NYCPlaywrights May 23, 2026

[NYCPlaywrights]

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

CASSANDRA
by Lesya Ukrainka
A reading by Magis Arts Collective

Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, is cursed with the gift of true prophecies that are not believed by anyone. She foretells the city’s fall should Paris bring Helen as his wife, as well as the death of several of Troy’s heroes and her family. The classic myth turns into much more in Lesia Ukrainka’s rendering: Cassandra’s prophecies are uttered in highly poetic language—fitting for the genre of the work—and are not believed for that reason, rather than because of Apollo’s curse. Cassandra as poet and as woman are the focal points of the drama.

Tuesday, May 26  •  7:30 PM - 9 PM
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street
New York, NY 10023

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cassandra-by-lesya-ukrainka-tickets-1990118148956?aff=oddtdtcreator


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

CHESTNUT STREET PLAYHOUSE 6TH ANNUAL PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL
This festival is designed not only as a performance opportunity, but as a collaborative workshop experience focused on helping writers develop the next best version of their piece.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:
Original plays (finished drafts only)
Works in any genre
Pieces with strong storytelling, compelling characters, and developmental potential

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Blindspot Collective seeks new short play and musical submissions that meet the following criteria:
Must be a short play or musical that is 12-15 minutes in length
Must be set on a modern college campus in the United States (more specifically, the publicly accessible parts of a campus - not a dorm room)
All characters must be college-aged students
The piece should be flexible in specific institutional details (e.g., school name, mascot, geography) to allow for adaptation to the UC San Diego campus

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Quannapowitt Players seeking short plays for Suburban Holidays

Play submissions should be between 10 and 20 minutes in length and focus on a holiday. All holidays are welcome! Past plays have focused on everything from Christmas to Arbor Day, and everything in between. We even recently did International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Casts of varying sizes are welcome, as are shows that feature children. Please keep in mind that the festival is family friendly, so plays with excessive profanity or other inappropriate material will not be selected.

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** THORNTON WILDER ***

At the time of his death at the age of 78, legendary American playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) – the only writer with the distinction of having won the Pulitzer Prize for both drama (Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth) and fiction (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) – left his final play unfinished, with more than 300 pages of his handwritten drafts preserved in The Thornton Wilder Collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. With the permission of the Wilder Family, playwright Kirk Lynn researched, adapted, and completed the work, some 75 years after it was begun (in 1948), then put aside (in 1954). Following its world premiere at Houston’s The Alley Theatre in 2024, that long-unseen play, Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium, is now making its NYC debut with Classic Stage Company.

More...
https://dctheaterarts.org/2026/05/18/nyc-debut-of-the-now-completed-thornton-wilders-the-emporium-off-broadway-at-classic-stage-company/

***

With “Our Town,” Wilder popularized no-set sets, so the designer Walt Spangler provides a few tables, some boxes and a huge, rusty EMPORIUM sign — in the shadowy lighting provided by Cat Tate Starmer, the brick-and-wood 13th Street Theater looks more like a warehouse than ever. And Wilder was interested in audience participation, so the director Rob Melrose incorporates several cutesy interactive touches. We fill out complaint cards, for instance: The night I went, someone was annoyed about weekend service on the A train.

We also vote at intermission, casting ballots about whether we’ll hear a mid-show “prologue,” proposed by Wilder but written by Lynn, which decodes the play’s central metaphor. If you would vote against such a thing, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

Wilder, supposedly, was writing an allegory about a life in the arts. It’s an underdeveloped analogy, although the Emporium’s elusiveness about entry-level positions — and reliance on free labor — will be familiar to anyone attempting a theater career. With the creative industry as the symbolic matrix, what should we make of the weirdly despised Craigie’s department store? It, at least, manages to pay its staff, yet when we meet Craigie himself (Smith again), he grumbles that his shop lacks the Emporium’s cachet. It’s never made explicit, but academia is a traditional artists’ refuge, and Lynn works at the University of Texas, Austin, as the head of playwriting. I will leave that there.

