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NYCPlaywrights November 2, 2024
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NYCPlaywrights
Nov 2, 2024, 5:12:19 PM11/2/24
to NYCPlaywrights
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
SHAKESBEER: Much Abrew About Nothing @ Finback Brooklyn
Drinking on, off, and all around the stage, Shakesbeer presents a FREE, shortened, frothy, Shakespearian comedy. Party at 2:30, Show at 3.
545 President Street Brooklyn, NY 11215
Finback Brooklyn 11/10
Finback Glendale 11/17
THE PLAY:
The Prince and his crew have returned from war victorious and gather at Signior Leonato's for an all night party, and while the party ensues, two sets of very different couples start to fall in love. But as the lovers swoon and spar, their journey to love is riddled with mischievous pranks, party fouls, and scheming plots. The witty warriors Beatrice and Benedick are the blueprint for all modern rom-coms, come see what made them so special!
THE THING:
The Wit's Shakesbeer is performing Much Ado About Nothing, an original 90-minute adaptation of the lauded Shakespearean romantic comedy.
THE BEAUTY:
Actors imbibe before and throughout the entire show...hijinx ensue. Shakesbeer is always free, always fun, and always audience driven. "Lambic" pentameter..."vienna style" verse—frankly, few things fit together like theatre and beer!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shakesbeer-much-abrew-about-nothing-finback-brooklyn-tickets-1057692279079?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Prospect Musicals seeks applicants to participate in the 18th installment of its annual Musical Theater Lab program. Each year, Prospect's Lab brings together writing teams to create short musicals in response to a curated assignment. The 6-week program culminates in a public presentation of the new works generated through the lab process. The 2025 Lab features in-person writer meetings, rehearsals, and concert performance.
***
Now in its 37th year, NAMT’s Festival of New Musicals is the cornerstone of NAMT’s mission to be a catalyst for nurturing musical theatre development and production.
In 1989, the Festival of New Musicals was created to provide a forum to celebrate the new musicals that were being produced and presented around the country. Since then, the Festival has introduced musical theatre producers to 300+ musicals and 565 writers from around the world. More than 85% have gone on to subsequent readings, workshops, productions and tours; been licensed; and/or recorded on cast albums as a direct result of the Festival
***
Exhume submissions for Spring 2025
We strive to publish visual art, poetry, prose, and drama in order to help writers who discuss queerness and trauma find a home for their works. Though we especially seek submissions that discuss these topics, we accept good writing across the board. We appreciate work that speaks to the human experience on a raw level. Consider works like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” Above all else, we want writing that makes us feel something. Writing can be traditional, experimental, or a hybrid of the two.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** FASCISM AND THEATER ***
The play, which Brecht wrote as a refugee in Finland, in early 1941, describes the rise of Hitler through the parable of a gangster in Chicago during the Great Depression. Brecht had fled Germany in 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire. He saw that disaster was coming, and, as the play’s title makes clear, felt that it might have been averted if more of his countrymen had seen it, too. Brecht, who was waiting to immigrate to the United States, intended “Arturo Ui” for an American audience, but, according to his biographer Stephen Parker, “no U.S. theatre would touch a work which exposed the country’s social and economic life as latently Fascist, susceptible to the same collapse into lawlessness as Europe.”
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/the-disturbing-resonance-of-bertolt-brechts-the-resistible-rise-of-arturo-ui
***
Today the American right wing has discovered (George Bernard) Shaw’s more disreputable mouthings and found them to be a convenient club with which to beat today’s liberals and the left. The reasoning is usually along the lines of those marvelous syllogisms so beloved by the Glenn Becks of the world: Shaw liked Mussolini, Shaw was a Fabian Socialist, Fabian Socialists are similar to liberals, therefore liberals like Mussolini, Mussolini was a fascist, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are liberals, therefore Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are fascists. If you think I exaggerate, take a look at National Review editor Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism, which was #1 on the New York Times best seller list.
