NYCPlaywrights September 6, 2025
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NYCPlaywrights
Sep 6, 2025, 5:09:58 PM (6 days ago) Sep 6
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Unlimited Stages is proud to present our brand new Unlimited Cold Read Series—a gathering where selected plays and scenes are brought to life by actors in a relaxed and creative environment.
This is an open and supportive space for artists to connect, explore, and hear new work out loud.
What to Expect:
Casual, unrehearsed readings of selected plays
Space for spontaneous collaboration and conversation
A community-driven approach to new storytelling
September 22 - 7PM
520 8th Avenue 3rd Floor New York, NY 10018
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/unlimited-cold-read-series-septemberedition-tickets-1664611179849?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Premiere Stages will accept submissions of unproduced plays written by playwrights affiliated with the greater metropolitan area. All plays submitted to the festival are evaluated by a panel of professional theatre producers, directors, dramaturgs, playwrights, and publishers. Four finalists are subsequently selected for public Equity readings in Spring of 2026.
Following the Spring readings, one play is selected for an Equity production in the Premiere Stages 2027 season and receives an award of $4000. Another finalist receives a 29-hour staged reading and $1500. The other finalists will each be awarded $1000.
***
Pegasus PlayLab is a new play festival hosted every summer at the University of Central Florida. This festival is dedicated to developing new works by MFA Playwriting candidates or emerging playwrights. We are seeking three full-length plays, including Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) pieces, which we will rehearse for two weeks in collaboration with the playwright and subsequently present as workshop productions.
***
CAPE COD THEATER PROJECT 2026
Playwrights may send one play per season for consideration. The proposed play must still be in development and cannot have received a professional production, or a production that has been reviewed, prior to June 30, 2025.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THE MOTHERF**CKER WITH THE PROPHESY ***
Oedipus, the West End hit starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, will begin its 14-week engagement at Broadway‘s Studio 54 on Thursday, October 30, with an opening night set for Thursday, November 13, producers announced today.
The previously announced staging will star Strong reprising his West End performance as Oedipus, with Manville making her Broadway debut reprising her Olivier Award-winning performance as Jocasta.
Created and adapted by Robert Icke, the revival “transforms Sophocles’ epic tragedy into an essential, explosive, sensual human thriller catapulting the secrets of the past into a high-stakes present,” per the synopsis. “It’s election night. The polls predict a landslide victory. Everything is about to change.”
More...
https://deadline.com/2025/06/oedipus-broadway-mark-strong-opening-date-1236441045/
***
It begins with a birth certificate. A politician standing for election promises to prove his origins to the nation after his opponent has questioned them (a dig at Donald Trump in relation to Barack Obama’s heritage?). Even so, he questions the nativist idea that birth is crucial to belonging.
Of course, the ancient Greek drama on which Robert Icke’s play is based is all about origins and the tragedy of Oedipus’s cursed birth. Icke has modernised Sophocles’ story but kept the ancient names. The statesman, Oedipus, is intent on truth-telling and full disclosure but it is just this that leads to his downfall.
Icke, who directs too, has form with modernising Greek drama from his 2015 adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. This play has already been performed in Dutch in 2018 and at the Edinburgh international festival in 2019. However far-fetched (even preposterous) this ancient story seems, and however creaky Freud’s theory of unconscious desires, its transformation into a political thriller-cum-family tragedy is riveting from beginning to end.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/oct/16/oedipus-review-lesley-manville-and-mark-strong-electrify-ancient-saga-turned-political-thriller
***
Caedit nos pestis: “The plague falls upon us.” The dire opening of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” should have had a chilling effect when L.A. Opera presented the work at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on June 6th. The chorus sings of the Plague of Thebes over five darkly screaming chords in the key of B-flat minor, with an obdurate bass line grating against the upper harmonies. Flutes and trumpets slide from the first chord to the second in an anguished whoop. L.A. Opera’s orchestra and chorus executed a series of impeccable attacks, each sonority landing with a splendid thud. This is the sound of an inescapable catastrophe, one that leaves its human victims in a state of fear and fury. Stravinsky wrote “Oedipus” in the nineteen-twenties, in the wake of the twin disasters of the First World War and the flu pandemic of 1918. It sounds no less fearsome a century on.
