*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

 

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

THINK FAST: Annual One-Act Play Competition

The Theater Project’s annual short play competition awards the winner for Best Play a $500 prize. The contest is open to adult playwrights, 18 and up. There is no fee to submit your play for consideration, but there is a participation fee for the finalists who present (see below). Plays are accepted in the fall for the March 4,5,6 event. Eight to ten short plays are selected for three prerecorded broadcast performances.

***

The Plain Site Theatre Festival returns for a third season and is currently seeking new LGBTQIA2+ centered plays to develop and produce. 

The Plain Site Theatre Festival returns for a new season. Curated by Alex Rioux and run by Theatre St. Thomas in partnership with Solo Chicken Productions, the festival has become an annual part of programming on the St. Thomas University campus presenting new LGBTQIA2+ centered plays with the aim of fostering queer visibility in the local arts scene and on campus. 

***

At Hominum Journal, we see the writer and the body as indivisible. Beyond the anatomy of narrative, we believe that there is language deep within our bone marrow and muscle tissue. A language that reconciles the mind/body/spirit divide. A language that, when pushed beyond the physical, has the power to challenge, heal, and embody.

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***

*** THEATER SCAMS ***

It sounds like something out of a Broadway musical: a producer approaches investors, hyping a fantastic, inspirational show about a famous opera singer, starring a famous actress. Only this was real life, with a real person accused of scamming seven people out of $165,000.

Prosecutors in New York indicted a theater producer who allegedly orchestrated a scheme revolving around a new Broadway play he was producing, The KB Project, which would be based on the life of singer Kathleen Battle, reports NBC 4. Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o would star in the play, he claimed, and he had reserved the Booth Theatre on Broadway for the production. Representatives for all those parties say the man never approached them, and there were no deals in place.

Not only that, but in January 2015, according to court documents, the producer claimed to have a deal with Netflix to run the play on its platform, and allegedly used that as leverage to convince investors to give him more money in a second round of funding. Two of the victims invested additional money, prosecutors said.

The cracks started to show in the fall of 2015 when several investors asked where their money was. The producer sent them all checks — which bounced due to insufficient funds, prosecutors said, and the suspect ceased all communications.

More...

https://consumerist.com/2016/08/19/theater-producer-accused-of-scamming-investors-out-of-165k-for-fake-broadway-play/

***

In December 1794, a young man in London named William Henry Ireland brought his father, Samuel, a devoted collector of antiquities and curiosities, a parchment document sealed with wax. After carefully opening up the parchment, Samuel was astonished at what he saw: a mortgage deed dated 1610, signed by William Shakespeare and John Heminges, an actor in Shakespeare’s King’s Men troupe of players.

At the time, only a handful of signatures were known to have survived from Shakespeare’s handwritten records, so to have a personal document like this was an extraordinary coup. William Henry explained that the document was one of dozens like it he had found while rummaging in an old chest belonging to a rich gentleman whom William Henry described only as "Mr. H." The gentleman wished to remain anonymous to avoid being bothered, William Henry explained, but had assured the young man that he had little interest in the documents and could take whatever he liked.

More...

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94483/shakespeare-fraud-tricked-late-18th-century-london

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“Fraudsters use the power of theater – pretending to be someone they are not – to scam seniors. SAGES fights fire with fire,” says Christine Hamacher, Executive Director of Senior Actors Guild and Education Services. 

Hamacher and her team at SAGES invite seniors from across Tampa Bay to experience their newest production, “Phoney Baloney,” an original play that spotlights reality on both ends of a scam phone call. Thanks to grants from the RRF Foundation for Aging and the Pinellas Community Foundation Senior Citizens Services, DVDs of a live performance are free for use at 55+ communities in Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco counties to help keep seniors from falling victim to scams.

More...

https://thegabber.com/new-play-helps-seniors-with-scams/

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I love it. What is the biggest scam you’ve ever pulled off?

