Groups keyboard shortcuts have been updated
Dismiss
See shortcuts
NYCPlaywrights November 16, 2024
28 views
Skip to first unread message
NYCPlaywrights
Nov 16, 2024, 5:22:12 PM11/16/24
to NYCPlaywrights
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
The Witches of Kabul, the premiere reading of the new play by Mujib Mehrdad and Dave Johnson, is based on their co-translation and stage adaptation of Mehrdad's novella of two promising, young female university scholars whose lives are upended during the collapse of the Afghan government and the violent return of the Taliban to Kabul from 2015 to the present.
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at the Schools of Public Engagement.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 6:00PM to 7:00PM (EST)
Room A-407, 4th floor
66 West 12th Street
https://event.newschool.edu/readingmujibmehrdaddavejohnson
*** RESISTING FASCISM ***
NYCPlaywrights is looking for monologues and 10-minute plays about resisting fascism.
NYCPlaywrights will select as many of the scripts that we like (and which meet the submission guidelines) as semi-finalists.
The finalist scripts will be selected from the semi-finalist scripts. Three scripts will be chosen. Video-recorded excerpts of those scripts, read/performed by actors will be displayed on NYCPlaywrights.org (if permission is granted by the playwright) along with contact information and links to author web sites, author biography and a summary of the script.
One script will be chosen from the three finalists scripts to receive an award of $25.
For more information:
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/2024/11/nycplaywrights-seeks-monologues-and-10.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Theatre Southwest is NOW accepting short plays for its Annual Readers' Theatre Matinee. Selected plays will be read and voted on by the audience in attendance and the Audience Favorite will receive a $100 cash prize.
***
Beacon Theatre Productions is seeking play submissions for our 2025 Beacon Award.
The chosen playwright will get $500
* Opportunity to see a staged reading of their play during Philly Theatre Week April 2025 produced by Beacon
We are seeking plays (or screenplays) that meet the following criteria:
* Spotlights a critical moment of the past (connection to real event or person)
* That shows the way to a better future (directly or indirectly. For example: a post-show talkback on the play’s content could connect to a social issue that still affects us today)
***
Life Jacket is now accepting applications for our WRITERS ROOM, a new dramaturgical home dedicated to supporting and uplifting emerging LGBTQ+ playwrights based in the New York City area who are interested in creating new investigative works based on (or inspired by) real people and events.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER DESIGN ***
Hamlet, 1912
Edward Gordon Craig was a pioneer of modern theatre design who produced little on the stage. He became a “hermit visionary” whose belief in the imaginative power of lighting and the beauty of harmonious form greatly influenced Peter Brook. For Stanislavski’s 1912 production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art theatre, he planned to drape Claudius and Gertrude in a cloak that flowed over the entire stage; the sycophants of the court were to poke through the fabric, their golden mantles reflecting on gilt walls; sliding screens would effect scene changes. Brook called him “an inspiration and a warning”
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2011/may/22/set-theatre-design-in-pictures
***
The scene-shifter is supposed to have had far less to do in Queen Elizabeth’s day than at present. John Addington Symonds thus expresses the general opinion: “It is difficult for us to realize the simplicity with which the stage was mounted in the London theatres. Scenery may be said to have been almost wholly absent. Even in Masques performed at Court, on which immense sums of money were lavished, and which employed the ingenuity of men like Inigo Jones [reigns of James I and Charles I], effect was obtained by groupings of figures in dances, by tableaux and processions, gilded chariots, temples, fountains, and the like, far more than by scene-painting. Upon the public stage such expenditure had, of course, to be avoided. Attention was concentrated on the actors, with whose movements, boldly defined against a simple background, nothing interfered. The stage on which they played was narrow, projecting into the yard, surrounded on all sides by spectators.”
Dr. H. H. Furness says, in A note on Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare Variorum), “I think there were more scenery and stage accessories in those days than is generally believed.” Then he asks, “Why should the rough makeshifts by the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream excite such mirth in Theseus and his court if they were not seen to be caricatures of the real stage scenery to which that court was accustomed?”
More...
https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/elizabethan-stage-scenery/
***
Periaktoi, also known as “triple-faced” or “three-sided” scenery, is a rotating scenic device used in theatrical productions for over 2,000 years. First invented in ancient Greece, periaktoi quickly changed the backdrop of a stage to set the scene for different play acts.
***
Theatre is a visual medium. A scenic designer needs to be able to describe to the creative team what the show might look or feel like. Early in your design work, sketch small, quick drawings of various ideas for the show. These are “thumbnail sketches,” no larger than a few inches across. Each sketch should only take you a few minutes to complete. They do not necessarily relate to each other. Sketch anything that comes to mind and move on to another.
Once you have six to eight thumbnails, identify what you like and what you dislike. What helps you and your collaborators to tell the story the best and provides the best opportunity for the director and actors to succeed and connect with the audience?