Glenn Beck has an Internet post entitled Who Are the Fabian Socialists? that opens with an accurate if disturbing quote in which Shaw intones, “if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”
More...
https://boryanabooks.com/george-bernard-shaw-can-his-reputation-survive-his-dark-side/
***
Benito Mussolini collaborated ...
- with librettist and playwright Giovacchino Forzano on the writing of three historical dramas: Campo di Maggio (1930), about Napoleon Bonaparte’s Hundred Days; Villafranca (1931), which takes its audience through the trials of Count Camillo Benso di Cavour in the quest for Italian unity; and Cesare (1939), an epic (and episodic) highlighting of key events in the Roman dictator’s rise and fall. It is the third of these plays that interests us here, but how it fits into the triptych is both ideologically and dramatically significant. All three works stage the dashing of their protagonists’ loftiest ambitions; all three of the great leaders’ defeats are brought about by the betrayal of lesser, uncomprehending men; all three heroes—Napoleon, Cavour, and Caesar—are clear proxies for Mussolini himself. All three pieces, as noted, are historical plays, and in them history is employed analogically to speak of the present.
More...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S2211624923000074
***
Six months after Hitler’s accession to power, Rieser decided to stage the play Die Rassen (The Races) by Jewish author Ferdinand Bruckner, which was about the Jewish boycott of 1933. Thomas Mann was invited to the premiere and noted in his diary: “very well received. Big response from the audience to the words: ‘It isn’t German to tell the truth these days’.”
The programme for 1934/35 with such classics as the obligatory William Tell by Schiller, the successful Katharina Knie by Carl Zuckmayer, light comedies and bourgeois dramas grew by more than 20 premieres per season. One play stood out: Professor Mamlock – or Professor Mannheim in Zurich, by doctor and dramatist Friedrich Wolf addresses the antisemitism prevalent at the time. The leading character, Jewish doctor Professor Hans Mamlock, a dedicated democrat, is unable to bear the growing repression of the Jews and in his despair, commits suicide. “A drama from the Germany of today,” as the author described it.
More...
https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2023/07/the-theatre-that-stood-up-to-fascism/
***
Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists is a shrewd exploration of the boundaries of what can be justified in the name of anti-fascism. Can extra-judicial violence be warranted to confront fascism? Can undemocratic means be used to defend democracy? What happens when the law is complicit with the far right — as with the case of the misogynist, homophobic judge, Neto de Moura?
The family debate the different ideological positions with humour and fervour. Brecht is invoked repeatedly by the earnest socialists but this is no ordinary lehrstück, rather the argument for killing the silent fascist tied up in the chair in the centre of the stage is progressively questioned by the younger Catarina who posits a different approach to countering fascism. Her uncles may try to teach her to shoot but she resists. Her sister may want to take her place but this is not an option. There is panic as a mobile phone rings, and the family fear that Catarina daughter may not have followed the careful steps to ensure she was not followed. As her mother gets progressively drunker, her inflexibility comes to the fore. Catarina daughter is planning to return to Lisbon but her mother insists she return the jumper she had been borrowing. Will she sacrifice her daughter like Iphigenia if she refuses to comply? There is no compromise, no grey area for Catarina mother. She marches with a sense of purpose that will not accept a challenge. Her daughter on the other hand hopes that reason will prevail. But as the piece progresses, it becomes all too clear that neither her mother nor the fascist is interested in reasoned argument.
More...
https://thetheatretimes.com/catarina-and-the-beauty-of-killing-fascists-at-the-tampere-theatre-festival-do-we-defend-democracy-by-breaking-its-rules/
***
As the upcoming, historic presidential election looms with the future of democracy in question for many, “’Rhinoceros’ serves as an examination of unchecked groupthink and the allure of ideological certainty,” Lorraine wrote in her description of the play.
The play, she added, is really about how a society becomes fascist and the difficulties of being uncommon in a society that is tipping in a certain direction of power.
Written in 1959 and set in a small French village, the play centers on a bizarre crisis that starts innocuously as a bump on the forehead and results in an entire village turning into rhinoceroses.
