NYCPlaywrights February 7, 2026
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Feb 7, 2026, 5:02:21 PMFeb 7
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*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
ALAY: A Mourning Ritual Performance
ALAY is a mourning ritual performance created and performed by Dorothea Gloria, rooted in Ilocano traditions of grief, remembrance, and offering. Drawing from ancestral practices of lamentation, prayer, and embodied devotion, the work explores how grief lives in the body and how ritual can hold what language cannot.
Positioned at the intersection of performance, ritual, and social practice, ALAY treats mourning as a living, communal practice. Through gesture, repetition, sound, and presence, the performance creates a shared space where grief is witnessed rather than explained, and where collective attention becomes an act of care.
ALAY reframes mourning as relational and expansive. The performance asks: What does it mean to mourn together? How might ritual be adapted and reimagined within contemporary performance practice? And how can ancestral knowledge inform present-day modes of gathering, remembrance, and healing?
ALAY functions both as a performance and an offering to our ancestors, to the community, and to those carrying unspoken or unresolved grief. Audiences are invited into an intimate ritual space that prioritizes presence over spectacle and process over product, foregrounding mourning as a shared human experience rather than an individual burden.
Created and performed by Dorothea Gloria, ALAY reflects Gloria’s ongoing artistic practice of exploring theater as ritual. The work builds a bridge between inherited ceremonial practices and contemporary performance, offering a space to sit with loss, tenderness, and collective remembrance.
ALAY is a durational performance. Audience can enter and exit at any point throughout the performance time.
Saturday, Apr 11 from 1 pm to 5 pm EDT
BAX Annex
80 Hanson Pl floor 1
Brooklyn, NY 11217
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/alay-a-mourning-ritual-performance-tickets-1982196260374?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** ROGUE THEATER FESTIVAL ***
Rogue Theater Festival is looking for Fully Staged Shows, Staged Readings, Short Shows, and Digital Streaming Productions for their hybrid theater festival going up August 3rd thru 16th, 2026 at The Flea Theatre in New York City and streaming digitally on CUR8. Going into their eighth year, Rogue has worked with over 250 playwrights and 500 artists to present their new works. We also offer seminars and educational opportunities for our playwrights each year!
Check out www.roguetheaterfestival.com for more information on who we are and how to submit your piece.
Make a wave with us this summer!
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Vidalia Theatre Company in Atlanta, is accepting submissions for its annual Summer Harvest show of 10-minute plays to be produced in June 2026.
The theme for this show is “connection.” We’re looking for plays that explore the human need for connection… romantic or platonic. Stories that deal with the obstacles in today’s world to achieving genuine connection, how we cope or fail to cope and how we sometimes avoid it all together. We are only seeking plays that fit this theme at this time.
***
Play submissions are open for the 3rd annual Gloria Bond Clunie Playwright's Festival at Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre in Evanston, right outside of Chicago, IL. All events will take place at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center (927 Noyes St). The mission of Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre is to present work that centers the Black American experience and explore stories of the African Diaspora.
The inclusion and interpretation of this mission is up to the playwright.
***
Pronoia Theater seeks new works related to the USA public domain
“Public Domain” covers a wide swath of material (items correct as of America in 2026):
Anything first published in USA in 1930 or earlier
Anything published between 1931-1977 which did not have its copyright renewed
Most documents created by the United States Government
Recipes, game rules, etc. (Things which are ruled to not have enough authorship to be protectable)
Property whose copyright was relinquished by its owners.
For the purposes of this festival anything created under the Creative Commons license with proper attribution will also be considered.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BLANCHE MARVIN ***
When I was formally offered the job of Artistic Director at the Royal Court I immediately went to seek advice from Blanche Marvin.
I know I’m not the only artistic director to regularly seek her counsel and, over three hours in her glorious flat, filled with memorabilia from her incredible theatrical life and adventures, among Emmy statues, theatre posters, plays and art, she sparkled as she shared her insight, forthright views and brilliant opinions. She was particularly pleased as she had predicted I would take over the Royal Court ten years previously - and I had been pretty dismissive. I thought she would have forgotten this, she absolutely had not. Soon after our conversation, an email arrived that summarised her advice across several pages of analysis of the state of new writing in the UK and beyond - including what I should do and how I should use my experience and rip it all up. Blanche, who was in her late 90s at this point, wrote an assessment of the state of play across London theatre and what our ambitions for it should now be that was so fresh and radical it felt like it was written by a direct contemporary. I was not surprised, despite her advanced age she always grasped new trends and ideas immediately - using her experience of what had been to see what could come next. She was the best co-conspirator.
