NYCPlaywrights April 4, 2026
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NYCPlaywrights
Apr 4, 2026, 5:07:43 PMApr 4
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Plays Out Loud! Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl
Eurydice! Our April 2026 edition of a live stage reading. No sets. No spectacle. Just actors, language, and a room full of humans listening.
In Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl reimagines the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. Ruhl's imaginative play offers a fresh look at a timeless love story.
Rough DraftNew York, NY
Sunday, Apr 12 from 3 pm to 4:30 pm
126 Hamilton Place
New York, NY 10031
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/plays-out-loud-eurydice-by-sarah-ruhl-tickets-1986007090670?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** SHANGRI-LA-LA ***
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Plays Out Loud! Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl
Eurydice! Our April 2026 edition of a live stage reading. No sets. No spectacle. Just actors, language, and a room full of humans listening.
In Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl reimagines the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. Ruhl's imaginative play offers a fresh look at a timeless love story.
Rough DraftNew York, NY
Sunday, Apr 12 from 3 pm to 4:30 pm
126 Hamilton Place
New York, NY 10031
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/plays-out-loud-eurydice-by-sarah-ruhl-tickets-1986007090670?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** SHANGRI-LA-LA ***
Shangri-La-La is a funny and unconventional new comedy musical inspired by the true story of Siegfried & Roy and the transformation of Las Vegas into a spectacle-driven family destination. Blending original music, magic, comedy, and a boldly theatrical visual world, the piece examines the delusion, ambition, and excess behind that cultural reinvention. Beneath its sequins and absurdity, the musical tells a real American story about illusion, image-making, and the business of fantasy.
The show will appear in New York City in April as part of the Back Door to Broadway Festival:
Shangri-La-La
Sunday, April 19, 2026 at 3:00 PM
American Theatre of Actors, Sargent Theatre
314 W. 54th Street, New York, NY 10019
https://hangingcowproductions.com/index.php/2025-one-act-festival/
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Over a 5-year period, The Democracy Cycle – a collaboration between the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) and Civis Foundation – will commission and develop a total of 25 new performing arts works across the fields of theater, dance, music, opera, and multi-disciplinary performance that express themes related to the nature and practice of democracy, particularly as it is practiced in the United States. This is a national and international open call.
***
Jersey Central Theatre Company seeks new scripts of plays or screenplays (finished or in progress) involving New Jersey history for consideration for a staged reading, to be presented in celebration of the country’s Semiquincentennial, on Sunday afternoon, August 2nd at the Patricia M. Kuran Cultural Arts Center in Fanwood, NJ. We are especially seeking new works by regional area writers, as we prefer to have authors in attendance to participate in a talk-back/Q&A with the audience following the performance.
***
The Manhattan Theatre Mission is accepting submissions for the Festival of New Musicals. Up to 5 shows will be selected for Staged Readings of their submission in New York City. Several Awards will be given to those selected. The First Place Musical will be produced in its entirety by the Manhattan Theatre Mission in its following season.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** DOG DAY AFTERNOON ***
1. It’s not a straight adaptation of the movie.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis didn’t simply adapt the screenplay. He went back to the real events and drew on the film to build his own version, adding his own dashes of profane comedy. If you are familiar with his work from Between Riverside and Crazy or The Motherf**ker with the Hat, you realize he's known for giving actors dialogue they can sing their teeth into and isn't interested in keeping things tidy or safe. As The New York Times put it, his writing has “an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk.”
2. The connection sneaks up on you.
As you might imagine, there is no comfort zone during a bank robbery. If the definition of character is who you are in the dark, a 1970s Brooklyn bank heist on a sweltering day will really show you if you play well with others (or not). It’s messy. People talk over each other and go off track. But then you catch these moments where they reach each other. It’s not about good guys or bad guys to root for. It’s about rooting for human compassion in the least schmaltzy way possible.
More...
https://www.broadway.com/buzz/206887/6-reasons-dog-day-afternoon-on-broadway-isnt-what-you-expect/
***
An even bigger problem, however, is that the movie’s moral ambiguity has been replaced by Folgers Crystals. The hostages, who in the film version were hazily sketched but convincingly idiosyncratic, have been provided with backstories—shallow ones. There’s a tramp, a ditz, a bad boss, a hippie, a by-the-book good girl. It’s difficult to care about what happens to them as they bicker and backbite.
