NYCPlaywrights February 14, 2026
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NYCPlaywrights
Feb 14, 2026, 5:02:33 PM (7 days ago) Feb 14
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
HOUSES, SECRETS AND TIME
by Laura MacLean
Margaret has scraped together everything possible to buy a historical New England home from an elderly neighbor. When her sister finds a keepsake box hidden away, its contents send the sisters on an impulsive trip to Japan to investigate. While they both grapple with the financial loss their father incurred before his death, Margaret's boyfriend Jim has hopes for a happy future with Margaret. Margaret's fears about losing the family business clouds her ability to see beyond the past that still holds her in its grip.
Mar 1 at 2:00 pm EST
102nd Street Field House
New York, NY 10025
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/houses-secrets-and-time-a-new-play-reading-tickets-1982887155861?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The inaugural Lavender Hill Cultural District Theatre Festival announces a call for submissions for staged readings of LGBTQ+ themed plays to be presented as part of the 2026 Festival, alongside a bold slate of fully produced works. This groundbreaking festival is dedicated to fearless storytelling, artistic excellence, and amplifying LGBTQ+ voices—past, present, and emerging—through theatre that challenges, illuminates, and endures.
***
WP Theater is looking for early to mid-career playwrights, directors, and producers, who crave an artistic home, a cohort of collaborators, professional support, and the resources to launch them into the next phase of their careers to be a part of the Heidi Thomas Initiative WP Theater Lab.
The Lab provides up to fifteen artists with community, a vital professional network, entrepreneurial and leadership skills, free rehearsal space, and, most significantly, tangible opportunities for the development of bold new work for the stage.
***
The Sidekick Troupe (TST) is currently accepting submissions for SummerWeen: A Radio Play Festival.
Calling all mythical beasts, beach bums, and everyone who considers themselves a writer! Come celebrate the perfect spooky/summer blend with us in SummerWeen, A Radio Play Festival. Send us your scary or silly Halloween oriented radio play… as long as it’s spooky.
- Must be at least 10 minutes, and no longer than 15 minutes.
- Must be Halloween-oriented in theme or genre.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER LOVE STORIES ***
My faith in the theatre is inconstant. It requires regular refreshment, renewal of belief that this thing, on which I have staked hope and energy, is worth hope and energy. I’ll search anywhere for reasons to believe: among the never-ending parade of new artists who take nothing for granted about the way things are; among those who keep keeping on through the trials of mid-career; among those who have endured. This is a story of two writers who have endured beyond all probability and continued, in late life, to remain ever-new. More, it’s a set of love stories, nesting inside one another like Matryoshka dolls.
The first love story: Paul Zimet and Ellen Maddow met in 1970 when he was a member of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and she signed on as an intern with a talent for keeping a beat on a drum. Together with Tina Shepherd, Paul and Ellen have been the core artists of an ensemble called Talking Band (TB) for the past fifty years. (You read that right.) Over that half century they’ve written, directed, performed in, and co-created nearly sixty original theatrical works with modest means. As if that math weren’t miracle enough, this winter and spring, the couple has offered up three back-to-back new pieces of theatre that would challenge the most Olympian of artists, each of which might stand as the accomplishment of several years. Speaking of years: Paul is eighty-one; Ellen merely seventy-five.
More...
https://howlround.com/lovers-guide-american-playwrights-ellen-maddow-and-paul-zimet
***
EVERYBODY called them “the Lunts,” and they were probably the greatest husband-andwife acting team the American theater has ever known, dominating the stage for nearly four decades. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne—brilliant, glamorous, inseparable, the epitome of the happily married couple.
Then, last August, he died of cancer at the age of 84, leaving her alone for the first time since their marriage in 1922.
Now, on one of her rare trips away from her home in Genesee Depot, Wis., near Milwaukee, the 90-year-old Miss Fontanne sat in a friend's elegant Upper East Side living room and talked aboilt her life since her husband's death.