Getting a show on Broadway as a producer. I think that’s the one. Being a producer on Broadway wasn’t financial for me, it was about the title. I don’t need more money for this, but it does now give me the chance to be, like, a producer. Broadway producer Jeremy O. Harris. Which is something very few people can say.

But wait, you also did a public scam once. Like, you did one on a late night talk show.

I did, I did. I scammed [Steph]. That was very fun. I love [Steph] so much.

More...

https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/jeremy-o-harris

***

The Producers is the story of down-on-his-luck theatrical producer, Max Bialystock, and Leo Bloom, a mousy accountant. Together they hatch the ultimate scam: raise more money than you need for a sure-fire Broadway flop and pocket the difference. Their "sure-fire" theatrical fiasco? None other than the musical Springtime for Hitler.

The day after its opening, The Producers broke the record for the largest single day box office gross in theater history, taking in more than $3 million, and then went on to break its own record in 2003 with over $3.5 million in single day ticket sales.

More...

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/VIDEO-THE-PRODUCERS-Celebrates-20-Years-of-Scams-Songs-and-Showgirls-20210419

***

Acting scams are made to appeal to the hopes and dreams of aspiring actors. They exist around every corner of the entertainment business. Seasoned actors know what acting scams look and sound like and so should you. Recognize the red flags: promises of instant stardom, amateur phrases like “no experience necessary,” and guarantees of work or representation. For young people who are just starting out in show business, the difference between the legitimate and the bogus is not so obvious, and scammers know that aspiring performers make the easiest prey.

Acting scams are always too good to be true

The best way to tell legit acting opportunities from acting scams is to educate yourself on the audition process. For an industry shrouded in mystery, the mechanics of casting are really quite simple. You book an audition, either through an agent or on your own. The person holding the audition, after seeing you, decides if you are right for the part. If you are what they are looking for then they ask you to return for a callback or you just might book the job then and there. If they don’t like you, better luck next time and that’s the end of it. It’s that simple.

More...

http://www.showbusinessweekly.com/acting-advice/acting-scams/

***

Having a literary agent is the dream of many writers. Countless blog posts, forums, and writers’ handbooks begin with the question: How do you get a literary agent? To these sources, it seems that all a writer needs to do is secure an agent, and every other problem, from finding a publisher to making a living as a writer, is solved.

However, there are many ways in which your relationship with a literary agent can go wrong, and end up causing more damage to your career than if you had never contracted to have that person represent you. This applies not just to visibly dodgy agents, who charge fees upfront (never work with these!). Dangers also arise in connection with agents who are entirely legit and respected in the world of publishing.

Below I tell three horror stories relating to highly reputable agents, the kind that writer’s advice columns are geared to helping you secure, and whom writers are congratulated on signing with. These examples show that, while it has its advantages, being represented by an agent is not as uniformly wonderful as it is cracked up to be.

The embezzler: Donadio & Olson

The first literary agent horror story is linked to Darin Webb, the former bookkeeper for Donadio & Olson literary agency in New York City. Donadio & Olson was a major literary agency until it filed for bankruptcy following an embezzlement scandal in 2018.

Its clients included authors like Chuck Palahniuk as well as the estates of Mario Puzo, Peter Matthiessen, Studs Terkel, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Robert Stone, Frank Conroy, Nelson Algren, and Joseph Heller.(Disclaimer: I interned here many years ago, in 2000–1, and was overwhelmed by the agency’s alpha male atmosphere.)

As Donadio & Olson authors later learned, Webb spent years siphoning off millions of dollars of royalties due to them during the course of his work as the bookkeeper for Donadio & Olson’s financial accounts. By the time he was caught, Webb had stolen $3.4 million dollars from the money that the agency owed to its clients.

More...

https://writingcooperative.com/3-literary-agent-horror-stories-3345ef27a38d

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And that's where we got that expression...

 

We lost John Prine this year. Have you ever explored his works? Its a few hours well spent.