Take your favorite thumbnail and construct a three-dimensional rough model, with scale and proportion in mind. Like the thumbnails, this model should be quick and a response to your feelings and reactions. A rough model is usually built in one-quarter-inch scale.
More...
https://dramatics.org/read-render-realize/
***
It was opening night of “Plaza Suite,” and the set’s bathroom door was meant to stay shut — a stubborn comic obstacle to Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, playing parents of a bride who has locked herself inside on her wedding day.
Reinforced within an inch of its life, the door had held all through previews. On that March evening, though, the frame around it gave way, derailing the plot and amusing the crowd.
“Opening night!” the set’s mortified designer, John Lee Beatty, said later. “I wish the audience hadn’t enjoyed it that much.”
Of course spectators would have. One of the principal pleasures of in-person theatergoing is the ever-present awareness that the performance might somehow go awry. And in the Broadway season that followed such a long, grim pandemic intermission, simply encountering a gorgeous set, even one that’s being temperamental, could be its own source of delight.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/theater/broadway-set-design-tonys.html
***
Q: What were the challenges in designing “New York, New York” for the stage?
The show has about 60 locations, and ¾ of those we realize pretty fully. Another 25 percent are brief, but usually still need a piece of scenery to help establish them. Even a relatively large Broadway theatre like the St. James is very small backstage so making all that scenery look good onstage, but still fit backstage is a huge challenge — and when the locations include Grand Central station, the old Penn Station, the top of a skyscraper under construction, Times Square in 1946, Bow Bridge in the snow, the East River by the Brooklyn Bridge, etc., it’s even harder — New Yorkers know these places, so I have to try to live up to the beauty and the majesty of the real things.
More...
https://fabricsandhome.com/blogs/blog/to-the-stage-three-designers-talk-about-creating-theatrical-ambience?srsltid=AfmBOoqXgg0bm9niAZihMVqvQJLX8tJ28y1xuAwBiPj2aTMt5_jTF_Ru
***
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
The Witches of Kabul, the premiere reading of the new play by Mujib Mehrdad and Dave Johnson, is based on their co-translation and stage adaptation of Mehrdad's novella of two promising, young female university scholars whose lives are upended during the collapse of the Afghan government and the violent return of the Taliban to Kabul from 2015 to the present.
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at the Schools of Public Engagement.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 6:00PM to 7:00PM (EST)
Room A-407, 4th floor
66 West 12th Street
https://event.newschool.edu/readingmujibmehrdaddavejohnson
*** RESISTING FASCISM ***
NYCPlaywrights is looking for monologues and 10-minute plays about resisting fascism.
NYCPlaywrights will select as many of the scripts that we like (and which meet the submission guidelines) as semi-finalists.
The finalist scripts will be selected from the semi-finalist scripts. Three scripts will be chosen. Video-recorded excerpts of those scripts, read/performed by actors will be displayed on NYCPlaywrights.org (if permission is granted by the playwright) along with contact information and links to author web sites, author biography and a summary of the script.
One script will be chosen from the three finalists scripts to receive an award of $25.
For more information:
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/2024/11/nycplaywrights-seeks-monologues-and-10.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Theatre Southwest is NOW accepting short plays for its Annual Readers' Theatre Matinee. Selected plays will be read and voted on by the audience in attendance and the Audience Favorite will receive a $100 cash prize.
***
Beacon Theatre Productions is seeking play submissions for our 2025 Beacon Award.
The chosen playwright will get $500
* Opportunity to see a staged reading of their play during Philly Theatre Week April 2025 produced by Beacon
We are seeking plays (or screenplays) that meet the following criteria:
* Spotlights a critical moment of the past (connection to real event or person)
* That shows the way to a better future (directly or indirectly. For example: a post-show talkback on the play’s content could connect to a social issue that still affects us today)
***
Life Jacket is now accepting applications for our WRITERS ROOM, a new dramaturgical home dedicated to supporting and uplifting emerging LGBTQ+ playwrights based in the New York City area who are interested in creating new investigative works based on (or inspired by) real people and events.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER DESIGN ***
Hamlet, 1912
Edward Gordon Craig was a pioneer of modern theatre design who produced little on the stage. He became a “hermit visionary” whose belief in the imaginative power of lighting and the beauty of harmonious form greatly influenced Peter Brook. For Stanislavski’s 1912 production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art theatre, he planned to drape Claudius and Gertrude in a cloak that flowed over the entire stage; the sycophants of the court were to poke through the fabric, their golden mantles reflecting on gilt walls; sliding screens would effect scene changes. Brook called him “an inspiration and a warning”
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2011/may/22/set-theatre-design-in-pictures
***
The scene-shifter is supposed to have had far less to do in Queen Elizabeth’s day than at present. John Addington Symonds thus expresses the general opinion: “It is difficult for us to realize the simplicity with which the stage was mounted in the London theatres. Scenery may be said to have been almost wholly absent. Even in Masques performed at Court, on which immense sums of money were lavished, and which employed the ingenuity of men like Inigo Jones [reigns of James I and Charles I], effect was obtained by groupings of figures in dances, by tableaux and processions, gilded chariots, temples, fountains, and the like, far more than by scene-painting. Upon the public stage such expenditure had, of course, to be avoided. Attention was concentrated on the actors, with whose movements, boldly defined against a simple background, nothing interfered. The stage on which they played was narrow, projecting into the yard, surrounded on all sides by spectators.”
