NYCPlaywrights December 6, 2025
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NYCPlaywrights
Dec 6, 2025, 5:06:11 PM12/6/25
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Embark on a journey beyond the grid as Anne Washburn's darkly comedic vision unfolds. MR BURNS explores the evolution of pop culture into mythology in the wake of societal collapse. Directed by Dominique Betts and Liam Archer Lundberg and featuring Dia Ghosh, James deVelder, Rosie Wagner, Nicole Ostlie, Perry Daniel, Annabel Cummings, and Harper Lee Davis, Playground Theatre Company invites you to join us as America's favorite family survives the end of the world.
December 12 & 13 at 7:30
December 14 at 2PM
Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mr-burns-a-post-electric-play-by-anne-washburn-tickets-1976621402825?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** HUNTER COLLEGE MFA PLAYWRIGHTING PROGRAM ***
Study playwriting at Hunter College, a public school in the heart of New York City!
The Hunter College MFA Playwriting Program is a rigorous and affordable two-year program looking for writers eager to develop their craft and challenge assumptions about what theatre is and will become. Students study with acclaimed theatre artists in a program that offers hands-on writing workshops and fosters a collaborative, close-knit artistic community. We offer ample networking opportunities and affordable tickets to a wide range of shows in New York City. Tuition assistance and teaching opportunities are available. Current/recent faculty includes David Adjmi, Eboni Booth, Lisa D’Amour, Chisa Hutchinson, Haruna Lee, Maria Striar, and Anne Washburn.
Visit https://theatre.hunter.cuny.edu/mfa for more information. Applications due January 15!
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Apotheosis Theatre Group is seeking submissions of original full-length plays for our upcoming A “Looking-For-A-Play” Festival. Selected playwrights will have scenes from their work featured in a staged presentation, giving audiences and our team a first look at their stories. From these presentations, one play will be chosen for full production with Apotheosis — an opportunity to bring your vision from page to stage.
***
Van Lier New Voices Fellowship 2026 Application
With the support of The New York Community Trust and the Jerome Foundation, the Van Lier New Voices Fellowship provides substantial support to two BIPOC playwrights under the age of 30.
***
Vivid Stage seeks full-length plays, 2025
Playwrights, we'd love to read your script! Please take a look at the parameters below. Scripts will be considered for our Meet the Artist reading series in May, and for production on our mainstage.
***
Hosts Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel sit down with accomplished British writer Tom Stoppard as he discusses his work and new play “Rock ‘n’ Roll” and how it explores the relationship between rock n roll music and the political evolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtbjg_9MmKA
***
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025): Charlie Rose's Interview with the Legendary Playwright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NQebVXA7fo
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
MR BURNS, a post electric play
by Anne Washburn
Directed by Dominique Betts and Liam Archer Lundberg. Produced by Playground Theatre Co and funded by USS @ The New School.
by Anne Washburn
Directed by Dominique Betts and Liam Archer Lundberg. Produced by Playground Theatre Co and funded by USS @ The New School.
Embark on a journey beyond the grid as Anne Washburn's darkly comedic vision unfolds. MR BURNS explores the evolution of pop culture into mythology in the wake of societal collapse. Directed by Dominique Betts and Liam Archer Lundberg and featuring Dia Ghosh, James deVelder, Rosie Wagner, Nicole Ostlie, Perry Daniel, Annabel Cummings, and Harper Lee Davis, Playground Theatre Company invites you to join us as America's favorite family survives the end of the world.
December 12 & 13 at 7:30
December 14 at 2PM
Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mr-burns-a-post-electric-play-by-anne-washburn-tickets-1976621402825?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** HUNTER COLLEGE MFA PLAYWRIGHTING PROGRAM ***
Study playwriting at Hunter College, a public school in the heart of New York City!