 

She's fabulous

 

Its Okay

 

Its okay

 

Amicable and Cabal

  

Amicable comes from Latin amīcābilis, meaning "friendly," and amāre, "to feel affection for" or "to love." Amāre has a number of English descendants, including amiable ("friendly, sociable, and congenial"), amorous ("strongly moved by love and especially sexual love"), and amateur, which, though it might seem surprising, is related to amāre by way of the Latin amātor, which means "lover" as well as "enthusiastic admirer" and "devotee."

A cabal is a group secretly united in a plot. Cabal has been associated with a group of five ministers in the government of England's King Charles II. The initial letters of the names or titles of those men (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale) spelled cabal, and they have been collectively dubbed as the "Cabal Cabinet" or "Cabal Ministry." But these five names are not the source of the word cabal, which was in use decades before Charles II ascended the throne. The term traces back to cabbala, the Medieval Latin name for the Kabbalah, a traditional system of esoteric Jewish mysticism. Latin borrowed Cabbala from the Hebrew qabbālāh, meaning "received or traditional lore."

The rule of three

 Omne trium perfectum (everything that comes in threes is perfect)

The rule of three is a writing principle that says that a trio of events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other numbers and that an audience is more likely to remember the information conveyed because having three entities combines both brevity and rhythm with having the smallest amount of information to create a pattern.  The rule of three is often used in words, phrases, sentences, lines, paragraphs/stanzas, chapters/sections of writing, books, poetry, oral storytelling, films, and advertising and. Photography (dividing an image into three vertically and horizontally.

Related to that is the term hendiatris, meaning a figure of speech where three successive words are used to express a single central idea. When used in a slogan or a motto, it’s is known as a tripartite motto.

Here are some examples;

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Stop, Look and Listen

Stop, Drop and Roll

Faster, Higher, Stronger

Veni, vidi, vici

 

Disney Left Out the Most Gruesome Aspects of the Original Snow White Story

 Disney Left Out the Most Gruesome Aspects of the Original Snow White Story

E.L. Hamilton

 

Oh, Snow White, that classic, if a little retro, fairytale of good triumphing over evil. It’s a sweet story of an innocent young beauty who is banished by a vain, cruel, and jealous stepmother and who, with the help of seven lovable dwarfs, ultimately finds everlasting true love. Walt Disney turned the fable into the first full-length animated musical feature film in 1937. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is to this day one of the top-10 films of all time (adjusted for inflation), beloved by generations of children.

 

It turns out the American animator left out a few gruesome details. Disney’s well-known Snow White is a sanitized version of the original German Brothers Grimm fairytale, which was a lot more, well, grim.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm didn’t actually come up with the story of Snow White or Cinderella, Rapunzel, or any other storybook princess associated with their (and now Disney’s) name, for that matter. The Grimms were German scholars, researchers, and authors who collected folktales that were part of a rich oral tradition, having been passed down from generation to generation of women telling the stories to pass the time. In 1812, they published the collection as Nursery and Household Tales.

Despite its title, the book was not originally intended for children. The text included violence, incest, sex, and perhaps most deadly of all—footnotes. In the Cinderella story, for instance, the stepsisters cut off their toes and heels in order to fit into the glass slipper.

In “Little Snow-White,” as the original story was called, the Evil Queen asks a hunter to take Snow White into the forest to kill, as happens also in the movie. (In the original version, the child is also only 7 years old, as opposed to Disney’s 14. Neither seems old enough to consider marriage.)

In the Grimm version, the Queen orders the huntsman to bring back Snow White’s internal organs, saying “Kill her, and as proof that she is dead bring her lungs and liver back to me.”

He kills a boar instead, and brings back to the Queen the boar’s lungs and liver—which the Queen thinks belongs to Snow White and so promptly eats. Ewww!

“The cook had to boil them with salt, and the wicked woman ate them, supposing that she had eaten Snow-White’s lungs and liver,” as the Grimm brothers wrote.

