NYCPlaywrights March 4, 2023
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NYCPlaywrights
Mar 5, 2023, 12:36:21 PM3/5/23
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
New England Summer Storms
Written by Emily Elyse Everett
Directed by Catalina Beltrán
In a mansion on the coast of Maine, Hedda and George gather their friends to announce that they’ve gotten married. To each other. Through the weekend, Hedda’s friends parse through why the wild and impulsive Hedda they used to know married practical and unassuming George, especially when her heart seemed so set on another. A story of desperation, obsession, addiction, and greed, New England Summer Storms is a retelling of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, reflecting on what it takes to have power in America.
CONTENT WARNING
RUNTIME: Approximately 120 minutes with intermission
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE:
Friday, Marc 17, 2023, at 7:00 PM
Saturday, March 18, 2023, at 2:00 PM
Saturday, March 18, 2023, at 7:00 PM
Columbia University School of the Arts
The Theatre @ Schapiro,
Lower Level 605-615 West 115th Street
New York, NY 10027
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/new-england-summer-storms-a-2nd-year-playwriting-project-tickets-534614916607?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** THE NEGOTIATING STAGE ***
STRUGGLING WITH A DRAFT? STUDY PLAYWRITING WITH THE MAN WHO WROTE THE BOOK! Award-winning playwright, Jeffrey Sweet has a few places open in his weekly playwriting class. This is your opportunity to work one-to-one with the man who wrote “The Dramatists Toolkit”, the best-selling book on playwriting. Sessions begin on the first Sunday of each month and cost $140 per month. That’s just $35 per class.
Get ONE FREE LESSON here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNIQCSMY5tI&t=1s&ab_channel=JeffreySweet
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
New England Summer Storms
Written by Emily Elyse Everett
Directed by Catalina Beltrán
In a mansion on the coast of Maine, Hedda and George gather their friends to announce that they’ve gotten married. To each other. Through the weekend, Hedda’s friends parse through why the wild and impulsive Hedda they used to know married practical and unassuming George, especially when her heart seemed so set on another. A story of desperation, obsession, addiction, and greed, New England Summer Storms is a retelling of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, reflecting on what it takes to have power in America.
CONTENT WARNING
RUNTIME: Approximately 120 minutes with intermission
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE:
Friday, Marc 17, 2023, at 7:00 PM
Saturday, March 18, 2023, at 2:00 PM
Saturday, March 18, 2023, at 7:00 PM
Columbia University School of the Arts
The Theatre @ Schapiro,
Lower Level 605-615 West 115th Street
New York, NY 10027
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/new-england-summer-storms-a-2nd-year-playwriting-project-tickets-534614916607?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** THE NEGOTIATING STAGE ***
STRUGGLING WITH A DRAFT? STUDY PLAYWRITING WITH THE MAN WHO WROTE THE BOOK! Award-winning playwright, Jeffrey Sweet has a few places open in his weekly playwriting class. This is your opportunity to work one-to-one with the man who wrote “The Dramatists Toolkit”, the best-selling book on playwriting. Sessions begin on the first Sunday of each month and cost $140 per month. That’s just $35 per class.
Get ONE FREE LESSON here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNIQCSMY5tI&t=1s&ab_channel=JeffreySweet
SIGN UP for the next session here: www.thenegotiatingstage.com/classes
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Every spring and fall, birds migrate long distances for food and survival. It is never easy; they face the danger of being left behind by their flock, dying on the road, or being hunted by humans, but they do it anyway. Fish also migrate; millions of fish swim thousands of miles through oceans and rivers to reach their destination to reproduce. Humans have always migrated as well. Our bodies and ideas move from one place to another, across cities, countries, continents, and oceans.
We want to ask: why do we migrate? How do we migrate? What happens after we migrate? What are the limitations? Can we adapt? How do we adapt?
We believe that the best way to engage our community in this conversation is through short plays. Therefore, we are calling for several 10-20 minute short plays that explore this idea and hope it will spark a meaningful dialogue within our community about the complexities and realities of migration.
***
Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival is BTB Theatre's yearly event presenting works wholly created by and for transgender, non-binary, and Two-Spirit+ (TNB2S+) artists. We are so looking forward to reading your work.
***
Liberation Theatre Company Writing Residency Program 2023/24
We will select four early-career playwrights and provide them with dramaturgical and professional support over a ten-month period, during which time they will each be required to complete a new full-length play.