The Hunter College MFA Playwriting Program is a rigorous and affordable two-year program looking for writers eager to develop their craft and challenge assumptions about what theatre is and will become. Students study with acclaimed theatre artists in a program that offers hands-on writing workshops and fosters a collaborative, close-knit artistic community. We offer ample networking opportunities and affordable tickets to a wide range of shows in New York City. Tuition assistance and teaching opportunities are available. Current/recent faculty includes David Adjmi, Eboni Booth, Lisa D’Amour, Chisa Hutchinson, Haruna Lee, Maria Striar, and Anne Washburn.
Visit https://theatre.hunter.cuny.edu/mfa for more information. Applications due January 15!
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Apotheosis Theatre Group is seeking submissions of original full-length plays for our upcoming A “Looking-For-A-Play” Festival. Selected playwrights will have scenes from their work featured in a staged presentation, giving audiences and our team a first look at their stories. From these presentations, one play will be chosen for full production with Apotheosis — an opportunity to bring your vision from page to stage.
***
Van Lier New Voices Fellowship 2026 Application
With the support of The New York Community Trust and the Jerome Foundation, the Van Lier New Voices Fellowship provides substantial support to two BIPOC playwrights under the age of 30.
***
Vivid Stage seeks full-length plays, 2025
Playwrights, we'd love to read your script! Please take a look at the parameters below. Scripts will be considered for our Meet the Artist reading series in May, and for production on our mainstage.
Full-length comedies or dramas (no musicals)
Solo shows for our Summer Solo reading series are welcome
One script per writer
Cast size of no more than 9
Contemporary topics
Focus on “the human story”
Solo shows for our Summer Solo reading series are welcome
One script per writer
Cast size of no more than 9
Contemporary topics
Focus on “the human story”
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** TOM STOPPARD ***
Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright who entwined erudition with imagination, verbal pyrotechnics with arch cleverness, and philosophical probing with heartache and lust in stage works that won accolades and awards on both sides of the Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw, has died at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88.
The death was announced in a statement from United Agents, which represented him. No other details were provided.
Few writers for the stage — or the page, for that matter — have exhibited the rhetorical dazzle of Mr. Stoppard, or been as dauntless in plumbing the depths of intellect for conflict and drama. Beginning in 1966 with his witty twist on “Hamlet” — “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” — he soon earned a reputation as the most cerebral of contemporary English-language playwrights, venturing into vast fields of scholarly inquiry — theology, political theory, the relationship of mind and body, the nature of creativity, the purpose of art — and spreading his work across the centuries and continents.
More...
https://archive.ph/nDxwB
***
After the first night of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre in London in 1967, Tom Stoppard awoke, like Lord Byron, and found himself famous. This new star in the playwriting firmament was a restless, questing bundle of contradictions. Stoppard wrote great theatre because, primarily, he wrote argumentative and witty dialogue. Writing plays, he said, was the only respectable way of contradicting oneself. His favourite line in modern drama was Christopher Hampton’s in The Philanthropist: “I’m a man of no convictions – at least, I think I am.”
More...
https://archive.ph/JFkqn
***
On the day of his mother’s funeral in 1996, the playwright Tom Stoppard had a little spat with his stepfather Kenneth, the man who married his widowed mother in India and took her and her two young sons back with him to the U.K. “It was like the hour my mother died and we came home from the hospital and he was very upset and he didn’t entirely approve of things I was involved in—Jewish questions—and he just blurted out that I should stop using his name. But it was just an expression of grief,” says Stoppard. He regrets ever mentioning it. “I shouldn’t have told people about it. It was true for about 10 minutes.”
At least, that’s how Stoppard tells the story now. But he’s told it before, in an article he wrote for Talk magazine in 1999. The argument in that story took place days after the funeral. And his stepfather—essentially the only father he remembers—made the request in a letter, to which the English language’s most famous living playwright replied that it would be impractical. That version of the tale appeared in Stoppard’s authorized biography and in many of the profiles of him since. Very little else is known of Kenneth Stoppard, except that he was a major in the military and an ardent Anglophile. The anti-Semitic name change incident will forever loom large in the way he is remembered.