A Romanian playwright, Ionesco moved to France in early childhood witnessing the Nazi occupation of France and how the French went from denouncing the atrocities of the Nazis to sympathizing and cooperating with the Nazis in a very short timeframe, Lorraine said.
Cook County Public Defender Bide Akande takes the stage as Berenger. None of the characters have last names. Originally from a small town in Southern Illinois, Akande has a background in theater and performance in general.
He explained the play’s ability to show the slow creep of fascism and how it sets in.
“The more you see fascism, the more you see ordinary people finding their own justifications and their own ways of going along to get along until you get to where we’re at today,” he told the Austin Weekly News.
More...
https://www.austinweeklynews.com/2024/10/28/theatre-ys-latest-production-explores-fascism-political-responsibility/
***
A Polish acting troupe outwits the Nazis using Shakespeare codes and theatrical smarts in Ernst Lubitsch’s film To Be or Not to Be, an audacious comedy filmed while Adolph Hitler’s forces were moving across Europe in 1941, and released in February 1942, just two months after America entered World War II. Almost the definition of a joke told too soon, the movie succeeds — and is still vital, 80 years later — by finding the tonal sweet spot between fanciful comedy and grim reality, and presenting Shakespeare as the ultimate plea for humanity.
As the film begins, it’s 1939 and Joseph Tura and his wife Maria are the leading actors in a Warsaw theater company whose current production — a biting satire called Gestapo! — is canceled before it can open out of fear it will offend Hitler. “Well, wouldn’t that be too bad!” is the sarcastic response of Joseph, played in a wonderful deadpan by Jack Benny (who’s best remembered today as a comedian more than an actor). When the company is forced to resume performances of a classic from their repertory — William Shakespeare’s Hamlet — Maria (played incandescently, in her final role, by Carole Lombard) encourages the flattering attentions of a handsome young pilot in the audience, telling him to come to her dressing room during her husband’s indulgently lengthy rendition of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” monologue.
More...
https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/ernst-lubitsch-to-be-or-not-to-be-actors-taking-on-tyrants/
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
SHAKESBEER: Much Abrew About Nothing @ Finback Brooklyn
Drinking on, off, and all around the stage, Shakesbeer presents a FREE, shortened, frothy, Shakespearian comedy. Party at 2:30, Show at 3.
545 President Street Brooklyn, NY 11215
Finback Brooklyn 11/10
Finback Glendale 11/17
THE PLAY:
The Prince and his crew have returned from war victorious and gather at Signior Leonato's for an all night party, and while the party ensues, two sets of very different couples start to fall in love. But as the lovers swoon and spar, their journey to love is riddled with mischievous pranks, party fouls, and scheming plots. The witty warriors Beatrice and Benedick are the blueprint for all modern rom-coms, come see what made them so special!
THE THING:
The Wit's Shakesbeer is performing Much Ado About Nothing, an original 90-minute adaptation of the lauded Shakespearean romantic comedy.
THE BEAUTY:
Actors imbibe before and throughout the entire show...hijinx ensue. Shakesbeer is always free, always fun, and always audience driven. "Lambic" pentameter..."vienna style" verse—frankly, few things fit together like theatre and beer!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shakesbeer-much-abrew-about-nothing-finback-brooklyn-tickets-1057692279079?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Prospect Musicals seeks applicants to participate in the 18th installment of its annual Musical Theater Lab program. Each year, Prospect's Lab brings together writing teams to create short musicals in response to a curated assignment. The 6-week program culminates in a public presentation of the new works generated through the lab process. The 2025 Lab features in-person writer meetings, rehearsals, and concert performance.
***
Now in its 37th year, NAMT’s Festival of New Musicals is the cornerstone of NAMT’s mission to be a catalyst for nurturing musical theatre development and production.