“1 miss him every second of every day,” she said, her voice a bit shaky, but now and then regaining traces of her elegant stage diction. “We were together all the time, and I'm very lonely. Right now if he were still alive, he would be making our spring garden. It was one of our happiest times of the year.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/24/archives/new-jersey-pages-lynn-fontanne-at-90-talks-of-love-looks-closer-to.html
***
The Victorian lesbian power couple Elsie de Wolfe (1859-1950), often credited as America’s first professional interior designer, and Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury (1856-1933), one of the world’s leading, and pioneering female, theatrical agents and producers, lived in this house at the corner of East 17th Street and Irving Place, near Union Square, between 1892 and 1911. They first met in 1887, and their relationship lasted nearly 40 years.
When they began leasing the house in 1892, de Wolfe was an actress and Marbury was just then establishing her career as an agent to the leading European and American playwrights (her clients included Oscar Wilde). Their house was located near the home of Marbury’s parents and several friends and was close to the Union Square theaters. In 1897 and 1898, de Wolfe began to redecorate and simplify the interiors of No. 122, gaining experience and publicity that enabled her to launch her career as an interior decorator in 1905.
More...
https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/elisabeth-marbury-elsie-de-wolfe-residence/
***
I think the secret to a relationship is just perseverance, you know?" he stated. "It's not always pretty…but he's pretty, so it makes it easy."
The couple celebrated their 15-year anniversary earlier this month. To mark the important occasion, the 45-year-old actor shared a photo of himself and his husband together at the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa in Iceland.
"My first date with David was 15 years ago today, and we've been nearly inseparable ever since," Harris wrote alongside of Burtka, whom he wed in 2014. "I'm so, so grateful to this gorgeous man for giving me his heart, his shoulder, his strength, his lust, his laughter, his joy. He's an actor, chef, author, singer, producer, and the most wonderful, selfless parent I've ever seen. A sextuple threat, if you will. And I most certainly will."
"Happy 15th Anniversary, @dbelicious," Harris added. "You keep making all my dreams come true. #love"
Thursday's event, which the acclaimed actor and performer is emceeing, is the world's largest youth empowerment event which celebrates doing "social good." Kids who want to attend must successfully tackle a local cause and global cause.
More...
https://www.etonline.com/neil-patrick-harris-shares-how-he-and-husband-david-burtka-have-lasted-15-years-exclusive-124120
***
You first met on a Broadway tour. What was your first impression of each other?
Block: It was the first tour of “Wicked” in 2006. Seven weeks before the end of my year contract, company management walks in with this guy and introduces my new Fiyero. I’m wearing my green leotard and my makeup’s half done, and I’m polite and respectful, but I also realize we now have to rehearse and do a put-in [rehearsal] and everything. And Mama Elphaba was tired!
Arcelus: She was so gracious. At the end of a long tour like that, it’s a lot to reignite everything with your cast and develop a new understanding of the material as it exists between the two of you.
Block: I even said, “How is one supposed to develop chemistry with someone coming in this late?” But little by little, I recognized how extraordinary he was — as a friend, a son, a brother, a human. And him in those white pants [Fiyero wears], are you kidding me?
More...
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-06-26/broadway-national-tour-into-the-woods-stephanie-j-block-sebastian-arcelus-married
***
The love story of Eva Noblezada Carney and Reeve Carney—actors, entertainers, musicians, artists—began (where else?) on the stage, in a “weirdly lit” little rehearsal space on Manhattan’s 8th Avenue. It was June 29, 2017, and Eva was there to audition for the lead role of Eurydice in the then-Broadway debut of the now-musical phenomenon Hadestown. Reeve had already secured his part as Orpheus.
“Reeve was just so cool, confident, and kind. [He was] so beautifully locked into the moment, and it really influenced me to be as present as possible,” remembers Eva. They finished singing their duet, “Wedding Song,” and Reeve returned to the back of the room to watch her finish the audition—which she nailed. (Two weeks later, she found out she got the part, and screamed down the Equinox at Columbus Circle) The couple would go on to propel Hadestown to major Tony award-winning success.