Dr. H. H. Furness says, in A note on Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare Variorum), “I think there were more scenery and stage accessories in those days than is generally believed.” Then he asks, “Why should the rough makeshifts by the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream excite such mirth in Theseus and his court if they were not seen to be caricatures of the real stage scenery to which that court was accustomed?”
More...
https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/elizabethan-stage-scenery/
***
Periaktoi, also known as “triple-faced” or “three-sided” scenery, is a rotating scenic device used in theatrical productions for over 2,000 years. First invented in ancient Greece, periaktoi quickly changed the backdrop of a stage to set the scene for different play acts.
A periaktos typically consists of a tall, triangular wooden structure that can be rotated on an axis to reveal one of three painted scenes. The scenes are painted on cloth or canvas and can be quickly changed by rotating the periaktos. Periaktoi allowed playwrights and directors to set different scenes quickly and easily without pausing the performance or changing the entire stage.
The most famous use of periaktoi in ancient Greek theater was in productions of plays by renowned playwrights such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The periaktoi allowed for a seamless transition between scenes, helping to maintain the flow of the performance and keep the audience engaged.
More...
https://hstech.org/how-to-tech/carpentry/periaktoi/
More...
https://hstech.org/how-to-tech/carpentry/periaktoi/
***
Theatre is a visual medium. A scenic designer needs to be able to describe to the creative team what the show might look or feel like. Early in your design work, sketch small, quick drawings of various ideas for the show. These are “thumbnail sketches,” no larger than a few inches across. Each sketch should only take you a few minutes to complete. They do not necessarily relate to each other. Sketch anything that comes to mind and move on to another.
Once you have six to eight thumbnails, identify what you like and what you dislike. What helps you and your collaborators to tell the story the best and provides the best opportunity for the director and actors to succeed and connect with the audience?
Take your favorite thumbnail and construct a three-dimensional rough model, with scale and proportion in mind. Like the thumbnails, this model should be quick and a response to your feelings and reactions. A rough model is usually built in one-quarter-inch scale.
More...
https://dramatics.org/read-render-realize/
***
It was opening night of “Plaza Suite,” and the set’s bathroom door was meant to stay shut — a stubborn comic obstacle to Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, playing parents of a bride who has locked herself inside on her wedding day.
Reinforced within an inch of its life, the door had held all through previews. On that March evening, though, the frame around it gave way, derailing the plot and amusing the crowd.
“Opening night!” the set’s mortified designer, John Lee Beatty, said later. “I wish the audience hadn’t enjoyed it that much.”
Of course spectators would have. One of the principal pleasures of in-person theatergoing is the ever-present awareness that the performance might somehow go awry. And in the Broadway season that followed such a long, grim pandemic intermission, simply encountering a gorgeous set, even one that’s being temperamental, could be its own source of delight.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/theater/broadway-set-design-tonys.html
***
Q: What were the challenges in designing “New York, New York” for the stage?
The show has about 60 locations, and ¾ of those we realize pretty fully. Another 25 percent are brief, but usually still need a piece of scenery to help establish them. Even a relatively large Broadway theatre like the St. James is very small backstage so making all that scenery look good onstage, but still fit backstage is a huge challenge — and when the locations include Grand Central station, the old Penn Station, the top of a skyscraper under construction, Times Square in 1946, Bow Bridge in the snow, the East River by the Brooklyn Bridge, etc., it’s even harder — New Yorkers know these places, so I have to try to live up to the beauty and the majesty of the real things.
More...
https://fabricsandhome.com/blogs/blog/to-the-stage-three-designers-talk-about-creating-theatrical-ambience?srsltid=AfmBOoqXgg0bm9niAZihMVqvQJLX8tJ28y1xuAwBiPj2aTMt5_jTF_Ru
***
Follow the journey of Tony and Obie Award Winner Beowulf Boritt and Obie and Hewes Design Award winner Mimi Lien as they explore the process of a Scenic Designer. Find out how they got started, what it takes to work in this profession, and how the scenic design is informed through collaboration with many other key members of the theater.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXYX5YXjYaA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXYX5YXjYaA
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages