NYCPlaywrights July 5, 2025

[NYCPlaywrights]

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

AMERICAN IDLE
Times Square Arts and artist Maia Chao present ‘American Idle’ - a public performance that blurs the line between subject and spectator.

Times Square Arts Public Artist-in-Residence Maia Chao, choreographed by Lena Engelstein, and devised in collaboration with dancers Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Marin Day, Benjamin Hard, and Ampersand Paris.

The hour-long performances will take place on Wednesday, July 9 at 3pm, 6pm, and 8pm on Duffy Square, Broadway & 46th St

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/maia-chao-american-idle-tickets-1429013169859?aff=ebdssbdestsearch


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

Playwrights of all ages, new or experienced, we invite you to capture something unique in Quincy (Massachusetts)'s 400 year history (from 1625 to today). 
- selected plays may be performed on the open air stage at the Ruth Gordon Amphitheater
- plays can tackle “challenging themes” with sensitivity, but please keep topics and language unoffensive for all audiences.
- plays can be funny, heartfelt, musical or anything you can dream up (minus any elaborate sets or expensive costumes)

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Radcliffe Institute Fellowship 2025
Applicants may apply as individuals or in groups of two people working on the same project. We seek diversity across discipline, career stage, race and ethnicity, country of origin, gender and sexual orientation, and ideological perspective. Although our fellows come from many different backgrounds, they are united by their demonstrated excellence, collegiality, and creativity.

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Molecule accepts submissions of poetry, prose (fiction & non-fiction) plays, reviews and interviews in 50 words or less (including titles and interview questions). Visual artwork of tiny things like tea bags and toothpicks, or tiny paintings, also wanted: no skyscrapers please.

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


*** RICHARD GREENBERG ***

Denis O'Hare: Hard to believe the genius that was Richard Greenberg is no more. I owe him more than I could possibly say. He gave me the greatest gift ever--a beautiful character to inhabit in a beautiful play. He also gave me 2 of my best friends--Lisa Peterson and Linda Emond. We all met and worked on Rich's one act-The Author's Voice at Remains Theatre in 1987 in a festival of one acts called "Sneaky Feelings" I have a sneaky feeling of grief mixed with gratitude for this man. RIP Rich.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DLtCB80NHdM/

***

Baseball? That's right. In ''Take Me Out,'' which opened last night on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater after a sold-out run at the Joseph Papp Public Theater last fall, Mr. Greenberg brings his gymnastic verbal skills to bear on the subject of the all-American pastime. And when Mr. O'Hare takes center stage as the conduit of Mr. Greenberg's feelings about the sport, this comic drama emanates a dewy, delirious passion not unlike that in the opera being performed a few blocks away, Puccini's ''Bohème.''

There is much more to ''Take Me Out'' than Mr. O'Hare, although that may not be your impression when you leave the theater. The play, which has been advantageously shaved and streamlined from three acts to two for its Broadway incarnation, has an involved and ambitious central plot in which Mr. O'Hare's Mason figures only as an onlooker.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/28/movies/theater-review-love-affair-with-baseball-and-a-lot-of-big-ideas.html

***

As of today, there is exactly one play running on Broadway -- ''Take Me Out,'' by Richard Greenberg -- and 19 musicals, a count that is a rout by pretty much anyone's definition.

That ratio, of course, is not completely unheard of -- musicals are the industry's moneymakers and have long dominated Broadway. Rarely, though, has the balance been so completely off-kilter.

But just as in those old war movies, where the troops are hunkered down and hopelessly outnumbered (not to mention out-sung and out-danced), a cavalry of new plays has appeared on the horizon. Between now and Christmas, no fewer than seven new plays are scheduled to open, with several others possible.

And one of those leading the charge is by the man also holding down the fort: Mr. Greenberg, whose newest play, a melancholy comedy called ''The Violet Hour,'' directed by Evan Yionoulis, is to open on Nov. 6 at the newly renovated Biltmore Theater on West 47th Street. Depending on how long ''Take Me Out'' lasts -- it is currently doing better-than-break-even business at the Walter Kerr Theater -- Mr. Greenberg has the opportunity to become the first American writer to have two new plays running simultaneously on Broadway since Neil Simon did it in 1992 with ''Jake's Women'' and ''Lost in Yonkers.'' (The British playwright David Hare did it in 1999 with ''Amy's View'' and his one-man show, ''Via Dolorosa.'')

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/theater/the-new-season-theater-broadway-has-a-new-heavy-hitter.html

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Richard Greenberg, one of the most produced playwrights of his generation, tries his hand at narrative nonfiction in an uneven new collection of anecdotes and essays, Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions. Not a tell-all or a primer on life in the theatre, nor a scandalous confession of addiction or abuse, the book instead depicts Greenberg’s life as a self-identified urban recluse. “I used to have a wildly exaggerated reputation for being a hermit,” he writes. “I still have the reputation, but it’s no longer so exaggerated.”

The book eschews chronology, and sometimes context, so when diving in it helps to already know the broad outlines of the 58-year-old playwright’s life: his education at Princeton and Yale; his coterie of friends and collaborators, most of whom get pseudonyms here; his health problems, including bronchitis, insomnia, and Hodgkin’s; his greatest hits, including Eastern Standard, Take Me Out, Three Days of Rain, and The Assembled Parties, and his flops, like A Naked Girl on the Appian Way.