More...
https://royalcourttheatre.com/stories/a-message-from-david-byrne-blanche-marvin/
***
Blanche Marvin, an American expatriate whom The New York Times once called London’s “best-loved theater critic,” was not just a commentator on great dramas, but someone who also claimed to be an inspiration for one of the most famous of them.
She said her friend Tennessee Williams had named Blanche DuBois, the faded-belle protagonist of his 1947 classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” after her.
Moreover, she insisted that Mr. Williams had adapted a consoling remark that Ms. Marvin had offhandedly made to him into Blanche’s indelible final line: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Whether her assertions were truth or self-mythologizing, Ms. Marvin went on to a redoubtable career as a critic — starting in her 60s and publishing in a newsletter and then mostly on her website — after working as an actress, playwright, impresario and agent. She died on Jan. 13 at her home in London, four days before her 101st birthday, her daughter, Niki Marvin, said.
Just 4-foot-11, Ms. Marvin was a sizable and ubiquitous presence in British theaters in her beads, hats and scarves. She was known to have attended 21 performances in a single day at the Edinburgh International Festival. The British Theater Guide called her “bionic Blanche.”
Image
More...
https://archive.ph/Dl1rf
***
Tennessee Williams was born 100 years ago this week, in Columbus, Mississippi: despised as effeminate by a hard-drinking father, overshadowed by his hysterical mother, devoted to his fragile sister Rose whose schizophrenia led to a prefrontal lobotomy. His beginnings, like his conflicted sexuality, fed into his plays: he is one of those of gay male writers of the early 20th century (like our own Rattigan) whose repressed but acute sensitivities let them depict women in particular with piercing compassion. His first play was produced in Memphis when he was 24, and he wrote later: “The laughter ... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other, for better and for worse. I know it’s the only thing that saved my life.”
His career declined, drugs and drink taking their toll, and after his death in 1983 his reputation took a further dive; now again it rises. So in the centenary year, it has been fascinating to meet almost nightly amid the cluster of London critics a direct connection to Williams’s youth. There are many who met or interviewed him in his old age, but Mrs Blanche Marvin is special: not just because chronologically it seems more than likely that he borrowed her name for his most famous heroine — Blanche Dubois — but because they were young together, at a critical turning point on 1940s Broadway.
Blanche is a remarkable creature: 86 years old, always elegant in beads and scarves and dashing hats, acute and friendly. She has imported English plays, started an off-Broadway theatre, written children’s drama, taught acting and writing on both sides of the Atlantic and now covers London as a critic — she is recognised as one who knows what will export. Age — and a good deal of illness — fails entirely to wither her, nor does she stick to the big first-night circuit. Her curiosity about new fringe spaces is insatiable. I will never forget seeing her, only weeks out of hospital after a foot operation, trekking alone in her dashing hat down some grim muggers’ alley off Waterloo station to scout a one-man show under the latest set of railway arches. Last year she was appointed MBE for services to theatre.
Her stories are many, including a heavy pass from Marlon Brando (“I said ‘Marlon, I wouldn’t know what to do with you, you like boys as well as girls, I can’t deal with that.’ I told him to go work on his speech for the play he was in. He just said ‘I hate acting, but it’s better than working in a store from nine to five, and you meet lovely people’.”)
More...
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/he-went-with-men-who-beat-him-up-common-men-jqghgfrfc7p
***
Her home reflects this thrifty lifestyle. It consists of a kitchen, living room, office and dining room that doubles as a bedroom, with a daybed in the corner where she sleeps at night. She takes pride in the way her furniture adapts to the small space: the sofa becomes a guest bed; a small table hinges out to become a larger one; a wooden bench turns into another table. “Everything is convertible,” she says. “I’m very organised – in a small space, you have to be.”