My immediate reaction, though, was one of joy—and I felt a similar stir of pleasure in the crowd around me. Few of us could have heard unamplified music in more than a year. No big-budget American opera house had given a full-scale indoor performance since March of 2020. We had missed a particular kind of loudness, one that is the direct sum of human work, without technological enhancements. To hear such big sound after long silence brought me back to my first encounters with full orchestras in childhood: the National Symphony playing Mahler, the New York Philharmonic playing Richard Strauss.
More...
https://archive.ph/UtutI
***
Only the insensate among us can dwell on the Book of Job without feeling horror at the suffering this man endured as the result of a divine wager. And so, too, one does not finish Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex altogether free from the impression that all our talk of free will here on earth is not really just one big cosmic farce. The first of Sophocles’ three “Theban” plays, and likely the most famous tragedy ever written, Oedipus Rex forces us to consider the nature of human agency and seems, at least on the surface, to indicate something rather unpleasant: an inscrutable fate or destiny—not free will or reason—governs man.
But that’s not quite right.
For, while Oedipus Rex does raise the above problems, it does not, ultimately, answer them in the way that’s popularly understood, i.e. Oedipus, cursed by the gods, was fated to kill his father and marry (and sire children with) his mother. An alternative reading, and here I recommend the interpretation set out by political theorist Peter J. Ahrensdorf, argues it was Oedipus himself who, through the abdication of his famed rationality and subsequent turn to soothsayers and oracles, precipitated a downfall that could have otherwise been avoided.
More...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbahr1/2017/08/31/its-elementary-my-dear-oedipus-sophocles-oedipus-rex/
***
THE moment for ''Oedipus Rex'' has come round again. It popped up on Broadway in the late 1940's, when I, an eager student, saw the most acclaimed actor on the English-speaking stage, Laurence Olivier, portray the hapless young man who solves the riddle of the Sphinx, is rewarded with a kingdom and a queen, attempts to rid his land of a plague and discovers the truth.
It is one of the greatest plays ever written, certainly on the short list and close to first prize. What it says about our great American lack of culture -- and just plain lack of common sense -- that it has taken a large part of my lifetime for a major production to come to New York, I, as an American theater person, don't even want to know.
Now, the National Theater of Greece is bringing ''Oedipus Rex'' to City Center, beginning Wednesday for -- my gosh -- six whole performances, through next Sunday.
As it happens, I am privileged to be directing the play myself in another production, having been nudged into that position by -- once again -- one of the most acclaimed actors in the English-speaking world, Al Pacino. I share with him longevity at the Actors' Studio, where we developed our version over six months. (We expect to surface this season in New York in a commercial production under the auspices of Robert Fox when we find the right performance space.) There were a number of actors who worked with us early on because we were double and triple cast, so that people could grow with the play and still do their mainstream gigs. But only one of these actors had played in ''Oedipus'' before, and that was a college production. Am I going to name all the leading actors who came together because of this great play and to be with one another? No. These thoughts are about ''Oedipus Rex,'' the National Theater of Greece and directing, not celebrity.
More...
https://archive.ph/Ggbds
***
Though it be dangerous to raise too great an expectation, especially in works of this Nature, where we are to please an insatiable Audience, yet 'tis reasonable to prepossess them in favour of an Author, and there-fore both the Prologue and Epilogue inform'd you, that Oedipus was the most celebrated piece of all Antiquity. That Sophocles, not only the greateft Wit, but one of the greatest Men in Athens, made it for the Stage at the Publick Cost, and that it had the reputation of being his Masterpiece, not only amongst the Seven of his which are still remaining, but of the greater Number which are perished. Aristotle has more than once admir'd it in his Book of Poetry, Horace has mention'd it : Lucullus, Julius Caesar, and other noble Romans, have written on the fame Subject, though their Poems are wholly lost, but Seneca's is still prefer'd.