More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/10/20/richard-greenberg-alone-with-his-thoughts/

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Greenberg, like many of his characters, grew up in the shadow and thrall of New York City, in East Meadow, Long Island, the younger son of a homemaker, Shirley, and a movie-theater executive, Leon, alongside his older brother, Edward, an investment banker. The playwright got an undergraduate degree in English at Princeton, then headed to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in English literature but dropped out and transferred to Yale’s playwriting program after submitting a script he wrote while cutting class. As a younger man, though, Greenberg harbored a fantasy of being an architect because, as he recalls, “The people on Long Island used to go on weekends to model houses and dream about a better space.”

In “Eastern Standard” — which pits four striving urbanites against one another’s romantic advances, career complacency, gentrification, a naïve waitress, a grifting homeless woman and the shame and tragedy of AIDS-era Manhattan — it’s perhaps no coincidence that the central action revolves around the Hamptons home of a suicidal architect named Stephen Wheeler. By act two, he’s quit his job at a prestigious Manhattan firm and, drunk on wine during a dinner party with his friends, goes on a shouty tirade that encapsulates Greenberg’s skill at leavening seriousness with absurdity, crafting plays that are neither comedies nor dramas but both: “I’m free. No more — building ziggurats on Third Avenue! No more — acts of — edificary warfare against Manhattan!” Stephen begins. “And we’ll live like the disgusting rich — and we’ll drink till we puke — and have plastic surgery.” Finally, despite his friends’ protestations, Stephen finishes by both debasing and celebrating himself: “I am going to sound like such a … such a … the ultimate bleeding-heart liberal … How do you like that — I’m 30 and I’ve finally acquired politics!”

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/t-magazine/richard-greenberg-playwright.html

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Literary, but verging on cinematic, moments like these must be what inspired the playwright Richard Greenberg to adapt the story for the stage. Greenberg clearly thought that it would be possible to make “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (at the Cort, under the direction of Sean Mathias) theatrical, given that Holly herself is so theatrical. Besides, isn’t her m.o. rather like that of a conventional play—in that she moves life’s action along by telling character-driven stories? There isn’t a chink in Greenberg’s professional script, but it never really attempts to capture, let alone analyze, what makes Capote’s Holly feel so alive, or why she makes everyone who loves her feel more alive, too. Part of her appeal lies in the fact that she’s repelled by self-pity—which is why she has turned her back on her ramshackle past. To her mind and heart, the point is to say yes to the unexpected in the now.

“I suppose you think I’m very brazen. Or très fou,” Holly (Emilia Clarke) says to the narrator (Cory Michael Smith), during their first real conversation. She has climbed up the fire escape to the young writer’s room to escape a man she has brought home; he’s drunk, and he bites. The narrator isn’t alarmed by Holly’s sudden appearance. He’s charmed, and why not? Holly is guileless. Looking around his small apartment, she says, “How can you bear it? It’s a chamber of horrors!” But she’ll help him get ahead with his work, she promises, and his fortunes will change. Does he know Benny Shacklett? He’s written an awful lot of radio stuff. Maybe she can make some sort of connection? Holly, of course, has stories of her own. She has a younger brother, Fred; he’s in the Army now, and crazy about peanut butter. Her new friend looks like him. May she call him Fred?

More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/01/single-white-female

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The playwright grew up on Pontiac Road (“not to be confused with Pontiac Place,” he laughs), and spent much of his childhood at the East Meadow Library. “I would spend entire weekends there, sometimes hours and hours,” he says of the place, which is touched on in “The Babylon Line”. “It was also the nicest building, very modernist after they redid it. There wasn’t that much notable architecture, and that looked cool to me. I used to love to sit there and gather too many books and read them. I’m still sad that there are no more card catalogues!”

Undoubtedly, the vast number of books he read informed his plays; in “The Babylon Line,” the class’ students consist of a trio of housewives more set on enjoying a social gathering than on the subject matter, two men who are intriguingly vague, and a late entry who is outside the norm of the average Long Island housewife.

“When I was growing up, adult-ed was a very big part of the lives of my parents and aunt and uncle who lived two doors away, and the neighbors,” he remembers. “It was an enormous social movement, or at least an aspect of their social life that was crucial.” Greenberg says that as a child he used to listen to the women surrounding his world, and it helped him construct the play’s themes of feminism and self-discovery.

“There was a lot of neighborliness [in the ‘60s],” he says. “People were friends with their neighbors, which at a certain point struck me as peculiar. I thought, ‘So you’re all friends, just because you happen to live near each other? That’s strange.’ But it was kind of pleasant. Back then, people used to have those screens that they’d pull up on a bench and they’d take movies of their vacations, and people would gather in the driveway and watch other people’s vacations. It was pleasant. There was a lot of talk, and I was the kid who tagged along, or also sat at the table and just soaked it all up. Your secrets were not safe with me,” he laughs, “because years from then they were going to be at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater. They had no idea!”

More...
https://www.liherald.com/stories/tony-award-winning-playwright-has-his-sights-on-long-island,86777