Her living room is painted grey, and the office, dining room and a set of elegant velvet curtains are a mustard shade. “Things don’t have to match,” Marvin says, “but they do have to harmonise. If they don’t, keep working at it until they do!”
Nothing looks as if it was acquired later than 1950. The kitchen table is an old desk painted white, fitted with a green lacquer top. The room is painted gun-metal grey, not for style points but for practicality: “White in a kitchen gets too dirty.” Her woven glass curtains, at 80 years old, are only slightly younger than Marvin is. Her front room is filled with objects, collections and personal pieces, each with a story. She bought a set of green ceramics, on display in the kitchen, on her honeymoon in St Tropez. “It was just a fishing village where artisans lived and worked,” she says.
The most striking feature is a narrow, cork-walled hallway filled with theatre bills, programmes, photographs and pictures spanning her nine decades. A pencil drawing turns out to be a portrait of Marvin by Marcel Marceau, which he did just after the second world war, before he became famous. These objects are not just decoration, but memories: “I’m never lonely in this house, because I have my life with me.”
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/24/blanche-marvin-theatre-critic-flat-recycling-reuse-nonagenerian
***
She met Williams through Margo Jones, the director of The Glass Menagerie, who was living with Ms Marvin and her late husband. Rehearsals of Menagerie had been going badly and Jones thought Ms Marvin would provide a distraction.
"Everyone was terrified, and Tennessee was very nervous; he thought he was going to be ruined and Margo wanted to distract him," Ms Marvin said. The rehearsals had not been going well. Two of the stars had alcohol problems and struggled to remember their lines.
"So we began to talk and there was a real affinity between us. The two of us ended up crying on each other's shoulders. We got very close."
Ms Marvin said much of what drove Williams was his feeling of losing connection to the South.
"He was always distressed at losing his roots in the South. He talked about living in hotel rooms all the time and was unhappy," she said. "He said he was always living with strangers. I said, 'I've known only kindness from strangers, and so can you.' Look how brilliant he was in using it."
The Glass Menagerie became a huge hit and made Williams's name; and Streetcar won the Pulitzer Prize. Ms Marvin met the playwright only infrequently afterwards.
More...
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/critic-claims-i-was-the-inspiration-for-blanche-dubois-9630885.html
***
"I cashed in my old age annuity, I thought what the hell, let the government take care of me," she says, laughing. "Listen, if you don't put your money where your heart is, forget it."
The award has become so prestigious that it has helped winners gain mainstream production space and has spawned further prizes, most recently a rent-subsidy award to help cash-strapped smaller venues. It is named after Marvin's late husband, the American producer Mark Marvin.
Born Blanche Zohar in New York, she was an actress and dancer confined mostly to Asian handmaiden roles because of her exotic looks. A photo among the theater posters in her apartment shows a sultry jet-haired beauty with cheekbones so sharp they could fillet a sole.
She played in such Hollywood clinkers as "Casbah" (1948) and "The Girl from Persia" and on Broadway in "Lute Song," (1946) she understudied the star, Mary Martin, became friendly with Yul Brynner (who was playing his first role) and had to dance around Mrs. Ronald Reagan, then Nancy Davis. "She was a stick, she couldn't move and she couldn't act so they kept her still."
She befriended a shy young Tennessee Williams, claims that Blanche Dubois was named after her, was courted by Marlon Brando, painted scarves made from World War II parachute silk with Zero Mostel, started a successful children's theater in New York and taught playwriting at the University of Iowa. In London she became a producer, acting teacher and agent, getting Joan Littlewood in 1973 to put on "Sweeney Todd," her client Christopher Bond's play, and then informing Stephen Sondheim that he should make a musical of it.
It's been a very full life. "One thing about my age," she says, "I can tell you every scene of every show I've seen." Brook says her ideals are fed by enormous experience: "I don't think anyone has seen as much as she has," he says. "Her criticism as such is the most reliable I know."
More...
https://archive.ph/kw7Wp
***
Blanche Marvin on Tennessee Williams part 1
Blanche Marvin recalls her youthful days as an actress in New York when she met the young Tennessee Williams, then premiering The Glass Menagerie (1944/5) on Broadway. Marvin, the wife of producer Mark Marvin, believes - with some justification - that Williams then went on to name the heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, after her - while her maiden name, Zohar ("splendour") may additionally have inspired the character-name Stella in that play.