More...
https://archive.ph/BmGxY

***

Shortly after 8 p.m. on January 22, 1938, the veteran actor Frank Craven appeared on stage at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., and began to speak. “This play is called ‘Our Town,’” he said. “It was written by Thornton Wilder.” It was the first time the character called the Stage Manager had delivered these lines before an audience, the first time Wilder’s classic play about life, love and death in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, had ever been performed publicly.

For some audience members, the show’s lack of scenery and episodic narrative may have seemed odd or puzzling. But, in time, the observations and emotional impact of “Our Town” would be felt and enjoyed by legions of theatergoers around the world. Eventually acknowledged as a classic American drama, it would win Wilder his second Pulitzer Prize, the first of two he received for playwriting. (His first prize was for the novel “The Bridge at San Luis Rey”; his third was for “The Skin of Our Teeth.”) To this day he is the only author who has won Pulitzers for both fiction and drama.

“Our Town’s” significance was not immediately obvious, nor did it have an easy birth. The play’s long journey to Princeton, and the genesis of Wilder’s mythical town, began in 1920, in Rome. Wilder, 23, was a student at the American Academy, studying Italian, Latin and, notably, archaeology.

While visiting a local dig, a first-century tomb, he was struck by the vivid juxtaposition of past and present. In a letter to his parents, cited by Penelope Fitzgerald in her biography of Wilder, he described the formative experience: “... while by candle-light we peered at famous paintings of a family called Aurelius, symbolic representations of their dear children and parents ... the street-cars of today rushed by over us. We were clutching at the past to recover the loves and pieties and habits of the Aurelius family, while the same elements were passing above us.”

More...
https://www.pulitzer.org/article/birth-and-life-american-classic-our-town

***

THE BRIDGE OF SAINT LUIS REY
PART ONE: PERHAPS AN ACCIDENT

ON Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. This bridge was on the high¬road between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day. It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century before and visitors to the city were always led out to see it. It was a mere ladder of thin slats swung out over the gorge, with handrails of dried vine. Horses and coaches and chairs had to go down hundreds of feet below and pass over the narrow torrent on rafts, but no one, not even the Viceroy, not even the Archbishop of Lima, had descended with the baggage rather than cross by the famous bridge of San Luis Rey. St. Louis of France himself protected it, by his name and by the little mud church on the further side. The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break. The moment a Peruvian heard of the accident he signed himself and made a mental calculation as to how recently he had crossed by it and how soon he had intended crossing by it again. People wandered about in a trance-like state, muttering; they had the hallucination of seeing themselves falling into a gulf.

There was a great service in the Cathedral. The bodies of the victims were approximately collected and approximately separated from one another, and there was great searching of hearts in the beautiful city of Lima. Servant girls returned bracelets which they had stolen from their mistresses, and usurers harangued their wives angrily, in defense of usury. Yet it was rather strange that this event should have so impressed the Limeans, for in that country those catastrophes which lawyers shockingly call the “acts
of God” were more than usually frequent.

More...
https://dn720306.ca.archive.org/0/items/bridgeofsanluisr0000unse/bridgeofsanluisr0000unse.pdf

***

The time he spent in Rome widened his intellectual vision and sharpened his social skills. When he wasn’t writing plays and sending them off (only to be rejected) to producers like the Theatre Guild, he was palling around with other young graduate students and artists. But he also got caught up in a world of elderly society women, whose gossipy stories he listened to avidly while they fed him tea and dinner (his funds were desperately low). He was in danger, he acknowledged, of becoming “a confirmed little brother of the rich,” informing his mother that he “never paid a more than languid attention” to the young girls. At the same time, his activities as an archeologist—particularly an encounter with a trove of family paintings discovered in an ancient tomb—were suggesting to him the continuity of human existence and the universality of human experience.

Around this time, he suffered a severe emotional crisis—a love affair that went devastatingly wrong when the person he fell in love with rebuffed him. “I loved with all the exaggeration one can imagine,” he wrote to a close friend, “but I was not only not loved so in return. I was laughed at.” Wilder never named the person he was in love with, but it’s clear that it was a man. (His interest in women was unshakably nonsexual.) His homosexuality—his sexuality—was kept a dark secret. Young men appear and disappear in his life: a handsome young actor who, as Niven puts it, “told Thornton he had loved being with him ‘that night,’ more than he could know”; a boy from an “imposing New York family” he encountered in Naples in 1920—thinking he was a soldier, he reports to his family, “I ran back and spoke to him, inviting him to have an ice cream with me.” They then spent several days together, exploring Pompeii and climbing Vesuvius.