The same is true of Sonny and Sal, his high-strung henchman. So much of acting is alchemy: when John Cazale played Sal in Lumet’s film, the character transformed from the streetwise pretty boy in Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning screenplay into something more original, a fragile, hangdog figure whose childlike instability provoked a wary protectiveness even in the hostages whom he threatened. Sal’s best line—a plaintive, funny “Wyoming,” when Sonny asks him what country he wants to flee to—was ad-libbed. Those notes of fragility lent weight to the question of whether Sal would live or die once the police closed in.
More...
https://archive.ph/AdSG5
***
More than fifty years after the real-life robbery, the story has been reimagined for the stage with a new Broadway adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon. The new play is written by Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy, The Motherf***er with the Hat), and is directed by two-time Olivier Award winner Rupert Goold (King Charles III).
"I loved the movie as a kid. I saw a million times. When I interviewed for the job, I went kind of reluctantly because I thought... this is a bad idea, you know? But I left the meeting and I was like, 'Well, if somebody is going to mess this up, why not me?' And so ever since I've tried to do my best to meet unmeetable expectations," Guirgis told BroadwayWorld's Richard Ridge.
More...
https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/All-About-DOG-DAY-AFTERNOON-How-the-Story-Evolved-from-Page-to-Screen-to-Stage-20260314
***
Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik, a desperate man who, along with his partner Sal (John Cazale), attempts to rob a bank in Brooklyn, New York, to fund his partner’s gender-transition surgery. The heist turns into a chaotic hostage situation as Sonny’s personal struggles and a media frenzy unfold. The movie was directed by Sidney Lumet and won an Oscar for Frank Pierson’s screenplay.
Pacino had just played Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, a tough act for anyone to follow. He was approached about Dog Day Afternoon by Martin Bregman, who had been his personal manager and the producer of Serpico, also directed by Lumet and starring Pacino.
“He told me he wanted me to do it, and I had read it and thought it was well-written but I didn’t want to do it,” Pacino recalls. “I was in London at the time and I thought, I’m running out of gas. I don’t know if I could do this again.
“It seemed having that kind of intensity again and going through that was too close, I thought, to The Godfather II, which was an intense experience in a lot of ways – not the actual work but everything that had been happening in my personal life was affecting me.”
Pacino turned the role down. “I thought, all right, I understand it’s a great offer and thank you but I don’t think I can do this. I’d like to pass.” He adds with a chuckle: “Once again, I’ve got some kind of gun and I’m gonna go in a bank and rob it: I don’t want to go through that.”
Pacino settled back into life in New York but then “Bregman came back to me because they had someone else who said they wanted to do it, who was notorious, who was a famous actor.”
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/21/al-pacino-dog-day-afternoon-50th-anniversary
***
American Masters PBS
Sidney Lumet describes the characters and the narrative drive behind “Dog Day Afternoon.”
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/sidney-lumet-dog-day-afternoon/7729/
***
NYTimes movie review, 1975
"Dog Day Afternoon," which opened yesterday at the Cinema 1, is Sidney Lumet's most accurate, most flamboyant New York movie—that consistently vital and energetic Lumet genre that includes "The Pawnbroker" and "Serpico" and exists entirely surrounded by (but always separate from) the rest of his work.
Mr. Lumet's New York movies are as much aspects of the city's life as they are stories of the city's life. "Dog Day Afternoon" is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously ill-planned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer. If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it's reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids easy speculation. Each of the several principal lives it touches has been grotesquely bent out of shape. The director and Frank Pierson, who wrote the fine screenplay, don't attempt to supply reasons. The movie says only that this is what happened. No more. This severely limits the film's emotional impact, though not its seriousness or its fascination. "Dog Day Afternoon" is a gaudy street-carnival of a movie that rudely invites laughs at inappropriate moments, which is in keeping with the city's concrete sensibility.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/22/archives/screen-lumets-dog-day-afternoon.html
The show will appear in New York City in April as part of the Back Door to Broadway Festival:
Shangri-La-La
Sunday, April 19, 2026 at 3:00 PM
American Theatre of Actors, Sargent Theatre
314 W. 54th Street, New York, NY 10019
https://hangingcowproductions.com/index.php/2025-one-act-festival/
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Over a 5-year period, The Democracy Cycle – a collaboration between the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) and Civis Foundation – will commission and develop a total of 25 new performing arts works across the fields of theater, dance, music, opera, and multi-disciplinary performance that express themes related to the nature and practice of democracy, particularly as it is practiced in the United States. This is a national and international open call.
