be submitted to the judges anonymously. Winners will receive $100 and a subscription to Bamboo Ridge Press. The prompt for August 2025 is:
A Pinocchio prompt. Write a ten-page maximum scene or an eight-page maximum monologue of a public figure who lies and whose body part either grows or shrinks with each lie. This is an ideal world where all lies are obvious to the public. Go big with your scenes… or small.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** PLAYWRITING AS THERAPY ***
Steve noted that AA, therapy, novels, and plays all break down isolation and enhance connections with others. In important ways, for both of us, our work in all arenas is largely about breaking down isolation. But the ways that therapists aim to do this seems to me to contrast in important respects to the ways that playwrights and novelists do. To begin with, whether individual therapists like it or not, psychotherapy operates in a context of pathologizing, focusing on which individuals are "sick" and need to be "fixed."
Most therapists can tell you that no matter how much they try to persuade the client that they do not consider them mentally ill, it is extremely hard to succeed in that effort. That, of course, does not arise for the reader of a novel or an audience member at a play. Too often these days, there is a chasm between therapist and patient because of the emphasis on classifying the latter's alleged pathology and focusing on that, on how the therapist presumably differs from the patient rather than on the commonalities between them. Some therapists even today consider a therapist who cares much about a patient or sees their commonalities to be inadequately professional, to have "countertransference" that is inappropriate or dangerous, to have "weak ego boundaries."
Related to this, therapy as too often practiced is not much focused on breaking down isolation and enhancing human connections, because in this culture, emotional maturity is likely to be defined as involving independence, autonomy, and separation without an equally important emphasis on connection. And then if, as is increasingly the case, the "therapy" consists primarily of psychiatric drugs, most people who take them will describe them as blunting emotions and making them feel more distant from others than before. Novels and plays are usually aimed to connect with readers/theatergoers; otherwise, it's too easy to put down the book or leave the theatre.
More...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-isnt-golden/201106/why-psychotherapists-write-novels-and-plays
***
The songs I was writing thematically overlapped with Why I Can’t Get Work. So I started working with a director friend to put those songs into the monologue. The monologue turned into a one-man show called Fast Food Town. I performed the show for a small audience at Ars Nova, a venue featuring new talent in New York City, in 2006 or 2007. Maybe twenty people showed up; two people walked out. I was still a stage ant. I kept picking the piece up and putting it down over the years. Sometimes the show got better, and sometimes it got worse. Life happened. I had a racist sexual encounter with a white man in Inwood. I got rejected by a Black man in Inwood. I saw a Craigslist M4M ad that read, “Inwood Daddy sucking cock all Saturday morning,” and set it to music on the spot. I worked horrible day jobs, including ushering on Broadway. My mother had a series of serious health events. I started doing Gestalt therapy. After several months I had a breakthrough in which I realized that despite my many years of self-loathing, nothing was wrong with me. Every week my therapist would have me beat a rhythm on various chakras on my body and declare that I “completely and totally accept myself ” despite whatever problems were plaguing me. She would also make me identify where I tended to hold my emotions when feeling stress. Through this process I was able to recognize my body as a container for thoughts that were capable of changing, and as a result I could stop punishing myself so much.
That personal shift also turned into an artistic one: suddenly I knew what the protagonist of A Strange Loop wanted. He wanted to change. He wanted to change the same way I had always wanted to change, because I thought something was wrong with me. Because I thought I was an unlovable fat Black gay boy. Because I felt as though even if I wasn’t going to be killed by the police, I was still just a stage ant consigned by fate to carry objects from one side of the stage to the other until I died, when in truth my only real obstacle was myself. I realized that no matter what was going in the world, it was my own perceptions of reality that would hold me back or propel me forward. It was the way that I met my tangible or perceived obstacles that made me who I was.
More...
https://yalereview.org/article/michael-jackson-becoming-playwright-storytelling
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Graduate students in drama therapy may participate in one or more productions in our therapeutic theatre series. Therapeutic theatre is the intentional use of performance to address psychological, physical, and social concerns and promote health and wellbeing. It is one approach used by drama therapists to support goals such as reminiscence, recovery, rehabilitation, and advocacy. Every year, we collaborate with community organizations and mental health clinics who want to bring their stories to the stage. We co-create theatre with real people about their real lives.
More...
