NYCPlaywrights February 28, 2026
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NYCPlaywrights
Feb 28, 2026, 5:05:27 PM (9 days ago) Feb 28
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
The Oratory LAB : A Staged Reading of the story of Ruth
The Times Square Corps - Theatre 315 is launching a new performing arts series for 2026 entitled The Oratory LAB. Events may entail various performing art forms, such as plays, musicals, films, staged readings, dance, vocal performances, monologues and more. Each event will be different but all will be inspired by Scripture.
Each event for this series will occur on the last Friday of each month beginning Friday March 27 and finishing on Friday October 30 for 2026. Admission is free.
Come experience the unearthing of inspired talent and the power of biblical stories.
Friday, Mar 27 from 6:30 pm to 9 pm
Times Square Corps - Theatre 315
315 West 47th Street
New York, NY 10036
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-oratory-lab-a-staged-reading-of-the-story-of-ruth-tickets-1983982212204?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Abingdon Theatre Company is excited to invite both established and emerging artists to submit their full length one-person plays to continue our mission of developing brave new work. We encourage one-person plays that cover a diverse ground in genre, performance type, and subject matter.
***
Introducing a nine-month developmental program under the direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Annie Baker, designed to support emerging NYC playwrights.
The Cherry Lane Playwrights Collective is a nine-month developmental program under the direction of playwright Annie Baker, designed to support rising playwrights through community and a rigorous structure without the barriers of formal graduate programs. A cohort of six selected playwrights will meet over ten Sunday evenings, every three weeks, at Cherry Lane Theatre from September 2026 through June 2027 to share work, read pages aloud, and develop brand-new plays over the course of the year.
***
On the occasion of World Theatre Day, the Theatre Research Centre (TRC) presents TRC Postdramatic Script Award 2026 – an international script competition. This award encourages innovative, experimental, postdramatic, and abstract theatre scripts.
Scripts may be submitted in Bangla, English, or both languages.
বিশ্ব নাট্য দিবস উপলক্ষে “নাট্য গবেষণা কেন্দ্র (TRC)” আয়োজন করছে TRC
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATRE OF THE REAL ***
It’s difficult to maintain any kind of analytical distance while watching “Hate Radio.” The audience reads supertitles and listens to the show through headphones, so the hate vibrates directly against your skull. Rau, when he is working with his company, the International Institute of Political Murder, isn’t particularly interested in distance though: IIPM dissolves barriers between performance and life in often uncomfortable — and almost always exhilarating — ways. Rau “holds a mirror up to theater” as much as he does to nature, said Carol Martin, the author of “Theatre of the Real,” a 2013 book that analyzes such work. “He’s both inside and outside the frame.”
More...
https://archive.ph/UMeZW
***
Broadly conceived, American documentary theatre (also sometimes called docudrama, ethnodrama, verbatim theatre, tribunal theatre[1], theatre of witness, or theatre of fact) is performance typically built by an individual or collective of artists from historical and/or archival materials such as trial transcripts, written or recorded interviews, newspaper reporting, personal or iconic visual images or video footage, government documents, biographies and autobiographies, even academic papers and scientific research.
I locate three significant moments of innovation in the form, content, and purpose of documentary performance over the past 100 years of American theatre history and practice. The first is marked by the work produced under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project (1935-1939), particularly “living newspapers,” a form itself borrowed from agitprop and worker’s theatre in Western Europe and Russia. While the content of these early American documentary plays was drawn from everyday life, particularly the experiences of first- and second-generation working-class immigrants, their form was decidedly modernist, embracing collage, montage, expressionism, and minimalism in a symbiotic relationship with new forms of visual art, early cinema, and atonal musical compositions.
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/08/22/a-history-of-u-s-documentary-theatre-in-three-stages/
***
How do you make real people come to life on stage and maintain the truth of their journey while also keeping the audience engaged? And how do you create the feeling and vibe of a real community when it is logistically impossible to have every character in that community on stage? These are some critical challenges of documentary theatre that I encountered as a research team member for Life Jacket Theatre Company’s production of America is Hard to See.