The Queen tricks Snow White three separate times in the Grimm version. The first time, she has Snow White try on a corset, which is so tight, Snow White passes out. (The dwarfs save her by cutting the laces.) The second time, she sells Snow White a poisonous comb, which the young girl puts in her hair, causing her to pass out. (The dwarfs take it out.) The third time the Queen tricks her with the same poisonous apple we see in the Disney film.

Having fainted and presumed dead, young Snow-White is placed in a glass coffin in both book and movie. When the Prince happens by in the Grimm version, he insists on taking the deceased beauty away, even though he’s never met her. The dwarfs hesitantly agree, but as they are carrying her coffin out of their house, one of them stumbles. Jostled from her resting place in the coffin, Snow White spits out the apple lodged in her throat and is immediately revived. Without the influence of the Prince’s kiss.

In movie and in folklore, Snow White and the Prince fall in love and get married (never mind that in the original tale, Snow is only 7 years old). In the movie, the seven dwarfs chase the Evil Queen into the forest, where she tumbles off a cliff—with a push from a convenient lightning strike—and falls to her death.

In the book version, the Queen attends their wedding where she is meted out a just punishment of dancing to her death. (Perhaps this last was thought up by a 19^th century noblewoman forced to dance endlessly to the 1812 version of Bruno Mars’s “Marry You.”)

 

The more Grimm version of the Queen’s death goes like this: “They put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals. They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead.”

You can see why Disney wanted to clean up that unsavory image!

---

E.L. Hamilton has written about pop culture for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including Rolling Stone, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, the New York Post and the New York Daily News. She lives in central New Jersey, just west of New York City

 

 

WH Auden's 'The Age of Anxiety'

It was both hailed as 'his best work to date' and damned as 'his one failure'. Leonard Bernstein's symphony, inspired by the poem, is the better work of art, argues Glyn Maxwell

W. H. Auden

In 1944, in New York City, against a background of a changed and frightening world, the finest – and most controversial – English poet of the day began work on a new long poem. On its publication three years later it would garner some of the worst reviews he ever got and leave many of his devotees cold: while TS Eliot hailed it as "his best work to date", the Times Literary Supplement deemed it "his one dull book, his one failure". It would inspire a symphony and a ballet and win the Pulitzer prize. It was the last long poem he would write.

"The Age of Anxiety" is the strangest flower of a marvellously fertile period. The decade following WH Auden's emigration to New York in 1939 produced not only the long poems "For the Time Being", "New Year Letter" and "The Sea and the Mirror" – his sublime meditation on The Tempest – but some of the finest works of this or any 20th-century poet: "In Memory of WB Yeats", "At the Grave of Henry James", "If I Could Tell You", "The Fall of Rome", "The Quest". And the great – and latterly disavowed – lament for a falling world "September 1st, 1939".

There are still, remarkably, some who believe Auden's gift deserted him when he left England on the eve of the second world war, as if this perceived treachery to the motherland crippled him creatively, but another reason for this position is suggested by the words of Anthony Powell on Auden's death in 1973, as reported by Kingsley Amis, with whom Powell was breakfasting: "I'm delighted that shit has gone . . . It should have happened years ago . . . scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a . . . like a . . ." But there'll always be an England.

It is in "September 1st, 1939" that we first glimpse the setting for what would become "The Age of Anxiety":

 

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play . . .

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

 

At the outset of "The Age of Anxiety" Auden spotlights four of these faces, solitary drinkers in a wartime New York bar: Malin, a Canadian airman; Quant, a world-weary clerk; Rosetta, a buyer for a department-store; and Emble, a young naval recruit. Over six sections – a prologue, a life-story, a dream-quest, a dirge, a masque and an epilogue – they meditate on their lives, their hopes, their losses, and on the human condition. In real terms they get talking at the bar, grab a booth together, get plastered and stagger back to Rosetta's place. There they drink some more and dance a bit until the two older gents drift home and the younger one pledges undying love to Rosetta before crashing out on her bed.