“I feel blessed to have been a part of the epic that is Hadestown—and doing it all next to the man and artist who inspires me the most,” says Eva. After the Broadway stint that sparked their relationship, they took the tortured young lovers they originated to London in 2018, for a run at the National Theatre.
Reeve and Eva’s courtship unfolded alongside their intertwining theater careers—and their engagement had to be staged accordingly. “I had been planning it for years!” says Reeve. The pandemic slowed the process—Reeve had a specific location in mind and wanted their families to be present—but when they received the call to reprise their roles in Hadestown on the West End, the timing felt perfect. Eva had an extra day (March 10, 2025) in between Hadestown and her first day of rehearsal as Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway. “That’s the day I chose to propose to the love of my life and my best friend, on Blackfriars Bridge; the bridge we had walked across together every day to and from the National Theatre, as we were becoming best friends,” says Reeve. As Reeve got down on one knee, the ZHL string quartet was there to soundtrack their proposal. (The group had played during one of their date-night dinners at Sarastro Restaurant in Covent Garden, and Reeve sneakily grabbed their business card with this plan in mind.)
More...
https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/eva-noblezada-and-reeve-carney-wedding
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
HOUSES, SECRETS AND TIME
by Laura MacLean
Margaret has scraped together everything possible to buy a historical New England home from an elderly neighbor. When her sister finds a keepsake box hidden away, its contents send the sisters on an impulsive trip to Japan to investigate. While they both grapple with the financial loss their father incurred before his death, Margaret's boyfriend Jim has hopes for a happy future with Margaret. Margaret's fears about losing the family business clouds her ability to see beyond the past that still holds her in its grip.
Mar 1 at 2:00 pm EST
102nd Street Field House
New York, NY 10025
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/houses-secrets-and-time-a-new-play-reading-tickets-1982887155861?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The inaugural Lavender Hill Cultural District Theatre Festival announces a call for submissions for staged readings of LGBTQ+ themed plays to be presented as part of the 2026 Festival, alongside a bold slate of fully produced works. This groundbreaking festival is dedicated to fearless storytelling, artistic excellence, and amplifying LGBTQ+ voices—past, present, and emerging—through theatre that challenges, illuminates, and endures.
***
WP Theater is looking for early to mid-career playwrights, directors, and producers, who crave an artistic home, a cohort of collaborators, professional support, and the resources to launch them into the next phase of their careers to be a part of the Heidi Thomas Initiative WP Theater Lab.
The Lab provides up to fifteen artists with community, a vital professional network, entrepreneurial and leadership skills, free rehearsal space, and, most significantly, tangible opportunities for the development of bold new work for the stage.
***
The Sidekick Troupe (TST) is currently accepting submissions for SummerWeen: A Radio Play Festival.
Calling all mythical beasts, beach bums, and everyone who considers themselves a writer! Come celebrate the perfect spooky/summer blend with us in SummerWeen, A Radio Play Festival. Send us your scary or silly Halloween oriented radio play… as long as it’s spooky.
- Must be at least 10 minutes, and no longer than 15 minutes.
- Must be Halloween-oriented in theme or genre.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER LOVE STORIES ***
My faith in the theatre is inconstant. It requires regular refreshment, renewal of belief that this thing, on which I have staked hope and energy, is worth hope and energy. I’ll search anywhere for reasons to believe: among the never-ending parade of new artists who take nothing for granted about the way things are; among those who keep keeping on through the trials of mid-career; among those who have endured. This is a story of two writers who have endured beyond all probability and continued, in late life, to remain ever-new. More, it’s a set of love stories, nesting inside one another like Matryoshka dolls.
The first love story: Paul Zimet and Ellen Maddow met in 1970 when he was a member of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and she signed on as an intern with a talent for keeping a beat on a drum. Together with Tina Shepherd, Paul and Ellen have been the core artists of an ensemble called Talking Band (TB) for the past fifty years. (You read that right.) Over that half century they’ve written, directed, performed in, and co-created nearly sixty original theatrical works with modest means. As if that math weren’t miracle enough, this winter and spring, the couple has offered up three back-to-back new pieces of theatre that would challenge the most Olympian of artists, each of which might stand as the accomplishment of several years. Speaking of years: Paul is eighty-one; Ellen merely seventy-five.