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/programs/drama-therapy/student-experience
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The ancient Greeks used drama for catharsis. As anyone who has acted knows, theater can tap into emotions, build self esteem, and reduce feelings of isolation.
But drama therapy takes those emotional gains to another level. It uses drama and theater processes intentionally to achieve therapeutic goals. These can include symptom relief, emotional and physical integration, improvement of interpersonal skills and relationships, and personal growth.
According to the National Association of Drama Therapy (NADT), the modality is active and experiential. It provides a context for participants to tell their stories, set goals, solve problems, express feelings, or achieve catharsis. The NADT was incorporated in 1979 to establish and uphold standards of professional competence for drama therapists and set requirements for qualifying as a Registered Drama Therapist (RDT).
With older adults, for example, drama therapy can maximize cognitive and communication skills, build community, and strengthen self-esteem. With addicted clients, this creative arts modality helps them express emotions more openly and envision a drug-free future. Because it’s active, drama therapy allows clients to act out negative behaviors—without consequence—while facing them directly and truthfully.
More...
https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/practice/Theater_Processes_Therapeutic_in_Drama_Therapy/
***
It was a crisp December day in New York City. Nancy Hasty, who had written an off-Broadway play that was soon to be produced in London, sat at a long, oblong table in the posh Waldorf Astoria Hotel and related how she had come to write plays.
Some 30 psychoanalysts sat around the table, rapt. They had come there to better understand how the creative mind, especially the mind of a playwright, ticks. In fact, three other playwrights besides Hasty had been invited for this brain-picking session, which was part of the December 2000 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Indeed, one of the major revelations to emerge from the session was that playwrights view the world in a singular way. Another major disclosure was that their urge to document their observations in writing starts early in life.
Eric Nuetzel, M.D., believes that analysts and playwrights have many common characteristics. For instance, Hasty reported, she had been a quiet child, curious, a peeping Tom, an eavesdropper, if you will. And when people walked into the room she found them larger than life, fascinating. She also came from a Southern family that told a lot of stories connected with the past, and she remembers thinking as a child, “I too am a storyteller and I too want to preserve what I see and hear!”
David Lindsay-Abaire, another playwright invited to participate in the session, reported that for him, too, certain people had made a gargantuan impression on him when he was young. He said that this especially happened after he, the son of a Boston factory worker, got a scholarship to “a tony prep school in the suburbs.” So many of the new people he met seemed larger than life. He felt as if he was an outsider, looking in. And like Hasty, he too wanted to record what he observed. In fact, he had already written some plays as a youth.
More...
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/pn.36.3.0019
***
“Grief is so specific: I wanted to write something that contained a wide spectrum of experiences, so audience members could hopefully find something to connect with,” says Feraud. The characters are dealing with the pain of loss in different ways. Thom is mourning the wife he deeply adored and he has also began to date. Evelyn was devastated by her mother’s death, even though her mother abused her. Lily doesn’t want to go on living without her mom, who she worshiped. “Grief isn't one-size fits all,” says Feraud of the characters who try to take a measuring stick to their pain and out-grieve each other. “And that's something I very much wanted to explore with this play.”
Also, having Someone Spectacular exist in a group therapy session was a unique way to mine from the characters as they remain in one place. Then add to that not having the anchor of the therapist to set the rules.
“Group therapy without the therapist felt particularly dangerous, exciting and theatrical,” says Feraud. “It raises the stakes of this particular session, and strips the characters of any politeness they might otherwise possess. Without a referee, things quickly become messy, and that was especially intriguing to me here because grief is messy. These characters are waiting for someone who is never going to come, and in some ways, isn't that what grief is?”
More...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerylbrunner/2024/08/30/she-found-her-power-writing-a-play-about-grief-loss-and-someone-spectacular/
***
It was not easily recognizable as therapy, these two women screaming at each other, their faces inches apart, during a rehearsal in a basement space in Greenwich Village.
The patient, a blond woman with spiky hair and spiky heels: Jill Powell, 49, an actress who had fallen on hard times. The other woman, more reserved in dress and demeanor, was Cecilia Dintino, 56, a clinical psychologist.
But this particular scene had a twist; Ms. Dintino is an actual psychologist and Ms. Powell is one of her actual patients.
The therapist and the patient were rehearsing a show called “Borderline,” which features the two women playing themselves and dealing with Ms. Powell’s lifelong struggle with borderline personality disorder.
More...
https://archive.ph/wkt8i
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