More...
https://time.com/6218687/tom-stoppard-leopoldstadt-interview/
***
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the second Tom Stoppard production to be put on this semester after Arcadia (dir. Aidan Monks and Millie Chew), a play I also had the pleasure of reviewing. As a result, one might be tempted to compare the two and see who did greater justice to Stoppard’s material. To me, this misses the point. These two plays could not be more different, with one being a meditation on the ephemeral nature of the universe and the other boldly asking, “What are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern up to when they aren’t on stage in Hamlet?” (This is, of course, selling R&G short thematically speaking, but I will get to that later). I’m only here to review the latter, and I can say with confidence that I had a wonderful time.
As previously mentioned, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play that primarily takes place in the wings of Hamlet, as the two eponymous characters, played by Freddie Crawford and George Rook, struggle with the absurd nature of life as side characters with little to no agency. Crawford and Rook have an absolutely electric chemistry, bouncing off each other and around the stage with such enthusiasm that I was totally unable to be bored whenever they were on stage (which, luckily for me, was the case for basically the entirety of the play). Kiera Joyce also gives a standout performance as The Player, the head of a troupe of actors/prostitutes/eccentrics who shows up to expound on blood, rhetoric, and the believability of theatre. Joyce brings a great physicality to the role, sometimes moving as though she has to convince each of her limbs to go where she wants to go. Overall, the actors breathe a lot of life into what is already some pretty great material.
More...
https://www.thesaint.scot/post/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-review-delightfully-absurd
***
At the time of this interview, Stoppard was near the end of rehearsals for his new play, Hapgood, which opened in London in March, 1988. For the duration of the rehearsals Stoppard had rented a furnished apartment in central London in order to avoid commuting, and although he had said, “I would never volunteer to talk about my work and myself more than ninety seconds,” he was extremely generous with his time and attention. Stoppard is tall and exotically handsome, and he speaks with a very slight lisp.
INTERVIEWER
How are the rehearsals going?
TOM STOPPARD
So far they are conforming to pattern, alas! I mean I am suffering from the usual delusion that the play was ready before we went into production. It happens every time. I give my publisher the finished text of the play so that it can be published not too long after the opening in London, but by the time the galleys arrive they’re hopelessly out-of-date because of all the changes I’ve made during rehearsals. This time I gave them Hapgood and told them that it was folly to pretend it would be unaltered, but I added, “I think it won’t be as bad as the others.” It turned out to be worse. Yesterday I realized that a chunk of information in the third scene ought to be in the second scene, and it’s like pulling out entrails: as in any surgery there’s blood. As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.
More...
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2467/the-art-of-theater-no-7-tom-stoppard
*** TOM STOPPARD ***
Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright who entwined erudition with imagination, verbal pyrotechnics with arch cleverness, and philosophical probing with heartache and lust in stage works that won accolades and awards on both sides of the Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw, has died at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88.
The death was announced in a statement from United Agents, which represented him. No other details were provided.
Few writers for the stage — or the page, for that matter — have exhibited the rhetorical dazzle of Mr. Stoppard, or been as dauntless in plumbing the depths of intellect for conflict and drama. Beginning in 1966 with his witty twist on “Hamlet” — “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” — he soon earned a reputation as the most cerebral of contemporary English-language playwrights, venturing into vast fields of scholarly inquiry — theology, political theory, the relationship of mind and body, the nature of creativity, the purpose of art — and spreading his work across the centuries and continents.
More...
https://archive.ph/nDxwB
***
After the first night of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre in London in 1967, Tom Stoppard awoke, like Lord Byron, and found himself famous. This new star in the playwriting firmament was a restless, questing bundle of contradictions. Stoppard wrote great theatre because, primarily, he wrote argumentative and witty dialogue. Writing plays, he said, was the only respectable way of contradicting oneself. His favourite line in modern drama was Christopher Hampton’s in The Philanthropist: “I’m a man of no convictions – at least, I think I am.”