Beginning in May 2023, selected playwrights will attend monthly group meetings to share and refine their works-in-progress in a collaborative, energized setting; meet individually with LTC’s Artistic Director and staff who will provide additional support for their artistic needs, concerns and process; and have the resources of a director and professional actors during a table reading as their play begins to take shape.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER IN A TIME OF WAR ***
Kharkiv theatres closed at the start of the war; by the summer, the city’s famous puppet theatre performed a show about wartime in Bucha. Lapa has been hosting these performances at her house for the past three months. The actors, all of them dressed in black, sat down on folding chairs, facing the audience to wait for stories. “My name is Sasha,” the first speaker began. He had close-cropped blond hair and a sharp nose and, like the actors, was wearing a black hoodie. “For the past year, none of us have been stories in ourselves—all of us are absorbing other people’s stories, many of them very painful,” he said. He was struggling to put words to an experience familiar to anyone who has lived in or visited Ukraine during the war. Stories of pain and loss, death and destruction, are everywhere, and, however bad one’s story is, there is always a worse one. The conductor, a large man in a hot-pink hoodie with buzzed hair and a long, untrimmed beard, goes by the name Shabanov. He tried to coax a story out of Sasha.
“My story is that we are all sinking together,” Sasha finally said.
“Are you sinking?” Shabanov asked.
“I am a buoy. I am holding everyone afloat.”
Four of the actors stood up to enact Sasha’s story. All of them were under thirty. Two of them were now living in Germany and were visiting family and friends in Kharkiv. The other two had stayed in Kharkiv through the worst of the shelling, and both had become involved with Playback Theatre in the past year. After a few moments of stillness, they interacted, entangling with one another. They moved slowly, tenderly, apparently trying to hold one another and hold one another up, but in the end their common motion brought them down to the floor.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/war-as-theatre-at-a-private-home-in-kharkiv
***
Dressed in black, the actors moved around a sparse rehearsal room preparing a new play — the story of a dissident Ukrainian who died in a Russian prison camp decades ago. As they took a break, they gathered in a circle with their arms around each other, laughing and chattering.
Though the play is set decades ago, for these actors, the subject is close to heart, and the mere fact of rehearsal a triumph. They survived the siege of Mariupol by Russian forces earlier this year — and the destruction of their home theater.
“There is a saying: ‘The king is dead. Long live the king,’” said Liudmyla Kolosovych, the acting director of the theater company. “So, the theater died. Long live the theater.”
Mariupol’s Academic Regional Drama Theater was destroyed on March 16 by a Russian airstrike in the midst of the weeks-long siege of Mariupol, one of the earliest instances of Russia’s shocking brutality in the Ukraine war. Before the attack, the word “children” had been spelled out as a warning in large white lettering on the ground outside. Hundreds of people had sheltered in the theater during the siege, among them four members of the theater company.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/mariupol-drama-theater-ukraine.html
***
In a bomb shelter in western Ukraine, a young woman holds her phone in the air, trying to get a WiFi signal, while another sips a matcha latte. Long silences hang between sentences as the small collection of strangers tossed together after the latest air-raid siren start to make small talk.
While it is a real bomb shelter, this is far from a real air-raid alert: Shmata (Rag) is a play, and one of an increasing number of performances being put on underground in Ukrainian bomb shelters since Russia launched a large-scale invasion eight months ago. And it's one that, despite the dramaticism, removes itself somewhat from the war's intensity.
"Someone changes their socks, someone cleans with disinfectant, and someone even brought a window with them to wash," director Yana Tytarenko said.
The phrase "theater of war" has slowly seeped into public discourse in recent years. A fast-moving news cycle, constant fighting, and frequent reports of shelling lend a frenzied tenor to the war in Ukraine. But against the nerve-wracking background of bombardments, air-raid sirens, and evacuations, the need to deal with more mundane matters -- procuring food, stitching together uniforms, or completing paperwork -- is a pervasive facet of the conflict, too.
More...
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-theater-bomb-shelter/32049430.html
***
Since the beginning of the war, volunteering has penetrated nearly all spheres of peoples’ lives in Ukraine, particularly in the cultural scene. Spaces and people have been transforming in response to urgencies at hand. Theatres are turned into shelters and centres of humanitarian help. Actors, theatre directors, and art managers work to help their community to settle in the theatre-cum-shelter, where they organise transfers abroad, collect humanitarian aid and medication and reach out to other volunteers delivering help around the country.
