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NYCPlaywrights January 11, 2025
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NYCPlaywrights
Jan 11, 2025, 5:04:10 PMJan 11
to NYCPlaywrights
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
The Retreat: A Theatrical Exploration of Contemporary Anxieties
Join us in celebration of our National Culture Day with The Retreat, a tour-de-force one-woman show based on a work by legendary Marin Sorescu, one of Romania’s most revered literary voices, starring inimitable Simona Măicănescu in a spellbinding performance, with live musical interludes by multi-instrumentalist and multimedia artist Mircea Florian. A show produced and presented by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York in partnership with The Embassy of Romania to the United States and the General Consulate of Romania in Vancouver.
The Retreat, inspired by Viziunea vizuinii (The Vision of the Burrow) and created especially for this North American tour - with stops in New York, Washington, D.C. and Vancouver, British Columbia - weaves a poignant and darkly comic metaphor for the absurdity of our modern time. The show masterfully captures the complexities of Sorescu’s vision, immersing the audience in a dazzling display of artistry, where Romania’s rich cultural heritage meets the pulse of contemporary global theater.
Măicănescu channels Sorescu’s biting wit and profound humanity, breathing life into a story that is both universal and deeply personal. With a stunning blend of drama, humor, and piercing insight, she and Florian take us on a journey that reflects the perilous nonsensicalities of our times while offering glimpses of hope, resilience, and the power of the human spirit.
Friday, January 17 · 7 - 9pm EST
Romanian Cultural Institute
200 East 38th Street New York, NY 10016
*** RESISTING FASCISM ***
A reminder that the three finalists will be announced on Sunday January 19 for the RESISTING FASCISM project and all the finalists and excerpts from the semi-finalist plays will be posted on NYCPlaywrights, one per day, beginning Monday January 20.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Go Try Play Write January 2025
The prompt for January 2025 is:
A chop stick prompt. Write a 10-page maximum scene about someone learning how to use chop sticks to eat. The scene should end with either success or failure. Have fun with this one.
***
The New Works Festival is designed to bring living playwrights and their words to the center of conversation. All plays are presented as Staged Readings, as to keep the words first.
Seeking all lengths - the festival will feature 3 full length and 6-9 one acts OR 10-minute plays over the weekend.
***
The Black Men Talk Play Festival, the first of its kind, aims to honor the contributions of Black male playwrights - initiated by a Chicago-based Black playwright. The event will host three performances in Chicago in August 2025.
The 10-minute play festival will be a celebration of the voices, stories, and perspectives of Black male playwrights and showcase the works of new and emerging Black male playwrights telling authentic stories of the Black experience.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** #MOI AUSSI ***
In 2021, the hashtag #MeTooThéâtre began trending on social media in France. Thousands of stories about sexual abuse and harassment in the country’s theaters and drama schools poured in. Calls for change followed, starting with an open letter signed by 1,450 public figures in the newspaper Libération.
The movement quickly coalesced into a collective that took the hashtag as its name and has remained a prominent presence over the past three years. It published an eponymous book of essays in 2022, and has pushed theater institutions to stop hiring aggressors and better protect victims, holding demonstrations in front of playhouses including the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris.
Still, many in the French theater world know #MeTooThéâtre best through its Instagram presence: terse statements in black letters over a yellow background, which read like a running commentary on the abuse cases that have come to light.
Now, the collective’s five most active members are putting faces to the hashtag. This season, they have crafted their first stage production, “Les Histrioniques” (“The Histrionic Ones”), which is playing at the Théâtre de Belleville in Paris through Jan. 28. In it, the group pulls no punches, while also lifting the veil in witty, revelatory fashion on other aspects of its activism — starting with the personal cost.
MORE...
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Les Histrioniques
There are 6 of them and beyond their singularities, they are inextricably linked by their commitment to the #MeTooThéâtre collective and by the vitality of their revolt. They have a sense of humor to spare, the desire to fight impunity and rape culture and take us at high speed into the turbulent life that commitment implies. Exchanges on messenger, reconstruction of key scenes, they weave a fiction on different levels of reality so that the theatricality deployed lays bare an unacceptable system of domination. Using the tools of theater and the power of acting, they turn things upside down.