More...
https://howlround.com/lovers-guide-american-playwrights-ellen-maddow-and-paul-zimet
***
EVERYBODY called them “the Lunts,” and they were probably the greatest husband-andwife acting team the American theater has ever known, dominating the stage for nearly four decades. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne—brilliant, glamorous, inseparable, the epitome of the happily married couple.
Then, last August, he died of cancer at the age of 84, leaving her alone for the first time since their marriage in 1922.
Now, on one of her rare trips away from her home in Genesee Depot, Wis., near Milwaukee, the 90-year-old Miss Fontanne sat in a friend's elegant Upper East Side living room and talked aboilt her life since her husband's death.
“1 miss him every second of every day,” she said, her voice a bit shaky, but now and then regaining traces of her elegant stage diction. “We were together all the time, and I'm very lonely. Right now if he were still alive, he would be making our spring garden. It was one of our happiest times of the year.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/24/archives/new-jersey-pages-lynn-fontanne-at-90-talks-of-love-looks-closer-to.html
***
Audra McDonald and Will Swenson are theatrical powerhouses, with McDonald's record-holding six Tony awards to her name and Swenson's Tony-nominated stint in several of the buzziest productions of the 21st century. Now, the married couple (they celebrated ten years this October) are on Broadway at the same time. But! Not in the same show. Swenson is playing his own hero, Neil Diamond, in new musical A Beautiful Noise, which opened Dec. 4, while McDonald anchors Ohio State Murders, the Broadway debut of 91-year-old playwright Adrienne Kennedy, opening Dec. 8.
The two have shared stage time before, but this dance of navigating rehearsals, call times, their family life, and the physical and emotional toll of stage work is new to them. So, we called the couple up and asked them to interview each other about their respective projects, the biggest challenges of their work, and what inspires them about the other.
More...
https://ew.com/theater/audra-mcdonald-will-swenson-neil-diamond-broadway/
Audra McDonald and Will Swenson are theatrical powerhouses, with McDonald's record-holding six Tony awards to her name and Swenson's Tony-nominated stint in several of the buzziest productions of the 21st century. Now, the married couple (they celebrated ten years this October) are on Broadway at the same time. But! Not in the same show. Swenson is playing his own hero, Neil Diamond, in new musical A Beautiful Noise, which opened Dec. 4, while McDonald anchors Ohio State Murders, the Broadway debut of 91-year-old playwright Adrienne Kennedy, opening Dec. 8.
The two have shared stage time before, but this dance of navigating rehearsals, call times, their family life, and the physical and emotional toll of stage work is new to them. So, we called the couple up and asked them to interview each other about their respective projects, the biggest challenges of their work, and what inspires them about the other.
More...
https://ew.com/theater/audra-mcdonald-will-swenson-neil-diamond-broadway/
***
The Victorian lesbian power couple Elsie de Wolfe (1859-1950), often credited as America’s first professional interior designer, and Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury (1856-1933), one of the world’s leading, and pioneering female, theatrical agents and producers, lived in this house at the corner of East 17th Street and Irving Place, near Union Square, between 1892 and 1911. They first met in 1887, and their relationship lasted nearly 40 years.
When they began leasing the house in 1892, de Wolfe was an actress and Marbury was just then establishing her career as an agent to the leading European and American playwrights (her clients included Oscar Wilde). Their house was located near the home of Marbury’s parents and several friends and was close to the Union Square theaters. In 1897 and 1898, de Wolfe began to redecorate and simplify the interiors of No. 122, gaining experience and publicity that enabled her to launch her career as an interior decorator in 1905.
More...
https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/elisabeth-marbury-elsie-de-wolfe-residence/
***
I think the secret to a relationship is just perseverance, you know?" he stated. "It's not always pretty…but he's pretty, so it makes it easy."