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
ALAY: A Mourning Ritual Performance
ALAY is a mourning ritual performance created and performed by Dorothea Gloria, rooted in Ilocano traditions of grief, remembrance, and offering. Drawing from ancestral practices of lamentation, prayer, and embodied devotion, the work explores how grief lives in the body and how ritual can hold what language cannot.
Positioned at the intersection of performance, ritual, and social practice, ALAY treats mourning as a living, communal practice. Through gesture, repetition, sound, and presence, the performance creates a shared space where grief is witnessed rather than explained, and where collective attention becomes an act of care.
ALAY reframes mourning as relational and expansive. The performance asks: What does it mean to mourn together? How might ritual be adapted and reimagined within contemporary performance practice? And how can ancestral knowledge inform present-day modes of gathering, remembrance, and healing?
ALAY functions both as a performance and an offering to our ancestors, to the community, and to those carrying unspoken or unresolved grief. Audiences are invited into an intimate ritual space that prioritizes presence over spectacle and process over product, foregrounding mourning as a shared human experience rather than an individual burden.
Created and performed by Dorothea Gloria, ALAY reflects Gloria’s ongoing artistic practice of exploring theater as ritual. The work builds a bridge between inherited ceremonial practices and contemporary performance, offering a space to sit with loss, tenderness, and collective remembrance.
ALAY is a durational performance. Audience can enter and exit at any point throughout the performance time.
Saturday, Apr 11 from 1 pm to 5 pm EDT
BAX Annex
80 Hanson Pl floor 1
Brooklyn, NY 11217
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/alay-a-mourning-ritual-performance-tickets-1982196260374?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** ROGUE THEATER FESTIVAL ***
Rogue Theater Festival is looking for Fully Staged Shows, Staged Readings, Short Shows, and Digital Streaming Productions for their hybrid theater festival going up August 3rd thru 16th, 2026 at The Flea Theatre in New York City and streaming digitally on CUR8. Going into their eighth year, Rogue has worked with over 250 playwrights and 500 artists to present their new works. We also offer seminars and educational opportunities for our playwrights each year!
Check out www.roguetheaterfestival.com for more information on who we are and how to submit your piece.
Make a wave with us this summer!
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Vidalia Theatre Company in Atlanta, is accepting submissions for its annual Summer Harvest show of 10-minute plays to be produced in June 2026.
The theme for this show is “connection.” We’re looking for plays that explore the human need for connection… romantic or platonic. Stories that deal with the obstacles in today’s world to achieving genuine connection, how we cope or fail to cope and how we sometimes avoid it all together. We are only seeking plays that fit this theme at this time.
***
Play submissions are open for the 3rd annual Gloria Bond Clunie Playwright's Festival at Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre in Evanston, right outside of Chicago, IL. All events will take place at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center (927 Noyes St). The mission of Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre is to present work that centers the Black American experience and explore stories of the African Diaspora.
The inclusion and interpretation of this mission is up to the playwright.
***
Pronoia Theater seeks new works related to the USA public domain
“Public Domain” covers a wide swath of material (items correct as of America in 2026):
Anything first published in USA in 1930 or earlier
Anything published between 1931-1977 which did not have its copyright renewed
Most documents created by the United States Government
Recipes, game rules, etc. (Things which are ruled to not have enough authorship to be protectable)
Property whose copyright was relinquished by its owners.
For the purposes of this festival anything created under the Creative Commons license with proper attribution will also be considered.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BLANCHE MARVIN ***
When I was formally offered the job of Artistic Director at the Royal Court I immediately went to seek advice from Blanche Marvin.
I know I’m not the only artistic director to regularly seek her counsel and, over three hours in her glorious flat, filled with memorabilia from her incredible theatrical life and adventures, among Emmy statues, theatre posters, plays and art, she sparkled as she shared her insight, forthright views and brilliant opinions. She was particularly pleased as she had predicted I would take over the Royal Court ten years previously - and I had been pretty dismissive. I thought she would have forgotten this, she absolutely had not. Soon after our conversation, an email arrived that summarised her advice across several pages of analysis of the state of new writing in the UK and beyond - including what I should do and how I should use my experience and rip it all up. Blanche, who was in her late 90s at this point, wrote an assessment of the state of play across London theatre and what our ambitions for it should now be that was so fresh and radical it felt like it was written by a direct contemporary. I was not surprised, despite her advanced age she always grasped new trends and ideas immediately - using her experience of what had been to see what could come next. She was the best co-conspirator.