In 1989, the Festival of New Musicals was created to provide a forum to celebrate the new musicals that were being produced and presented around the country. Since then, the Festival has introduced musical theatre producers to 300+ musicals and 565 writers from around the world. More than 85% have gone on to subsequent readings, workshops, productions and tours; been licensed; and/or recorded on cast albums as a direct result of the Festival
***
Exhume submissions for Spring 2025
We strive to publish visual art, poetry, prose, and drama in order to help writers who discuss queerness and trauma find a home for their works. Though we especially seek submissions that discuss these topics, we accept good writing across the board. We appreciate work that speaks to the human experience on a raw level. Consider works like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” Above all else, we want writing that makes us feel something. Writing can be traditional, experimental, or a hybrid of the two.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** FASCISM AND THEATER ***
The play, which Brecht wrote as a refugee in Finland, in early 1941, describes the rise of Hitler through the parable of a gangster in Chicago during the Great Depression. Brecht had fled Germany in 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire. He saw that disaster was coming, and, as the play’s title makes clear, felt that it might have been averted if more of his countrymen had seen it, too. Brecht, who was waiting to immigrate to the United States, intended “Arturo Ui” for an American audience, but, according to his biographer Stephen Parker, “no U.S. theatre would touch a work which exposed the country’s social and economic life as latently Fascist, susceptible to the same collapse into lawlessness as Europe.”
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/the-disturbing-resonance-of-bertolt-brechts-the-resistible-rise-of-arturo-ui
***
Today the American right wing has discovered (George Bernard) Shaw’s more disreputable mouthings and found them to be a convenient club with which to beat today’s liberals and the left. The reasoning is usually along the lines of those marvelous syllogisms so beloved by the Glenn Becks of the world: Shaw liked Mussolini, Shaw was a Fabian Socialist, Fabian Socialists are similar to liberals, therefore liberals like Mussolini, Mussolini was a fascist, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are liberals, therefore Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are fascists. If you think I exaggerate, take a look at National Review editor Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism, which was #1 on the New York Times best seller list.
Glenn Beck has an Internet post entitled Who Are the Fabian Socialists? that opens with an accurate if disturbing quote in which Shaw intones, “if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”
More...
https://boryanabooks.com/george-bernard-shaw-can-his-reputation-survive-his-dark-side/
***
Benito Mussolini collaborated ...
- with librettist and playwright Giovacchino Forzano on the writing of three historical dramas: Campo di Maggio (1930), about Napoleon Bonaparte’s Hundred Days; Villafranca (1931), which takes its audience through the trials of Count Camillo Benso di Cavour in the quest for Italian unity; and Cesare (1939), an epic (and episodic) highlighting of key events in the Roman dictator’s rise and fall. It is the third of these plays that interests us here, but how it fits into the triptych is both ideologically and dramatically significant. All three works stage the dashing of their protagonists’ loftiest ambitions; all three of the great leaders’ defeats are brought about by the betrayal of lesser, uncomprehending men; all three heroes—Napoleon, Cavour, and Caesar—are clear proxies for Mussolini himself. All three pieces, as noted, are historical plays, and in them history is employed analogically to speak of the present.
More...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S2211624923000074
***
Six months after Hitler’s accession to power, Rieser decided to stage the play Die Rassen (The Races) by Jewish author Ferdinand Bruckner, which was about the Jewish boycott of 1933. Thomas Mann was invited to the premiere and noted in his diary: “very well received. Big response from the audience to the words: ‘It isn’t German to tell the truth these days’.”
The programme for 1934/35 with such classics as the obligatory William Tell by Schiller, the successful Katharina Knie by Carl Zuckmayer, light comedies and bourgeois dramas grew by more than 20 premieres per season. One play stood out: Professor Mamlock – or Professor Mannheim in Zurich, by doctor and dramatist Friedrich Wolf addresses the antisemitism prevalent at the time. The leading character, Jewish doctor Professor Hans Mamlock, a dedicated democrat, is unable to bear the growing repression of the Jews and in his despair, commits suicide. “A drama from the Germany of today,” as the author described it.
More...
https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2023/07/the-theatre-that-stood-up-to-fascism/
***
Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists is a shrewd exploration of the boundaries of what can be justified in the name of anti-fascism. Can extra-judicial violence be warranted to confront fascism? Can undemocratic means be used to defend democracy? What happens when the law is complicit with the far right — as with the case of the misogynist, homophobic judge, Neto de Moura?