The couple celebrated their 15-year anniversary earlier this month. To mark the important occasion, the 45-year-old actor shared a photo of himself and his husband together at the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa in Iceland.
"My first date with David was 15 years ago today, and we've been nearly inseparable ever since," Harris wrote alongside of Burtka, whom he wed in 2014. "I'm so, so grateful to this gorgeous man for giving me his heart, his shoulder, his strength, his lust, his laughter, his joy. He's an actor, chef, author, singer, producer, and the most wonderful, selfless parent I've ever seen. A sextuple threat, if you will. And I most certainly will."
"Happy 15th Anniversary, @dbelicious," Harris added. "You keep making all my dreams come true. #love"
Thursday's event, which the acclaimed actor and performer is emceeing, is the world's largest youth empowerment event which celebrates doing "social good." Kids who want to attend must successfully tackle a local cause and global cause.
More...
https://www.etonline.com/neil-patrick-harris-shares-how-he-and-husband-david-burtka-have-lasted-15-years-exclusive-124120
***
You first met on a Broadway tour. What was your first impression of each other?
Block: It was the first tour of “Wicked” in 2006. Seven weeks before the end of my year contract, company management walks in with this guy and introduces my new Fiyero. I’m wearing my green leotard and my makeup’s half done, and I’m polite and respectful, but I also realize we now have to rehearse and do a put-in [rehearsal] and everything. And Mama Elphaba was tired!
Arcelus: She was so gracious. At the end of a long tour like that, it’s a lot to reignite everything with your cast and develop a new understanding of the material as it exists between the two of you.
Block: I even said, “How is one supposed to develop chemistry with someone coming in this late?” But little by little, I recognized how extraordinary he was — as a friend, a son, a brother, a human. And him in those white pants [Fiyero wears], are you kidding me?
More...
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-06-26/broadway-national-tour-into-the-woods-stephanie-j-block-sebastian-arcelus-married
***
The love story of Eva Noblezada Carney and Reeve Carney—actors, entertainers, musicians, artists—began (where else?) on the stage, in a “weirdly lit” little rehearsal space on Manhattan’s 8th Avenue. It was June 29, 2017, and Eva was there to audition for the lead role of Eurydice in the then-Broadway debut of the now-musical phenomenon Hadestown. Reeve had already secured his part as Orpheus.
“Reeve was just so cool, confident, and kind. [He was] so beautifully locked into the moment, and it really influenced me to be as present as possible,” remembers Eva. They finished singing their duet, “Wedding Song,” and Reeve returned to the back of the room to watch her finish the audition—which she nailed. (Two weeks later, she found out she got the part, and screamed down the Equinox at Columbus Circle) The couple would go on to propel Hadestown to major Tony award-winning success.
“I feel blessed to have been a part of the epic that is Hadestown—and doing it all next to the man and artist who inspires me the most,” says Eva. After the Broadway stint that sparked their relationship, they took the tortured young lovers they originated to London in 2018, for a run at the National Theatre.
Reeve and Eva’s courtship unfolded alongside their intertwining theater careers—and their engagement had to be staged accordingly. “I had been planning it for years!” says Reeve. The pandemic slowed the process—Reeve had a specific location in mind and wanted their families to be present—but when they received the call to reprise their roles in Hadestown on the West End, the timing felt perfect. Eva had an extra day (March 10, 2025) in between Hadestown and her first day of rehearsal as Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway. “That’s the day I chose to propose to the love of my life and my best friend, on Blackfriars Bridge; the bridge we had walked across together every day to and from the National Theatre, as we were becoming best friends,” says Reeve. As Reeve got down on one knee, the ZHL string quartet was there to soundtrack their proposal. (The group had played during one of their date-night dinners at Sarastro Restaurant in Covent Garden, and Reeve sneakily grabbed their business card with this plan in mind.)
More...
https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/eva-noblezada-and-reeve-carney-wedding
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