To explore such formations, with the help of Olha Tuharinova, Oleh Halaidych filmed Lesia Ukrainka Drama Theatre, where art, joy, and mutual support is experienced in heightened intensities during a time when notions of community and expression entail extremely high stakes.
Here, we present to you our interview with Oleh.
Who is behind this film project? We would like to know more about your team and how you got together
In February 2022, my friend Olha and I attended the first-week session of the IndieLab workshop for young documentary filmmakers in Kyiv. In the middle of the session, on the 24th of February, Russia launched a full-scale war, so our initial idea has never been filmed. Soon I evacuated to Lviv. Here, I had the opportunity to film the activity of Lesya Ukrainka Drama Theater.
More...
https://culturalfoundation.eu/stories/cosround6-oleh-halaidych/
***
It is a place of escape, not just from the danger of near-daily death and destruction from Russian attacks, but also from the despair of nearly a year of war.
Here in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, the show goes on — even if not in the 450-seat neo-classical performance hall above, where it’s too dangerous for large crowds to gather.
"Creative life does not stop," says Artem Svystun.
He’s the director of the Mykolaiv Art Drama Theater. Before last February, Svystun says, "the official name of the theater was 'Russian Academic Drama Theater.' After the full-scale Russian invasion, we deleted the word 'Russian.'"
And at one point, Russia came close to deleting the theater.
A theater clock stopped ticking, just after midnight last September 22, when a Russian missile landed in the theater’s courtyard. Shrapnel from the missile is still lodged in a tree. An exterior wall took the brunt of the explosion, but, as Svystun shows us, the attack also caused massive damage inside.
More...
https://scrippsnews.com/stories/ukrainian-theater-lives-on-in-a-bunker/
***
Laughter is a reassuring sound in this picturesque, snow-covered city three hours from the Ukrainian border. It emanates from a theater on Krakowska Street, where a buff, bearded actor in his world-famous character’s trademark uniform — khaki T-shirt and pants — gyrates gymnastically with a chorus of male dancers and reflects sardonically on his astonishing change in circumstances.
“Yes, it is the role of my life!” he exclaims in Polish, the English translation flashing on a pair of television screens. “I don’t play a president on the barricades. I am that president!”
The audience giggles and guffaws all the way through “A Play About President Zelensky,” a two-hour vaudeville directed by Piotr Sieklucki that has been hailed as one of Poland’s best plays of 2022. Erstwhile comedian Volodymyr Zelensky is now lionized as an inspirational leader across much of the globe. Here, as played by a compact look-alike named Michal Felek Felczak, he’s also the president next door, a figure not above a little roasting. In the play, he spars with a double for Vladimir Putin sent to taunt him, debates history with the ghost of Rasputin and ducks for cover every time an earsplitting bombing raid resounds.
More..
https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2023/01/06/zelensky-play-festival-ukraine-poland/
***
In a black-walled theater at the heart of a darkened capital, the audience sits rapt as the plot unspools on a stark stage: A murderous dictator's calculated cruelty spirals out of control, and his madness grows in tandem with plots against him.
A venerable Kyiv drama company's staging of "Caligula," the absurdist play by Albert Camus about a tyrannical Roman emperor, hits close to home, nearly 10 months after Russian President Vladimir Putin's troops invaded Ukraine, setting off a calamitous war.
The modernist production has been playing to packed houses since July and is expected to run through December, although performances are often interrupted by air-raid alerts that send cast and audience alike hurrying to bomb shelters.
"I do think it resonates in this moment," said Vitaliy Azhnov, a 29-year-old Ukrainian stage and screen actor who turns in a slinkily malevolent portrayal of Rome's despotic third emperor.
More...
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2022-12-02/ukraine-war-kyiv-theatrical-play-murderous-dictator-8275549.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Every spring and fall, birds migrate long distances for food and survival. It is never easy; they face the danger of being left behind by their flock, dying on the road, or being hunted by humans, but they do it anyway. Fish also migrate; millions of fish swim thousands of miles through oceans and rivers to reach their destination to reproduce. Humans have always migrated as well. Our bodies and ideas move from one place to another, across cities, countries, continents, and oceans.
We want to ask: why do we migrate? How do we migrate? What happens after we migrate? What are the limitations? Can we adapt? How do we adapt?