Between these mundane characters and what Auden requires of them stretches a dizzying gulf. Each of his modern Americans speaks, most of the time, in long speeches of alliterative tetrameter, an English form so old as to suggest firelight and the mead-hall. To a mid-20th-century ear, tetrameter would always seem to have a rhyme planned ahead, but alliteration is what English used to bind ideas before it used rhyme, and that's good enough this time for the proudly nordic Auden: "My deuce, my double, my dear image, / Is it lively there, that land of glass". The never-fulfilled expectation of rhyme is a suitable curse on any lonesome quartet of drinkers at any bar, a milieu that Auden calls "an unprejudiced space where nothing particular ever happens".

Unsurprisingly Malin, Quant, Rosetta and Emble all sound like Auden, who wrote some lively charades but wasn't really a playwright. Then again, because they sound like Auden, what they say is mostly brilliant, beautiful, or both. Here is Malin's description of the death of an airman: "We fought them off / But paid a price; there was pain for some. / 'Why have They killed me?' wondered our Bert, our / Greenhouse gunner, forgot our answer, / Then was not with us . . ." While Quant imagines the decay of the dead: "Soil accepts for a serious purpose / The jettisoned blood of jokes and dreams . . ." And Rosetta imagines, with striking prescience, the world to come: "Odourless ages, an ordered world / Of planned pleasures and passport-control, / Sentry-go sedatives, soft drinks and / Managed money, a moral planet / Tamed by terror . . ."

After several pages of the poem one is aware only of Auden. I defy anyone new to the poem to conceal the characters' names and correctly guess which of the four is talking. Auden's prose introduction to them furnishes us with one man who happens to know his mythology, one man who is "trying to recapture the old atmosphere of laboratory and lecture-hall", a woman who daydreams of "those landscapes familiar to all readers of English detective stories" and a young man "fully conscious of the attraction of his uniform to both sexes". That is to say, Auden fourfold. When it becomes clear that the puppet-master has handed out abstractions to all his characters – Malin is "Thought", Quant "Intuition", Rosetta "Feeling" and Emble "Sensation" – one can sympathise with the Horizon reviewer who called the poem "a re-hash of Auden's psychology divided by four". John Berryman, who regarded Auden as "one of the best living poets", none the less called them "the four vaguest characters in modern literature".

Auden's burned-out Manhattanites are under no more obligation to chat in American slang than Hamlet is to murmur in Middle Danish. The speeches are meant to be taken as inward monologues, dream-soliloquies, while the uniform shape of utterance suggests a commonality, a shared and inescapable plight. Verse should be neither too free nor too formed, as human experience is also neither: breath and bloodstream hold in place a struggling spirit, and Auden is a master of human utterance only insofar as he's a master of form.

 

But for all its local wonders, its unceasing appeal to grace and intelligence – plus some welcome bursts of satiric laughter – there is something formally wrong with "The Age of Anxiety". If one is going to create puppets then one has to make them move, and they don't. They don't really move each other, let alone us. They begin in thought – "Quant was thinking", "Malin thought", "Emble was thinking" – and move into conversation – "Malin suggested" "Quant approved", "So did Rosetta" – but in their actual speeches they show only the faintest traces of attention to one another. In the third section, "The Seven Stages", Auden has them leaving the bar behind, not literally, but, by dint of being drunk, fanning out into a dream-landscape on a spiritual quest (is any drink that good?) at which point one wonders why he set it in a bar at all.

The quest requires that at one point the four ascend "the same steep pass", the only physical effect of which is to shorten their speeches, but paradoxically this causes them to sound more than ever like projections of abstractions: Rosetta (Feeling) has "a horror of dwarfs / And a streaming cold", Malin (Thought) muses that "The less I feel / The more I mind", while Emble (Sensation) complains "I hate my knees / But like my legs". One voice hardly ever responds to what another has said, as if the four abstractions were true oppositions, or sealed off from each other like the four elements. Those may be, but voices aren't.