As a playwright and fiction writer, I live in the land of creating characters and the worlds that they inhabit. The characters, of course, end up taking their own direction, but there is a sense of control over the story, which the author can perhaps nudge in one direction or another. As an academic writer in the field of environmental economics, however, the data and the numbers provide me with boundaries for my writing—my interpretation of what the world looks like according to those facts. No characters, of course, no messy emotions to deal with, just the rational reckonings of statistics. Working as a research team member on a work of documentary theatre that uncovers the lives of sex offenders living near Pahokee, Florida, has required an odd and, at times, uncomfortable tension between these two ways of approaching a writing project—the desire to create a narrative confronted by living, breathing characters with their individual histories and trajectories
More...
https://howlround.com/creating-theatre-reality
***
At the Union Square Theater, it turned out, where until recently Moises Kaufman's ''Laramie Project'' was playing. In the great and recent tradition of Anna Deavere Smith's ''Fires in the Mirror'' and ''Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,'' here was theater that seemed to walk in step with the culture at large.
Transcribed from tapes of witnesses to actual events, the work of both Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Smith brings a topical immediacy to the stage, refuting the outmoded style of American social realism -- all right, kitchen-sink dramas -- that theater artists, and critics, decry. If one accepts the theory that realism was appropriated from the theater by television with Norman Lear's revolutionary sitcoms ''All in the Family'' and ''Maude'' (and was revived, arguably, with Roseanne's working-class lament in the 80's), then artists like Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Smith have reclaimed what was once known as realism for the theater in new and provocative ways.
The well-known voice teacher Kristin Linklater, in her book ''Freeing Shakespeare's Voice: The Actor's Guide to Talking the Text,'' writes of the special power of the spoken word as it is heard live; its ability to unite an audience not only in meaning, but also in sound. In other words, a line of dialogue effects a physiological response that reverberates in the senses as well as the mind. This is what the kids call inter activity. This is realness plus. And this is what audiences everywhere are searching for.
Voting half-naked potential millionaires off an island? I think not. Try Off Broadway.
More..
https://archive.ph/NZfyY#selection-735.0-747.86
***
Blue Blouse was founded in 1923 by Boris Yuzhanin an instructor at the Moscow Journalism Institute, and named after the factory workers’ overalls. It was often described as a “Living Newspaper.”
This is how the Blue Blouse defined itself: “Blue Blouse is a form of agitation, a topical theatre born of the revolution, a montage of political and general phenomena presented from the point of view of the class ideology of the proletariat. Blue blouse is a juicy hard-hitting and mobile theatre performing under any conditions.”
This was a period of astounding ambition and optimism in the arts. Revolutionary zeal inspired artists of all kinds to seize the moment and create new forms, and the Blue Blouse embodied this spirit.
Exciting, informative and stimulating, the role of the Blue Blouse was to prepare audiences for “the new social conditions being developed in the Soviet Union.”
The Blue Blouse was a living newspaper at a time of widespread illiteracy, a popular news review that included everything from topical issues, sport, dance, poetry, magic tricks, acrobatics and sketches, to tableau vivant and scenes from history.
More...
https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/project/centenary-russian-revolution/tribute-revolution’s-blue-blouse-movement-heroes
***
The Federal Theatre Project (FTP), part of the Works Progress Administration’s efforts to provide work for unemployed people during the Great Depression, produced over 2,700 stage productions across the nation. Separate divisions within the FTP focused on different types of performances. One of them was the Living Newspaper unit which created plays with scenes that dramatized newspaper articles.
In collaboration with the American Newspaper Guild, the Living Newspaper headquarters in New York City wrote plays to send out to be performed by the regional FTP groups. Current events were transformed from the page to the stage.
More...
https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2022/08/living-newspapers/
***
Five years after January 6, 2021, Fatherland arrives in Durham squarely in the midst of a political world divided, with no interest in shying away from the conversation.
This is not a courtroom drama play about “that day” as a headline or an artifact of history. Instead, the Bulldog Ensemble Theater production focuses on the aftermath of the event—what happened when the barricades came down and the people who stormed the Capitol returned home to their families.
Opening Thursday, January 29, Fatherland is drawn from the true story of a son who reported his father to the FBI for his role in the Capitol insurrection and contains real court transcripts and interviews. Written by Stephen Sachs, the play moves between courtroom testimony and “memory theater,” with looks back on scenes from the family’s life, showing both the legal case and what led up to it.