***
Jersey Central Theatre Company seeks new scripts of plays or screenplays (finished or in progress) involving New Jersey history for consideration for a staged reading, to be presented in celebration of the country’s Semiquincentennial, on Sunday afternoon, August 2nd at the Patricia M. Kuran Cultural Arts Center in Fanwood, NJ. We are especially seeking new works by regional area writers, as we prefer to have authors in attendance to participate in a talk-back/Q&A with the audience following the performance.
***
The Manhattan Theatre Mission is accepting submissions for the Festival of New Musicals. Up to 5 shows will be selected for Staged Readings of their submission in New York City. Several Awards will be given to those selected. The First Place Musical will be produced in its entirety by the Manhattan Theatre Mission in its following season.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** DOG DAY AFTERNOON ***
1. It’s not a straight adaptation of the movie.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis didn’t simply adapt the screenplay. He went back to the real events and drew on the film to build his own version, adding his own dashes of profane comedy. If you are familiar with his work from Between Riverside and Crazy or The Motherf**ker with the Hat, you realize he's known for giving actors dialogue they can sing their teeth into and isn't interested in keeping things tidy or safe. As The New York Times put it, his writing has “an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk.”
2. The connection sneaks up on you.
As you might imagine, there is no comfort zone during a bank robbery. If the definition of character is who you are in the dark, a 1970s Brooklyn bank heist on a sweltering day will really show you if you play well with others (or not). It’s messy. People talk over each other and go off track. But then you catch these moments where they reach each other. It’s not about good guys or bad guys to root for. It’s about rooting for human compassion in the least schmaltzy way possible.
More...
https://www.broadway.com/buzz/206887/6-reasons-dog-day-afternoon-on-broadway-isnt-what-you-expect/
***
An even bigger problem, however, is that the movie’s moral ambiguity has been replaced by Folgers Crystals. The hostages, who in the film version were hazily sketched but convincingly idiosyncratic, have been provided with backstories—shallow ones. There’s a tramp, a ditz, a bad boss, a hippie, a by-the-book good girl. It’s difficult to care about what happens to them as they bicker and backbite.
The same is true of Sonny and Sal, his high-strung henchman. So much of acting is alchemy: when John Cazale played Sal in Lumet’s film, the character transformed from the streetwise pretty boy in Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning screenplay into something more original, a fragile, hangdog figure whose childlike instability provoked a wary protectiveness even in the hostages whom he threatened. Sal’s best line—a plaintive, funny “Wyoming,” when Sonny asks him what country he wants to flee to—was ad-libbed. Those notes of fragility lent weight to the question of whether Sal would live or die once the police closed in.
More...
https://archive.ph/AdSG5
***
More than fifty years after the real-life robbery, the story has been reimagined for the stage with a new Broadway adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon. The new play is written by Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy, The Motherf***er with the Hat), and is directed by two-time Olivier Award winner Rupert Goold (King Charles III).
"I loved the movie as a kid. I saw a million times. When I interviewed for the job, I went kind of reluctantly because I thought... this is a bad idea, you know? But I left the meeting and I was like, 'Well, if somebody is going to mess this up, why not me?' And so ever since I've tried to do my best to meet unmeetable expectations," Guirgis told BroadwayWorld's Richard Ridge.
More...
https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/All-About-DOG-DAY-AFTERNOON-How-the-Story-Evolved-from-Page-to-Screen-to-Stage-20260314
***
Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik, a desperate man who, along with his partner Sal (John Cazale), attempts to rob a bank in Brooklyn, New York, to fund his partner’s gender-transition surgery. The heist turns into a chaotic hostage situation as Sonny’s personal struggles and a media frenzy unfold. The movie was directed by Sidney Lumet and won an Oscar for Frank Pierson’s screenplay.
Pacino had just played Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, a tough act for anyone to follow. He was approached about Dog Day Afternoon by Martin Bregman, who had been his personal manager and the producer of Serpico, also directed by Lumet and starring Pacino.
“He told me he wanted me to do it, and I had read it and thought it was well-written but I didn’t want to do it,” Pacino recalls. “I was in London at the time and I thought, I’m running out of gas. I don’t know if I could do this again.