The only unambiguous account we have of Thornton Wilder’s sexual life comes from a young man named Samuel Steward, whom Gertrude Stein had befriended and sent to visit him in Zurich, in 1937. Steward wrote in his autobiography that after the two men went to bed together there they met for the same purpose on various occasions in Paris and Chicago. In an interview Steward gave in 1993, when he was eighty-five, he concluded that Wilder was “afraid of sex,” elaborating, “Thornton always went about having sex as though it were something going on behind his back and he didn’t know anything about it.” Niven ties herself in knots in her discussion of Wilder’s confusing sexuality, looking for the bright side and eventually finding it:

"Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual—whatever his inclinations and involvements may have been—he was a product of his era and his family, supremely conscientious and thoughtful by nature and by upbringing."

Asked once why he had never married, Wilder answered, “Well—y’know—I’m not one very much for passion.”

More...
https://archive.ph/l322H

***

Though Thornton Wilder’s rarely performed play “The Matchmaker” is not a musical, it’s nevertheless a great pleasure for musical theater lovers. That’s only partly because so much of its dialogue sounds unexpectedly familiar if you know “Hello, Dolly!” — the 1964 blockbuster built on its bones. Lines that the songwriter Jerry Herman turned into lyrics, barely having to alter a word, keep popping up in Wilder’s script like old friends at a crowded party.

“I am a woman who arranges things,” says Dolly Levi, the good-hearted widow who’s up in everyone’s business. “Go and get your Sunday clothes on,” says Cornelius Hackl, the 38-year-old Yonkers clerk who devises a plan for adventure in New York City. “This summer we’ll be wearing ribbons down our backs,” says Irene Molloy, the milliner he falls in love with there.

But even beyond the spark of recognition that has you humming along with the script, “The Matchmaker,” now enjoying a fine revival at Hudson Valley Shakespeare in Garrison, N.Y., is a musical lover’s delight, besotted with song. Wilder frequently calls for his characters to sing and dance to popular favorites of the period, roughly the 1880s. “The Sidewalks of New York,” the “Les Patineurs” waltz and others decorate and turn the plot while also dramatizing the play’s central theme: the necessity of engaging in the culture of one’s time.

More...
https://archive.ph/2FMdG

***

SCENES FROM THE EMPORIUM
There is a light chair on the left front of the stage (from the point of view of the actors), by the proscenium pillar:
A few minutes before the play begins the Member of the Audience enters from the wings at the left, looks about a little nervously and seats himself in this chair, turning it toward the center of the stage. He affects to be at ease, glances occasionally at the arriving audience, and studies his program. He is a modest but very earnest man of about fifty. He will be on the stage throughout the play and, except at the moments indicated, he will remain motionless, fixing an absorbed attention on the action before him.
A screen has been placed far front in the center of the stage, parallel with the footlights. The other screens are placed as though casually at the back of the stage though masking the entrances at the right and left. In front of the central screen is an old-fashioned "deacon's" chair. Beside it is a stand on which lies a vast Bible.

A bell starts ringing at the back of the auditorium.

SCENE ONE

The Amanda Gregory Foster Orphanage

Enter Mr. Foster, superintendent of the Orphanage. He is an excitable man of late middle age dressed in an old, faded and unpressed cutaway. He looks like a deacon or a small town undertaker.
He dashes out a few steps from the right and shakes his hand imperiously at the back of the auditorium, calling out loudly:

MR. FOSTER: Ring the bell, Mr. Conover. Ring it again. Ring it louder. I want every child in this orphanage to be in this auditorium in four minutes.

He disappears as rapidly as he came.

Enter from the same entrance Mrs. Foster, a worn woman of her husband's age, dressed in faded blue gingham. She also calls to the back of the auditorium:

MRS. FOSTER: Come in, children. Come in quietly. Take your
places quietly, girls.—
Boys, behave yourselves! - Girls here on my left, as usual.

More...
Thornton Wilder: Collected plays and writings on theater
https://archive.org/details/collectedplayswr0000wild