More...
https://indyweek.com/news/culture/bulldog-ensemble-theater-fatherland/
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
The Oratory LAB : A Staged Reading of the story of Ruth
The Times Square Corps - Theatre 315 is launching a new performing arts series for 2026 entitled The Oratory LAB. Events may entail various performing art forms, such as plays, musicals, films, staged readings, dance, vocal performances, monologues and more. Each event will be different but all will be inspired by Scripture.
Each event for this series will occur on the last Friday of each month beginning Friday March 27 and finishing on Friday October 30 for 2026. Admission is free.
Come experience the unearthing of inspired talent and the power of biblical stories.
Friday, Mar 27 from 6:30 pm to 9 pm
Times Square Corps - Theatre 315
315 West 47th Street
New York, NY 10036
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-oratory-lab-a-staged-reading-of-the-story-of-ruth-tickets-1983982212204?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Abingdon Theatre Company is excited to invite both established and emerging artists to submit their full length one-person plays to continue our mission of developing brave new work. We encourage one-person plays that cover a diverse ground in genre, performance type, and subject matter.
***
Introducing a nine-month developmental program under the direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Annie Baker, designed to support emerging NYC playwrights.
The Cherry Lane Playwrights Collective is a nine-month developmental program under the direction of playwright Annie Baker, designed to support rising playwrights through community and a rigorous structure without the barriers of formal graduate programs. A cohort of six selected playwrights will meet over ten Sunday evenings, every three weeks, at Cherry Lane Theatre from September 2026 through June 2027 to share work, read pages aloud, and develop brand-new plays over the course of the year.
***
On the occasion of World Theatre Day, the Theatre Research Centre (TRC) presents TRC Postdramatic Script Award 2026 – an international script competition. This award encourages innovative, experimental, postdramatic, and abstract theatre scripts.
Scripts may be submitted in Bangla, English, or both languages.
বিশ্ব নাট্য দিবস উপলক্ষে “নাট্য গবেষণা কেন্দ্র (TRC)” আয়োজন করছে TRC
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATRE OF THE REAL ***
It’s difficult to maintain any kind of analytical distance while watching “Hate Radio.” The audience reads supertitles and listens to the show through headphones, so the hate vibrates directly against your skull. Rau, when he is working with his company, the International Institute of Political Murder, isn’t particularly interested in distance though: IIPM dissolves barriers between performance and life in often uncomfortable — and almost always exhilarating — ways. Rau “holds a mirror up to theater” as much as he does to nature, said Carol Martin, the author of “Theatre of the Real,” a 2013 book that analyzes such work. “He’s both inside and outside the frame.”
More...
https://archive.ph/UMeZW
***
Broadly conceived, American documentary theatre (also sometimes called docudrama, ethnodrama, verbatim theatre, tribunal theatre[1], theatre of witness, or theatre of fact) is performance typically built by an individual or collective of artists from historical and/or archival materials such as trial transcripts, written or recorded interviews, newspaper reporting, personal or iconic visual images or video footage, government documents, biographies and autobiographies, even academic papers and scientific research.
I locate three significant moments of innovation in the form, content, and purpose of documentary performance over the past 100 years of American theatre history and practice. The first is marked by the work produced under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project (1935-1939), particularly “living newspapers,” a form itself borrowed from agitprop and worker’s theatre in Western Europe and Russia. While the content of these early American documentary plays was drawn from everyday life, particularly the experiences of first- and second-generation working-class immigrants, their form was decidedly modernist, embracing collage, montage, expressionism, and minimalism in a symbiotic relationship with new forms of visual art, early cinema, and atonal musical compositions.
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/08/22/a-history-of-u-s-documentary-theatre-in-three-stages/
***
How do you make real people come to life on stage and maintain the truth of their journey while also keeping the audience engaged? And how do you create the feeling and vibe of a real community when it is logistically impossible to have every character in that community on stage? These are some critical challenges of documentary theatre that I encountered as a research team member for Life Jacket Theatre Company’s production of America is Hard to See.
