Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER
ONLINE ***
Wed, Mar 3, 2021, 8:00
PM EST
PULP VÉRITÉ by Crystal
Skillman is a race against time: an examination of activism. The play unfolds
and unravels in startling ways. It's a call to action.
Joy, an active member
of the filmmaking collective Pulp Vérité, is captured and held overseas for
four years. After being released from captivity, she returns to the United
States to reunite with her friends and restart her life. But when the group
realizes Joy has gathered them together for the impossible—to bring her sister
who is still a captive with ISIS home—their strength as a collective, youthful
ideology, and commitment to the cause are shaken to the core.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ruth-easton-pulp-verite-by-crystal-skillman-tickets-120330486725
*** DRAMATIST GUILD
***
Wed, February 24, 2021
6:30 PM – 8:30 PM EST
New York State Fest
Night 3: Musical Theatre Writers and the Future Of Live Stage Productions
We know so much about
how writers have pivoted and created "virtual theatre" during this
time---but how are writers currently working toward future live stage
productions of their work?
Brought to you by the
New York State DG Regional Rep and Ambassador team, this webinar is free and
open for all to attend from any location.
Hear from Dramatists
Guild members Amanda Green, David Henry Hwang, Joe Iconis, and Michael R.
Jackson about the stage musicals they're working on, how they've persevered and
found unconventional ways to work during the pandemic, and what they envision
for their shows during the next era. Moderated by theatre historian and producer
Jennifer Ashley Tepper.
Register:
*** PRIMARY STAGES ***
NYCP DISCOUNT: Writing
for Zoom & Fundamentals of Playwriting at Primary Stages ESPA!
March is almost here
and so is the start of some exciting online classes at Primary Stages ESPA!
Take $100 off each of these classes using the code NYCP at checkout! Get back
to the basics with Fundamentals of Playwriting taught by Dennis A. Allen II
(Writer and Director, Atlantic Theater Co, National Black Theatre) or delve
into the new art form that is Writing for Zoom with Lia Romeo (4-time Kilroy's
List writer). Classes begin in March.
Flexible,
artist-friendly payment plans available.
http://primarystages.org/espa/writing
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR
PLAYWRIGHTS ***
In a joint project
between the Little Theatre of Alexandria (LTA) New Voices Series and The
Arlington Players (TAP), we are looking for your original 40-60 minute Audio
scripts. We will select one show to be performed in May. We are hoping to
broadcast a recorded performance on a local radio station, but if not possible,
we will air via Zoom.
***
National Arts
Diversity Integration Association (NADIA) is accepting script submissions for a
new play or musical to be recorded and presented as a staged reading in their
Spring 2021 Amplified Currents Festival of the Arts, which will be held online,
April 17th-25th, 2021.
***
Studio Players,
Kentucky’s Oldest Community-Involved Theater, located in Lexington, is proud to
announce their Annual 10-Minute Play Festival, to be performed in July 2021.
This event is growing yearly, with vibrant public response and Donor/Sponsor
support.
We are looking for 7
strong plays to feature so, once again, we are holding a competition. This
competition is for 10-minute plays only; it is open to any playwright. There is
NO submission fee. The judges will be members of the Studio Players theater
community: board members, directors and patrons.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION
about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BLACK PEOPLE /
BLACK HISTORY ***
Frederick Douglass:
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory
As part of Black
History Trilogy, a series of virtual productions from Flushing Town Hall, in
Queens, the 2019 Tony winner André De Shields will portray Frederick Douglass
in a stirring one-man performance. The transcendent “Hadestown” star also wrote
the show, which explores the achievements and ingenuity of the abolitionist
leader, as well as the darkness and horror that he experienced. The program
comes after Flushing Town Hall’s “Divine Sass: A Tribute to the Music, Life and
Legacy of Sarah Vaughan” from Lillias White on Feb. 18. All performances are
free. February 26, 7 p.m.,
flushingtownhall.org/black-history-trilogy-iii
***
MY GENERAL TUBMAN is
the first play Penn faculty Lorene Cary has written, and the first new play
that director, performer, and playwright James IJames has brought into
production. Playing to sold-out audiences, “My General Tubman” has been
extended twice since opening night in January and is now scheduled through
March 15.