We believe that the best way to engage our community in this conversation is through short plays. Therefore, we are calling for several 10-20 minute short plays that explore this idea and hope it will spark a meaningful dialogue within our community about the complexities and realities of migration.
***
Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival is BTB Theatre's yearly event presenting works wholly created by and for transgender, non-binary, and Two-Spirit+ (TNB2S+) artists. We are so looking forward to reading your work.
***
Liberation Theatre Company Writing Residency Program 2023/24
We will select four early-career playwrights and provide them with dramaturgical and professional support over a ten-month period, during which time they will each be required to complete a new full-length play.
Beginning in May 2023, selected playwrights will attend monthly group meetings to share and refine their works-in-progress in a collaborative, energized setting; meet individually with LTC’s Artistic Director and staff who will provide additional support for their artistic needs, concerns and process; and have the resources of a director and professional actors during a table reading as their play begins to take shape.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER IN A TIME OF WAR ***
Kharkiv theatres closed at the start of the war; by the summer, the city’s famous puppet theatre performed a show about wartime in Bucha. Lapa has been hosting these performances at her house for the past three months. The actors, all of them dressed in black, sat down on folding chairs, facing the audience to wait for stories. “My name is Sasha,” the first speaker began. He had close-cropped blond hair and a sharp nose and, like the actors, was wearing a black hoodie. “For the past year, none of us have been stories in ourselves—all of us are absorbing other people’s stories, many of them very painful,” he said. He was struggling to put words to an experience familiar to anyone who has lived in or visited Ukraine during the war. Stories of pain and loss, death and destruction, are everywhere, and, however bad one’s story is, there is always a worse one. The conductor, a large man in a hot-pink hoodie with buzzed hair and a long, untrimmed beard, goes by the name Shabanov. He tried to coax a story out of Sasha.
“My story is that we are all sinking together,” Sasha finally said.
“Are you sinking?” Shabanov asked.
“I am a buoy. I am holding everyone afloat.”
Four of the actors stood up to enact Sasha’s story. All of them were under thirty. Two of them were now living in Germany and were visiting family and friends in Kharkiv. The other two had stayed in Kharkiv through the worst of the shelling, and both had become involved with Playback Theatre in the past year. After a few moments of stillness, they interacted, entangling with one another. They moved slowly, tenderly, apparently trying to hold one another and hold one another up, but in the end their common motion brought them down to the floor.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/war-as-theatre-at-a-private-home-in-kharkiv
***
Dressed in black, the actors moved around a sparse rehearsal room preparing a new play — the story of a dissident Ukrainian who died in a Russian prison camp decades ago. As they took a break, they gathered in a circle with their arms around each other, laughing and chattering.
Though the play is set decades ago, for these actors, the subject is close to heart, and the mere fact of rehearsal a triumph. They survived the siege of Mariupol by Russian forces earlier this year — and the destruction of their home theater.
“There is a saying: ‘The king is dead. Long live the king,’” said Liudmyla Kolosovych, the acting director of the theater company. “So, the theater died. Long live the theater.”
Mariupol’s Academic Regional Drama Theater was destroyed on March 16 by a Russian airstrike in the midst of the weeks-long siege of Mariupol, one of the earliest instances of Russia’s shocking brutality in the Ukraine war. Before the attack, the word “children” had been spelled out as a warning in large white lettering on the ground outside. Hundreds of people had sheltered in the theater during the siege, among them four members of the theater company.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/mariupol-drama-theater-ukraine.html
***
In a bomb shelter in western Ukraine, a young woman holds her phone in the air, trying to get a WiFi signal, while another sips a matcha latte. Long silences hang between sentences as the small collection of strangers tossed together after the latest air-raid siren start to make small talk.
While it is a real bomb shelter, this is far from a real air-raid alert: Shmata (Rag) is a play, and one of an increasing number of performances being put on underground in Ukrainian bomb shelters since Russia launched a large-scale invasion eight months ago. And it's one that, despite the dramaticism, removes itself somewhat from the war's intensity.
"Someone changes their socks, someone cleans with disinfectant, and someone even brought a window with them to wash," director Yana Tytarenko said.
The phrase "theater of war" has slowly seeped into public discourse in recent years. A fast-moving news cycle, constant fighting, and frequent reports of shelling lend a frenzied tenor to the war in Ukraine. But against the nerve-wracking background of bombardments, air-raid sirens, and evacuations, the need to deal with more mundane matters -- procuring food, stitching together uniforms, or completing paperwork -- is a pervasive facet of the conflict, too.