As a playwright and fiction writer, I live in the land of creating characters and the worlds that they inhabit. The characters, of course, end up taking their own direction, but there is a sense of control over the story, which the author can perhaps nudge in one direction or another. As an academic writer in the field of environmental economics, however, the data and the numbers provide me with boundaries for my writing—my interpretation of what the world looks like according to those facts. No characters, of course, no messy emotions to deal with, just the rational reckonings of statistics. Working as a research team member on a work of documentary theatre that uncovers the lives of sex offenders living near Pahokee, Florida, has required an odd and, at times, uncomfortable tension between these two ways of approaching a writing project—the desire to create a narrative confronted by living, breathing characters with their individual histories and trajectories
More...
https://howlround.com/creating-theatre-reality
***
At the Union Square Theater, it turned out, where until recently Moises Kaufman's ''Laramie Project'' was playing. In the great and recent tradition of Anna Deavere Smith's ''Fires in the Mirror'' and ''Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,'' here was theater that seemed to walk in step with the culture at large.
Transcribed from tapes of witnesses to actual events, the work of both Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Smith brings a topical immediacy to the stage, refuting the outmoded style of American social realism -- all right, kitchen-sink dramas -- that theater artists, and critics, decry. If one accepts the theory that realism was appropriated from the theater by television with Norman Lear's revolutionary sitcoms ''All in the Family'' and ''Maude'' (and was revived, arguably, with Roseanne's working-class lament in the 80's), then artists like Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Smith have reclaimed what was once known as realism for the theater in new and provocative ways.
The well-known voice teacher Kristin Linklater, in her book ''Freeing Shakespeare's Voice: The Actor's Guide to Talking the Text,'' writes of the special power of the spoken word as it is heard live; its ability to unite an audience not only in meaning, but also in sound. In other words, a line of dialogue effects a physiological response that reverberates in the senses as well as the mind. This is what the kids call inter activity. This is realness plus. And this is what audiences everywhere are searching for.
Voting half-naked potential millionaires off an island? I think not. Try Off Broadway.
More..
https://archive.ph/NZfyY#selection-735.0-747.86
***
Blue Blouse was founded in 1923 by Boris Yuzhanin an instructor at the Moscow Journalism Institute, and named after the factory workers’ overalls. It was often described as a “Living Newspaper.”
This is how the Blue Blouse defined itself: “Blue Blouse is a form of agitation, a topical theatre born of the revolution, a montage of political and general phenomena presented from the point of view of the class ideology of the proletariat. Blue blouse is a juicy hard-hitting and mobile theatre performing under any conditions.”
This was a period of astounding ambition and optimism in the arts. Revolutionary zeal inspired artists of all kinds to seize the moment and create new forms, and the Blue Blouse embodied this spirit.
Exciting, informative and stimulating, the role of the Blue Blouse was to prepare audiences for “the new social conditions being developed in the Soviet Union.”
The Blue Blouse was a living newspaper at a time of widespread illiteracy, a popular news review that included everything from topical issues, sport, dance, poetry, magic tricks, acrobatics and sketches, to tableau vivant and scenes from history.
More...
https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/project/centenary-russian-revolution/tribute-revolution’s-blue-blouse-movement-heroes
***
The Federal Theatre Project (FTP), part of the Works Progress Administration’s efforts to provide work for unemployed people during the Great Depression, produced over 2,700 stage productions across the nation. Separate divisions within the FTP focused on different types of performances. One of them was the Living Newspaper unit which created plays with scenes that dramatized newspaper articles.
In collaboration with the American Newspaper Guild, the Living Newspaper headquarters in New York City wrote plays to send out to be performed by the regional FTP groups. Current events were transformed from the page to the stage.
More...
https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2022/08/living-newspapers/
***
Five years after January 6, 2021, Fatherland arrives in Durham squarely in the midst of a political world divided, with no interest in shying away from the conversation.
This is not a courtroom drama play about “that day” as a headline or an artifact of history. Instead, the Bulldog Ensemble Theater production focuses on the aftermath of the event—what happened when the barricades came down and the people who stormed the Capitol returned home to their families.
Opening Thursday, January 29, Fatherland is drawn from the true story of a son who reported his father to the FBI for his role in the Capitol insurrection and contains real court transcripts and interviews. Written by Stephen Sachs, the play moves between courtroom testimony and “memory theater,” with looks back on scenes from the family’s life, showing both the legal case and what led up to it.
More...
https://indyweek.com/news/culture/bulldog-ensemble-theater-fatherland/
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