Trigger warning: mentions of sexist and sexual violence
Translated from the French via Google Translate
***
When Vanessa Springora’s memoir, “Consent,” was published in 2020, it was the start of an overdue reckoning with child sexual abuse in France. Now the book has made its way to the stage, in a Paris production by Sébastien Davis that captures its raw impact yet lacks, at times, the clarity of purpose that Springora found in her writing.
It’s not for lack of star power. For this monologue, Davis has cast Ludivine Sagnier, a movie actress who is a household name in France. She has rarely appeared in theater productions: Her last stage role was a decade ago, in Christophe Honoré’s “Nouveau Roman.”
On the smaller second stage of the Espace Cardin, Sagnier looks increasingly assured as “Consent” unfolds. The production tracks the book closely, with some cuts. Springora’s troubled family background sets the scene for her encounter, at 13, with Gabriel Matzneff, then a famous author in his 50s who advocated for pedophilia in broad daylight and wrote extensively about his sexual encounters with teens. For two years, in the mid-1980s, he trapped Springora in a controlling sexual relationship, to which plenty of adults — and even the French police — turned a blind eye.
More...
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Edouard Baer, a French actor best known for playing Asterix on screen, has become the latest star to feel the impact of sexual assault allegations as his live show in Paris was cancelled.
Baer, who played the fictitious Gaul in the 2012 blockbuster Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia alongside Gérard Depardieu, was accused by six women of harassment and sexual assault in a joint article by online news site Mediapart and the feminist website Cheek last week.
Multiple accusations against Depardieu, which the 75-year-old actor denies, have contributed to a fresh wave of #MeToo accusations in France in recent months.
Baer, who also starred as artist Salvador Dali in last year’s film Daaaaaali!, was due to play about 15 dates of a live show at the Antoine theatre in Paris in June. The theatre announced the cancellation on Thursday, but did not respond to requests for an explanation.
More...
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Singer Chloe Briot was in the middle of a love scene on stage at the Opera Comique in Paris when she said her co-star sexually assaulted her. The French baritone had done something similar in rehearsals, Briot claimed, and she had warned him to stop. Rather than cause a scene "and throw the whole production into chaos", Briot at first said nothing. But later when she did speak out, her co-star -- who denies the claims -- launched a slander case against her. Briot, 32, is one of the very rare French singers to have dared complain of sexual assault in a world where her peers say complaining about harassment can be "suicidal for your career".
More...
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The calamitous moments inside the New York hotel that cost Dominique Strauss-Kahn his career, his dignity and possibly even his wife have now been turned into theater.
Some say bad theater.
It’s been over 18 months since the former International Monetary Fund chief faced sexual assault charges brought by New York hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo. Those charges have since been dropped. Now a play in Paris titled “Suite 2806” – the number of Strauss-Kahn’s Sofitel hotel room – asks, “What might have happened?”
But a year and a half is a long time. What was once a salacious story that provoked fascination on both sides of the Atlantic with its mix of sex, money and power has somehow ended up as a drama that’s dull as dishwater.
The play – panned by critics – has been struggling to fill seats since its premiere last month despite substantial press coverage. That begs the question: Is the French public finally losing its appetite for tabloid tales about the man known here as DSK?
More...
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#METOOTHÉÂTRE 2022
"United by our anger and the structural injustice of our professional environment, we decided to speak out to fight against the sexual and sexist violence that we suffer systemically and launched #MeTooThéâtre on the networks. A wave of testimonies then poured in, attesting to a concrete reality: we are not alone. We are not isolated cases. We are legion to suffer and want to denounce the constant sexualization of our bodies, the overwhelming dominance of the presence of men in charge and in possession of the means of production, the maintenance of this chimera that is the gray zone and which, in our environment probably more than elsewhere, is raging.
A few witches, gathered on a sofa one autumn evening, tremblingly launching the first #, with the faith of their unbearable revolt, that is it, the beginning of the revolution. »
The founding texts of #MeTooThéâtre are gathered today in this book with the clear aim of arming consciences. With sisterhood as a common thread, this book also aims to be a manifesto so that no one can say "we didn't know".
#MeTooThéâtre on Instagram
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