The family debate the different ideological positions with humour and fervour. Brecht is invoked repeatedly by the earnest socialists but this is no ordinary lehrstück, rather the argument for killing the silent fascist tied up in the chair in the centre of the stage is progressively questioned by the younger Catarina who posits a different approach to countering fascism. Her uncles may try to teach her to shoot but she resists. Her sister may want to take her place but this is not an option. There is panic as a mobile phone rings, and the family fear that Catarina daughter may not have followed the careful steps to ensure she was not followed. As her mother gets progressively drunker, her inflexibility comes to the fore. Catarina daughter is planning to return to Lisbon but her mother insists she return the jumper she had been borrowing. Will she sacrifice her daughter like Iphigenia if she refuses to comply? There is no compromise, no grey area for Catarina mother. She marches with a sense of purpose that will not accept a challenge. Her daughter on the other hand hopes that reason will prevail. But as the piece progresses, it becomes all too clear that neither her mother nor the fascist is interested in reasoned argument.
More...
https://thetheatretimes.com/catarina-and-the-beauty-of-killing-fascists-at-the-tampere-theatre-festival-do-we-defend-democracy-by-breaking-its-rules/
***
As the upcoming, historic presidential election looms with the future of democracy in question for many, “’Rhinoceros’ serves as an examination of unchecked groupthink and the allure of ideological certainty,” Lorraine wrote in her description of the play.
The play, she added, is really about how a society becomes fascist and the difficulties of being uncommon in a society that is tipping in a certain direction of power.
Written in 1959 and set in a small French village, the play centers on a bizarre crisis that starts innocuously as a bump on the forehead and results in an entire village turning into rhinoceroses.
A Romanian playwright, Ionesco moved to France in early childhood witnessing the Nazi occupation of France and how the French went from denouncing the atrocities of the Nazis to sympathizing and cooperating with the Nazis in a very short timeframe, Lorraine said.
Cook County Public Defender Bide Akande takes the stage as Berenger. None of the characters have last names. Originally from a small town in Southern Illinois, Akande has a background in theater and performance in general.
He explained the play’s ability to show the slow creep of fascism and how it sets in.
“The more you see fascism, the more you see ordinary people finding their own justifications and their own ways of going along to get along until you get to where we’re at today,” he told the Austin Weekly News.
More...
https://www.austinweeklynews.com/2024/10/28/theatre-ys-latest-production-explores-fascism-political-responsibility/
***
A Polish acting troupe outwits the Nazis using Shakespeare codes and theatrical smarts in Ernst Lubitsch’s film To Be or Not to Be, an audacious comedy filmed while Adolph Hitler’s forces were moving across Europe in 1941, and released in February 1942, just two months after America entered World War II. Almost the definition of a joke told too soon, the movie succeeds — and is still vital, 80 years later — by finding the tonal sweet spot between fanciful comedy and grim reality, and presenting Shakespeare as the ultimate plea for humanity.
As the film begins, it’s 1939 and Joseph Tura and his wife Maria are the leading actors in a Warsaw theater company whose current production — a biting satire called Gestapo! — is canceled before it can open out of fear it will offend Hitler. “Well, wouldn’t that be too bad!” is the sarcastic response of Joseph, played in a wonderful deadpan by Jack Benny (who’s best remembered today as a comedian more than an actor). When the company is forced to resume performances of a classic from their repertory — William Shakespeare’s Hamlet — Maria (played incandescently, in her final role, by Carole Lombard) encourages the flattering attentions of a handsome young pilot in the audience, telling him to come to her dressing room during her husband’s indulgently lengthy rendition of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” monologue.
More...
https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/ernst-lubitsch-to-be-or-not-to-be-actors-taking-on-tyrants/
*** The 2024 presidential election in one headline, November 2, 2024 ***
Trump Simulates Giving Oral Sex To Rally Microphone
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