More...
https://royalcourttheatre.com/stories/a-message-from-david-byrne-blanche-marvin/
***
Blanche Marvin, an American expatriate whom The New York Times once called London’s “best-loved theater critic,” was not just a commentator on great dramas, but someone who also claimed to be an inspiration for one of the most famous of them.
She said her friend Tennessee Williams had named Blanche DuBois, the faded-belle protagonist of his 1947 classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” after her.
Moreover, she insisted that Mr. Williams had adapted a consoling remark that Ms. Marvin had offhandedly made to him into Blanche’s indelible final line: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Whether her assertions were truth or self-mythologizing, Ms. Marvin went on to a redoubtable career as a critic — starting in her 60s and publishing in a newsletter and then mostly on her website — after working as an actress, playwright, impresario and agent. She died on Jan. 13 at her home in London, four days before her 101st birthday, her daughter, Niki Marvin, said.
Just 4-foot-11, Ms. Marvin was a sizable and ubiquitous presence in British theaters in her beads, hats and scarves. She was known to have attended 21 performances in a single day at the Edinburgh International Festival. The British Theater Guide called her “bionic Blanche.”
Image
More...
https://archive.ph/Dl1rf
***
Tennessee Williams was born 100 years ago this week, in Columbus, Mississippi: despised as effeminate by a hard-drinking father, overshadowed by his hysterical mother, devoted to his fragile sister Rose whose schizophrenia led to a prefrontal lobotomy. His beginnings, like his conflicted sexuality, fed into his plays: he is one of those of gay male writers of the early 20th century (like our own Rattigan) whose repressed but acute sensitivities let them depict women in particular with piercing compassion. His first play was produced in Memphis when he was 24, and he wrote later: “The laughter ... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other, for better and for worse. I know it’s the only thing that saved my life.”
His career declined, drugs and drink taking their toll, and after his death in 1983 his reputation took a further dive; now again it rises. So in the centenary year, it has been fascinating to meet almost nightly amid the cluster of London critics a direct connection to Williams’s youth. There are many who met or interviewed him in his old age, but Mrs Blanche Marvin is special: not just because chronologically it seems more than likely that he borrowed her name for his most famous heroine — Blanche Dubois — but because they were young together, at a critical turning point on 1940s Broadway.
Blanche is a remarkable creature: 86 years old, always elegant in beads and scarves and dashing hats, acute and friendly. She has imported English plays, started an off-Broadway theatre, written children’s drama, taught acting and writing on both sides of the Atlantic and now covers London as a critic — she is recognised as one who knows what will export. Age — and a good deal of illness — fails entirely to wither her, nor does she stick to the big first-night circuit. Her curiosity about new fringe spaces is insatiable. I will never forget seeing her, only weeks out of hospital after a foot operation, trekking alone in her dashing hat down some grim muggers’ alley off Waterloo station to scout a one-man show under the latest set of railway arches. Last year she was appointed MBE for services to theatre.
Her stories are many, including a heavy pass from Marlon Brando (“I said ‘Marlon, I wouldn’t know what to do with you, you like boys as well as girls, I can’t deal with that.’ I told him to go work on his speech for the play he was in. He just said ‘I hate acting, but it’s better than working in a store from nine to five, and you meet lovely people’.”)
More...
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/he-went-with-men-who-beat-him-up-common-men-jqghgfrfc7p
***
Her home reflects this thrifty lifestyle. It consists of a kitchen, living room, office and dining room that doubles as a bedroom, with a daybed in the corner where she sleeps at night. She takes pride in the way her furniture adapts to the small space: the sofa becomes a guest bed; a small table hinges out to become a larger one; a wooden bench turns into another table. “Everything is convertible,” she says. “I’m very organised – in a small space, you have to be.”
Her living room is painted grey, and the office, dining room and a set of elegant velvet curtains are a mustard shade. “Things don’t have to match,” Marvin says, “but they do have to harmonise. If they don’t, keep working at it until they do!”