“It seemed having that kind of intensity again and going through that was too close, I thought, to The Godfather II, which was an intense experience in a lot of ways – not the actual work but everything that had been happening in my personal life was affecting me.”
Pacino turned the role down. “I thought, all right, I understand it’s a great offer and thank you but I don’t think I can do this. I’d like to pass.” He adds with a chuckle: “Once again, I’ve got some kind of gun and I’m gonna go in a bank and rob it: I don’t want to go through that.”
Pacino settled back into life in New York but then “Bregman came back to me because they had someone else who said they wanted to do it, who was notorious, who was a famous actor.”
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/21/al-pacino-dog-day-afternoon-50th-anniversary
***
American Masters PBS
Sidney Lumet describes the characters and the narrative drive behind “Dog Day Afternoon.”
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/sidney-lumet-dog-day-afternoon/7729/
***
NYTimes movie review, 1975
"Dog Day Afternoon," which opened yesterday at the Cinema 1, is Sidney Lumet's most accurate, most flamboyant New York movie—that consistently vital and energetic Lumet genre that includes "The Pawnbroker" and "Serpico" and exists entirely surrounded by (but always separate from) the rest of his work.
Mr. Lumet's New York movies are as much aspects of the city's life as they are stories of the city's life. "Dog Day Afternoon" is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously ill-planned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer. If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it's reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids easy speculation. Each of the several principal lives it touches has been grotesquely bent out of shape. The director and Frank Pierson, who wrote the fine screenplay, don't attempt to supply reasons. The movie says only that this is what happened. No more. This severely limits the film's emotional impact, though not its seriousness or its fascination. "Dog Day Afternoon" is a gaudy street-carnival of a movie that rudely invites laughs at inappropriate moments, which is in keeping with the city's concrete sensibility.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/22/archives/screen-lumets-dog-day-afternoon.html
***
"DOG DAY AFTERNOON"
by Frank Pierson
"DOG DAY AFTERNOON"
by Frank Pierson
***
NYTimes September 1, 1972: BROOKLYN HOLDUP TOTALED $213,000
Two bank robbers whose bizarre behavior during a holdup of a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn on Aug. 22 attracted 3,000 onlookers were charged yesterday with stealing more than $213,000 in the robbery.
The police and Federal authorities had put the figure at $29,000 in cash in their earlier reports. But a four‐count indictment by a Federal grand jury in Brooklyn charged that they had “by force, violence and intimidation” taken approximately $37,951 in currenc yand $175,150 in traveler's checks.
Named in the indictment, announced by United States Attorney Robert A. Morse of the Eastern District, were John Wojtowicz, 27 years old, of 250 West 10th Street, who has said he is a homosexual, and Robert Arthur Westenberg, 21, who lived with his mother at 150‐17 Tahoe Street, Ozone Park, Queens, and at various Manhattan addresses.
A third accomplice named in the indictment, Salvatore Natu arale, 18 of 254 West 25th Street here and 194 Academy Street in Jersey City, was shot and killed early on Aug. 23 by an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Kennedy International Airport.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/01/archives/brooklyn-holdup-totaled-213000-figure-revised-in-bizarre-14hour.html
NYTimes September 1, 1972: BROOKLYN HOLDUP TOTALED $213,000
Two bank robbers whose bizarre behavior during a holdup of a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn on Aug. 22 attracted 3,000 onlookers were charged yesterday with stealing more than $213,000 in the robbery.
The police and Federal authorities had put the figure at $29,000 in cash in their earlier reports. But a four‐count indictment by a Federal grand jury in Brooklyn charged that they had “by force, violence and intimidation” taken approximately $37,951 in currenc yand $175,150 in traveler's checks.
Named in the indictment, announced by United States Attorney Robert A. Morse of the Eastern District, were John Wojtowicz, 27 years old, of 250 West 10th Street, who has said he is a homosexual, and Robert Arthur Westenberg, 21, who lived with his mother at 150‐17 Tahoe Street, Ozone Park, Queens, and at various Manhattan addresses.
A third accomplice named in the indictment, Salvatore Natu arale, 18 of 254 West 25th Street here and 194 Academy Street in Jersey City, was shot and killed early on Aug. 23 by an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Kennedy International Airport.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/01/archives/brooklyn-holdup-totaled-213000-figure-revised-in-bizarre-14hour.html
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