More...
https://archive.ph/JFkqn
***
On the day of his mother’s funeral in 1996, the playwright Tom Stoppard had a little spat with his stepfather Kenneth, the man who married his widowed mother in India and took her and her two young sons back with him to the U.K. “It was like the hour my mother died and we came home from the hospital and he was very upset and he didn’t entirely approve of things I was involved in—Jewish questions—and he just blurted out that I should stop using his name. But it was just an expression of grief,” says Stoppard. He regrets ever mentioning it. “I shouldn’t have told people about it. It was true for about 10 minutes.”
At least, that’s how Stoppard tells the story now. But he’s told it before, in an article he wrote for Talk magazine in 1999. The argument in that story took place days after the funeral. And his stepfather—essentially the only father he remembers—made the request in a letter, to which the English language’s most famous living playwright replied that it would be impractical. That version of the tale appeared in Stoppard’s authorized biography and in many of the profiles of him since. Very little else is known of Kenneth Stoppard, except that he was a major in the military and an ardent Anglophile. The anti-Semitic name change incident will forever loom large in the way he is remembered.
More...
https://time.com/6218687/tom-stoppard-leopoldstadt-interview/
***
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the second Tom Stoppard production to be put on this semester after Arcadia (dir. Aidan Monks and Millie Chew), a play I also had the pleasure of reviewing. As a result, one might be tempted to compare the two and see who did greater justice to Stoppard’s material. To me, this misses the point. These two plays could not be more different, with one being a meditation on the ephemeral nature of the universe and the other boldly asking, “What are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern up to when they aren’t on stage in Hamlet?” (This is, of course, selling R&G short thematically speaking, but I will get to that later). I’m only here to review the latter, and I can say with confidence that I had a wonderful time.
As previously mentioned, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play that primarily takes place in the wings of Hamlet, as the two eponymous characters, played by Freddie Crawford and George Rook, struggle with the absurd nature of life as side characters with little to no agency. Crawford and Rook have an absolutely electric chemistry, bouncing off each other and around the stage with such enthusiasm that I was totally unable to be bored whenever they were on stage (which, luckily for me, was the case for basically the entirety of the play). Kiera Joyce also gives a standout performance as The Player, the head of a troupe of actors/prostitutes/eccentrics who shows up to expound on blood, rhetoric, and the believability of theatre. Joyce brings a great physicality to the role, sometimes moving as though she has to convince each of her limbs to go where she wants to go. Overall, the actors breathe a lot of life into what is already some pretty great material.
More...
https://www.thesaint.scot/post/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-review-delightfully-absurd
***
At the time of this interview, Stoppard was near the end of rehearsals for his new play, Hapgood, which opened in London in March, 1988. For the duration of the rehearsals Stoppard had rented a furnished apartment in central London in order to avoid commuting, and although he had said, “I would never volunteer to talk about my work and myself more than ninety seconds,” he was extremely generous with his time and attention. Stoppard is tall and exotically handsome, and he speaks with a very slight lisp.
INTERVIEWER
How are the rehearsals going?
TOM STOPPARD
So far they are conforming to pattern, alas! I mean I am suffering from the usual delusion that the play was ready before we went into production. It happens every time. I give my publisher the finished text of the play so that it can be published not too long after the opening in London, but by the time the galleys arrive they’re hopelessly out-of-date because of all the changes I’ve made during rehearsals. This time I gave them Hapgood and told them that it was folly to pretend it would be unaltered, but I added, “I think it won’t be as bad as the others.” It turned out to be worse. Yesterday I realized that a chunk of information in the third scene ought to be in the second scene, and it’s like pulling out entrails: as in any surgery there’s blood. As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.
More...
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2467/the-art-of-theater-no-7-tom-stoppard
***
Hosts Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel sit down with accomplished British writer Tom Stoppard as he discusses his work and new play “Rock ‘n’ Roll” and how it explores the relationship between rock n roll music and the political evolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtbjg_9MmKA
***
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025): Charlie Rose's Interview with the Legendary Playwright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NQebVXA7fo
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