It was while Cary was
with her family at the New Jersey seashore that she first started thinking of
writing about Tubman, when she saw a photo of her displayed at Historic Cold
Springs Village. The former slave, abolitionist, and activist had worked at the
Cape May Hotel during the summers to earn the money she needed to go down south
to bring enslaved people up north to freedom.
More...
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/time-traveling-harriet-tubman-lorene-cary-arden-theater
***
Katori Hall’s THE
MOUNTAINTOP contains a strange premise that moves from exposing the
raw humanity of Dr. King to sanctifying him as we get a glimpse of his
last evening on earth on April 3, 1968. In the Lorraine Motel in Memphis,
Tennessee. Dr. King ( David Alan Anderson) is alone working on his speech for
the next day’s rally when he orders room service. It is delivered by Camae
(Lisa Beasley), a young motel maid.
The two strike up a
conversation revolving around King’s celebrity and his need for a
cigarette. Over Pall Malls, we slowly begin to both see the human side of Dr.
King and his eventual fate. We see Dr. King as a lonely man with doubts
as to his purpose and the direction of his movement. he is tired and spent. The
rainy lightning contributes to his fears for his life after continuous threats
on his life. The clap of thunder ignites his fears.
More...
https://chicagocritic.com/mountaintop/
***
San Antonio's
Renaissance Guild has put a powerful interpretation of August Wilson's 1984 MA
RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM on the makeshift stage at the Little Carver Civic
Center.
This is the only one
of the ten plays in Wilson's "Pittsburgh cycle" depicting
African-American lives across the twentieth century that is not, in fact, set
in Pittsburgh. The locale is Sturdyvant's shabby recording studio in Chicago in
the mid-1920's, where the impatient record distributor is waiting for the
idolized blues singer Gerturde "Ma" Rainey to show up with her band
for a session. Rainey's manager Irvin, a white man, reassures Sturdyvant but
frets, worries and jumps about. Soon enough, we'll understand why.
Four session musicians
show up on time, with no word from "Ma." Irvin packs them off with a
song list and instructions to rehearse until "Ma" gets there.
More...
https://ctxlivetheatre.com/reviews/review-ma-raineys-black-bottom-by-renaissance-g/
***
A new play that
sketches and celebrates Ida B. Wells’ life, CONSTANT STAR, has been staged in
several cities, including Washington, D.C., Hartford and, last month,
Pittsburgh. (It goes to Palm Beach, Florida, next March.) Playwright Tazewell
Thompson says he was moved to investigate the “insane lawlessness” of lynchings
and to write about Wells’ crusade against them after viewing a 1989 documentary,
Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice. “It haunted me that this tiny woman had to
become the drum majorette for this campaign,” says Thompson, a theater dis
rector. “Wells believed it was a land of laws, and by God she was going to see
to it that everyone was treated as if ‘all men are created equal.’”
More...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/against-all-odds-65322127/
***
Louis Armstrong cusses
up a storm in Terry Teachout’s smart, unfiltered one-man drama SATCHMO AT THE
WALDORF. The great trumpeter, well known among jazz fans for having a salty
tongue, also blasts out red-hot notes of racial slang.
Immersion in such
divisive language can pin your ears back, but that’s the way it was, the genial
yet feisty Satchmo explains to us in his dressing room during a final gig in
1971. Armstrong may have ruled the music world with his bright, jaunty horn and
ebullient personality, but racist American standards had him eating in the
kitchen rather than the dining room after too many of his shows.
More...
***
The lives of actors
often contain heady highs and dispiriting lows, so fragile is their hold on the
public’s imagination and their access to the levers of power in the industry.
But the story of Paul Robeson, the great African-American performer who
achieved international fame in the 1920s and ’30s, only to be condemned for his
political beliefs and branded a Communist during the witch hunts of the ’50s,
is a particularly egregious example of a star falling at warp speed.
The extraordinary arc
of Robeson’s life and career is resurrected with grace in THE TALLEST TREE IN
THE FOREST, an engrossing solo show written and performed by Daniel Beaty, and
directed by Moisés Kaufman. In the production, which can be seen through Sunday
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Mr. Beaty portrays Robeson and various men
and women who cross his path, including his father, his brother and his wife,
nearly 40 roles in all.
More...
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Nâzım Hikmet Ran
Nâzım Hikmet Ran (January 15,
1902 – June 3, 1963) commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet was a Turkish poet,
playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director and memoirist. He was acclaimed
for the "lyrical flow of his statements".
Described as a "romantic communist"
and "romantic revolutionary", he was repeatedly arrested for his
political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His
poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages.
On Living
Nazim Hikmet
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live
with great seriousness
like
a squirrel, for example—
I mean without
looking for something beyond and above living,
I
mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take
it seriously,
so much so
and to such a degree
that, for example,
your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a
laboratory
in your white
coat and safety glasses,
you can die
for people—
even for people whose
faces you've never seen,
even though you know
living
is the most
real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy,
for example, you'll plant olive trees—
and not for your
children, either,
but because although
you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I
mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about
going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for
the latest newscast. . .
Let's say we're at the front—
for something
worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall
on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still
worry ourselves to death
about the
outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
I mean with the outside beyond
the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as
if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived". . .
From Poems of Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and
Mutlu Konuk, published by Persea Books.
Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima, (January 14, 1925 – November 25, 1970), was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai, an unarmed civilian militia.
Mishima
is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century.
He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, but the award went
to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata.
His works include the novels Confessions of a
Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and the autobiographical essay "Sun and
Steel" Mishima's work is
characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its
fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its
obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death".
Mishima's
political activities were controversial, and he remains a controversial figure
in modern Japan Ideologically, Mishima was a right-winger who extolled the
traditional culture and spirit of Japan. He opposed what he saw as western-style
materialism, along with Japan's postwar democracy, globalism, and communism,
worrying that by embracing these ideas the Japanese people would lose their
"national essence" and their distinctive cultural heritage (Shinto
and Yamato-damashii) to become a "rootless" people.
Mishima
formed the Tatenokai for the avowed purpose of restoring sacredness and dignity
to the Emperor of Japan. On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of his
militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, took its commandant hostage,
and tried to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to rise up and overthrow
Japan's 1947 Constitution, which he called "a constitution of
defeat". When his attempt failed, he committed seppuku.
Mishima’s jisei, (A jisei or death poem)
The sheaths of swords rattle
As after years of endurance
Brave men set out
To tread upon the first frost of the year.
………………….
A small night storm blows
Saying ‘falling is the essence of a flower’
te
Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, Salle Wagram
Eric
Allan Dolphy Jr. (June 20, 1928 – June 29, 1964) was an American jazz alto
saxophonist, bass clarinetist and flautist. On a few occasions, he also played
the clarinet and piccolo. Dolphy was one of several multi-instrumentalists to
gain prominence around the time that he was active. His use of the bass
clarinet helped to establish the instrument within jazz. Dolphy extended the
vocabulary and boundaries of the alto saxophone and was among the earliest
significant jazz flute soloists.
His
improvisational style was characterized by the use of wide intervals, in
addition to employing an array of extended techniques to emulate the sounds of
human voices and animals. He used melodic lines that were "angular,
zigzagging from interval to interval, taking hairpin turns at unexpected
junctures, making dramatic leaps from the lower to the upper register." Although
Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos
were often rooted in conventional (if highly abstracted) tonal bebop harmony.
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