The fifth section, "The Masque", set in Rosetta's apartment, with Malin ogling Emble and Emble pawing Rosetta, would seem to require the most interaction, but the four remain symbolic mouthpieces, and when Emble and Rosetta dance and finally kiss, they render the following sweet nothings:

Emble said:

Till death divide

May the Four Faces Feeling can make

Assent to our sighs.

She said:

The snap of the Three

Grim Spinning Sisters' Spectacle Case

Uphold our honors.

 

And so to bed. It's easy to chuckle at this, but it's merely the sound of a form stretched to its furthest premise and, well . . . snapping. And yet there are traces of beautifully resonant writing, evoking the moment, bringing human faces close to our own, throughout "The Age of Anxiety" – they're just all in prose. They're the stage-directions.

Malin is watching Emble and Rosetta flirting. He "had been building a little altar of sandwiches. Now he placed an olive upon it and invoked the Queen of love". A little while before, when the group arrives at Rosetta's place, they "all felt that it was time something exciting happened and decided to do their best to see that it did. Had they been perfectly honest with themselves, they would have had to admit that they were tired and wanted to go home alone to bed." Quant "waved his cigar in time to the music" and "invoked the local spirits". Rosetta, having seen the older men to the elevator, finds Emble comatose on her bed: "She looked down at him, half-sadly, half-relieved . . ."

One must love Auden's poetry to be able to speak this heresy, but I can't help wondering what fun he might have had – we might have had – with, instead of the poem, a wartime novel in the vein of Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen. In virtually the last words of the poem something is revealed: "[Malin] returned to duty, reclaimed by the actual world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest . . ." This points to the problem with "The Age of Anxiety": time is real to real people. Abstractions can't change, so they don't listen.

A lesser poet wrote a greater poem for the age of anxiety: in Louis MacNeice's "Autumn Journal", set in London on the brink of the war, a recognisably human voice is blown hither and thither by memories, lusts and terrifying headlines. Auden's "The Age of Anxiety" isn't even the best work of art called "The Age of Anxiety": if I'm a junior minister in Auden's world, I'm barely a tea-boy in that of Leonard Bernstein, but I'd accord that honour to his Symphony No 2. Bernstein found the poem "fascinating and hair-raising". From the time he read "The Age of Anxiety" in 1948 "the composition of a symphony based on [it] acquired an almost compulsive quality", he wrote, describing an "extreme personal identification of myself with the poem, the essential line [of which] is the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith." Three years after the Holocaust, in the year of the founding of Israel, one can scarcely imagine how "difficult and problematic" faith had become for Bernstein.

Like the poem, the symphony is divided into six movements, each movement itself sub-divided, but many of the movements fade or blur into each other. By his own admission, Bernstein followed the poem very closely, with the piano representing the self in quest of meaning and faith, struggling to be understood, to be loved, against a backdrop of jazzily detached and distracted woodwinds, horns, celesta and wild percussion. For the quest section, the piano descends a tentative, untrustworthy scale, like the onset of dream, while "The Masque" – the bit in Rosetta's apartment – is a scintillating piano solo, a real dance for dear life. Bernstein's daughter Jaime called it "ridiculously difficult . . . one of the hardest parts ever written", and it does magnificently what the poem can't do – spins the characters out beyond reason in their desire to blot out the dismal world.

Throughout the piece instruments explode into life, peter out suddenly or are drowned out by others, yet the same fragile theme struggles on. This gives the symphony the concision and cohesion wanting in the poem. It is short (for a symphony) and electrifying. Its voices hear each other. And if the grand closing chords seem more resolved than anything at the end of the poem – notwithstanding Malin's Christian optimism as his train crosses the Manhattan bridge at sunrise – perhaps, at that point where genius in language and music meet, only the latter can seem to mend what's broken.