More...
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-theater-bomb-shelter/32049430.html
***
Since the beginning of the war, volunteering has penetrated nearly all spheres of peoples’ lives in Ukraine, particularly in the cultural scene. Spaces and people have been transforming in response to urgencies at hand. Theatres are turned into shelters and centres of humanitarian help. Actors, theatre directors, and art managers work to help their community to settle in the theatre-cum-shelter, where they organise transfers abroad, collect humanitarian aid and medication and reach out to other volunteers delivering help around the country.
To explore such formations, with the help of Olha Tuharinova, Oleh Halaidych filmed Lesia Ukrainka Drama Theatre, where art, joy, and mutual support is experienced in heightened intensities during a time when notions of community and expression entail extremely high stakes.
Here, we present to you our interview with Oleh.
Who is behind this film project? We would like to know more about your team and how you got together
In February 2022, my friend Olha and I attended the first-week session of the IndieLab workshop for young documentary filmmakers in Kyiv. In the middle of the session, on the 24th of February, Russia launched a full-scale war, so our initial idea has never been filmed. Soon I evacuated to Lviv. Here, I had the opportunity to film the activity of Lesya Ukrainka Drama Theater.
More...
https://culturalfoundation.eu/stories/cosround6-oleh-halaidych/
***
It is a place of escape, not just from the danger of near-daily death and destruction from Russian attacks, but also from the despair of nearly a year of war.
Here in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, the show goes on — even if not in the 450-seat neo-classical performance hall above, where it’s too dangerous for large crowds to gather.
"Creative life does not stop," says Artem Svystun.
He’s the director of the Mykolaiv Art Drama Theater. Before last February, Svystun says, "the official name of the theater was 'Russian Academic Drama Theater.' After the full-scale Russian invasion, we deleted the word 'Russian.'"
And at one point, Russia came close to deleting the theater.
A theater clock stopped ticking, just after midnight last September 22, when a Russian missile landed in the theater’s courtyard. Shrapnel from the missile is still lodged in a tree. An exterior wall took the brunt of the explosion, but, as Svystun shows us, the attack also caused massive damage inside.
More...
https://scrippsnews.com/stories/ukrainian-theater-lives-on-in-a-bunker/
***
Laughter is a reassuring sound in this picturesque, snow-covered city three hours from the Ukrainian border. It emanates from a theater on Krakowska Street, where a buff, bearded actor in his world-famous character’s trademark uniform — khaki T-shirt and pants — gyrates gymnastically with a chorus of male dancers and reflects sardonically on his astonishing change in circumstances.
“Yes, it is the role of my life!” he exclaims in Polish, the English translation flashing on a pair of television screens. “I don’t play a president on the barricades. I am that president!”
The audience giggles and guffaws all the way through “A Play About President Zelensky,” a two-hour vaudeville directed by Piotr Sieklucki that has been hailed as one of Poland’s best plays of 2022. Erstwhile comedian Volodymyr Zelensky is now lionized as an inspirational leader across much of the globe. Here, as played by a compact look-alike named Michal Felek Felczak, he’s also the president next door, a figure not above a little roasting. In the play, he spars with a double for Vladimir Putin sent to taunt him, debates history with the ghost of Rasputin and ducks for cover every time an earsplitting bombing raid resounds.
More..
https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2023/01/06/zelensky-play-festival-ukraine-poland/
***
In a black-walled theater at the heart of a darkened capital, the audience sits rapt as the plot unspools on a stark stage: A murderous dictator's calculated cruelty spirals out of control, and his madness grows in tandem with plots against him.
A venerable Kyiv drama company's staging of "Caligula," the absurdist play by Albert Camus about a tyrannical Roman emperor, hits close to home, nearly 10 months after Russian President Vladimir Putin's troops invaded Ukraine, setting off a calamitous war.
The modernist production has been playing to packed houses since July and is expected to run through December, although performances are often interrupted by air-raid alerts that send cast and audience alike hurrying to bomb shelters.
"I do think it resonates in this moment," said Vitaliy Azhnov, a 29-year-old Ukrainian stage and screen actor who turns in a slinkily malevolent portrayal of Rome's despotic third emperor.
More...
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2022-12-02/ukraine-war-kyiv-theatrical-play-murderous-dictator-8275549.html
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