Nothing looks as if it was acquired later than 1950. The kitchen table is an old desk painted white, fitted with a green lacquer top. The room is painted gun-metal grey, not for style points but for practicality: “White in a kitchen gets too dirty.” Her woven glass curtains, at 80 years old, are only slightly younger than Marvin is. Her front room is filled with objects, collections and personal pieces, each with a story. She bought a set of green ceramics, on display in the kitchen, on her honeymoon in St Tropez. “It was just a fishing village where artisans lived and worked,” she says.
The most striking feature is a narrow, cork-walled hallway filled with theatre bills, programmes, photographs and pictures spanning her nine decades. A pencil drawing turns out to be a portrait of Marvin by Marcel Marceau, which he did just after the second world war, before he became famous. These objects are not just decoration, but memories: “I’m never lonely in this house, because I have my life with me.”
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/24/blanche-marvin-theatre-critic-flat-recycling-reuse-nonagenerian
***
She met Williams through Margo Jones, the director of The Glass Menagerie, who was living with Ms Marvin and her late husband. Rehearsals of Menagerie had been going badly and Jones thought Ms Marvin would provide a distraction.
"Everyone was terrified, and Tennessee was very nervous; he thought he was going to be ruined and Margo wanted to distract him," Ms Marvin said. The rehearsals had not been going well. Two of the stars had alcohol problems and struggled to remember their lines.
"So we began to talk and there was a real affinity between us. The two of us ended up crying on each other's shoulders. We got very close."
Ms Marvin said much of what drove Williams was his feeling of losing connection to the South.
"He was always distressed at losing his roots in the South. He talked about living in hotel rooms all the time and was unhappy," she said. "He said he was always living with strangers. I said, 'I've known only kindness from strangers, and so can you.' Look how brilliant he was in using it."
The Glass Menagerie became a huge hit and made Williams's name; and Streetcar won the Pulitzer Prize. Ms Marvin met the playwright only infrequently afterwards.
More...
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/critic-claims-i-was-the-inspiration-for-blanche-dubois-9630885.html
***
"I cashed in my old age annuity, I thought what the hell, let the government take care of me," she says, laughing. "Listen, if you don't put your money where your heart is, forget it."
The award has become so prestigious that it has helped winners gain mainstream production space and has spawned further prizes, most recently a rent-subsidy award to help cash-strapped smaller venues. It is named after Marvin's late husband, the American producer Mark Marvin.
Born Blanche Zohar in New York, she was an actress and dancer confined mostly to Asian handmaiden roles because of her exotic looks. A photo among the theater posters in her apartment shows a sultry jet-haired beauty with cheekbones so sharp they could fillet a sole.
She played in such Hollywood clinkers as "Casbah" (1948) and "The Girl from Persia" and on Broadway in "Lute Song," (1946) she understudied the star, Mary Martin, became friendly with Yul Brynner (who was playing his first role) and had to dance around Mrs. Ronald Reagan, then Nancy Davis. "She was a stick, she couldn't move and she couldn't act so they kept her still."
She befriended a shy young Tennessee Williams, claims that Blanche Dubois was named after her, was courted by Marlon Brando, painted scarves made from World War II parachute silk with Zero Mostel, started a successful children's theater in New York and taught playwriting at the University of Iowa. In London she became a producer, acting teacher and agent, getting Joan Littlewood in 1973 to put on "Sweeney Todd," her client Christopher Bond's play, and then informing Stephen Sondheim that he should make a musical of it.
It's been a very full life. "One thing about my age," she says, "I can tell you every scene of every show I've seen." Brook says her ideals are fed by enormous experience: "I don't think anyone has seen as much as she has," he says. "Her criticism as such is the most reliable I know."
More...
https://archive.ph/kw7Wp
***
Blanche Marvin on Tennessee Williams part 1
Blanche Marvin recalls her youthful days as an actress in New York when she met the young Tennessee Williams, then premiering The Glass Menagerie (1944/5) on Broadway. Marvin, the wife of producer Mark Marvin, believes - with some justification - that Williams then went on to name the heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, after her - while her maiden name, Zohar ("splendour") may additionally have inspired the character-name Stella in that play.
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