In our own Age, Corneille has attempted it, and it appears by his Preface, with great success : But a judicious Reader will easily observe, how much the Copy is inferiour to the Original. He tells you himself that he owes a great part of his success to the happy Episode of Theseus and Dirce; which is the same thing, as if we should acknowledge, that we were indebted for our good fortune, to the underplot of Adrastus, Eurydice, and Creon. The truth is, he miserably failed in the Characier of his Hero: if he desired that Oedipus should be pitied, he shoud have made him a better man...
From OEDIPUS: A TRAGEDY. As it is ACTED at His Royal Highness THE DUKE's Theatre 1679
More...
https://archive.org/details/oedipustragedyas00dryd/page/n5/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater
***
Reversal of the Situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity. Thus in the Oedipus, the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from his alarms about his mother, but by revealing who he is, he produces the opposite effect. Again in the Lynceus, Lynceus is being led away to his death, and Danaus goes with him, meaning, to slay him; but the outcome of the preceding incidents is that Danaus is killed and Lynceus saved. Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation, as in the Oedipus.
Aristotle - Poetics
More...
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1974/pg1974-images.html
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Unlimited Stages is proud to present our brand new Unlimited Cold Read Series—a gathering where selected plays and scenes are brought to life by actors in a relaxed and creative environment.
This is an open and supportive space for artists to connect, explore, and hear new work out loud.
What to Expect:
Casual, unrehearsed readings of selected plays
Space for spontaneous collaboration and conversation
A community-driven approach to new storytelling
September 22 - 7PM
520 8th Avenue 3rd Floor New York, NY 10018
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/unlimited-cold-read-series-septemberedition-tickets-1664611179849?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Premiere Stages will accept submissions of unproduced plays written by playwrights affiliated with the greater metropolitan area. All plays submitted to the festival are evaluated by a panel of professional theatre producers, directors, dramaturgs, playwrights, and publishers. Four finalists are subsequently selected for public Equity readings in Spring of 2026.
Following the Spring readings, one play is selected for an Equity production in the Premiere Stages 2027 season and receives an award of $4000. Another finalist receives a 29-hour staged reading and $1500. The other finalists will each be awarded $1000.
***
Pegasus PlayLab is a new play festival hosted every summer at the University of Central Florida. This festival is dedicated to developing new works by MFA Playwriting candidates or emerging playwrights. We are seeking three full-length plays, including Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) pieces, which we will rehearse for two weeks in collaboration with the playwright and subsequently present as workshop productions.
***
CAPE COD THEATER PROJECT 2026
Playwrights may send one play per season for consideration. The proposed play must still be in development and cannot have received a professional production, or a production that has been reviewed, prior to June 30, 2025.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THE MOTHERF**CKER WITH THE PROPHESY ***
Oedipus, the West End hit starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, will begin its 14-week engagement at Broadway‘s Studio 54 on Thursday, October 30, with an opening night set for Thursday, November 13, producers announced today.
The previously announced staging will star Strong reprising his West End performance as Oedipus, with Manville making her Broadway debut reprising her Olivier Award-winning performance as Jocasta.
Created and adapted by Robert Icke, the revival “transforms Sophocles’ epic tragedy into an essential, explosive, sensual human thriller catapulting the secrets of the past into a high-stakes present,” per the synopsis. “It’s election night. The polls predict a landslide victory. Everything is about to change.”
More...
https://deadline.com/2025/06/oedipus-broadway-mark-strong-opening-date-1236441045/
***
It begins with a birth certificate. A politician standing for election promises to prove his origins to the nation after his opponent has questioned them (a dig at Donald Trump in relation to Barack Obama’s heritage?). Even so, he questions the nativist idea that birth is crucial to belonging.
Of course, the ancient Greek drama on which Robert Icke’s play is based is all about origins and the tragedy of Oedipus’s cursed birth. Icke has modernised Sophocles’ story but kept the ancient names. The statesman, Oedipus, is intent on truth-telling and full disclosure but it is just this that leads to his downfall.
Icke, who directs too, has form with modernising Greek drama from his 2015 adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. This play has already been performed in Dutch in 2018 and at the Edinburgh international festival in 2019. However far-fetched (even preposterous) this ancient story seems, and however creaky Freud’s theory of unconscious desires, its transformation into a political thriller-cum-family tragedy is riveting from beginning to end.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/oct/16/oedipus-review-lesley-manville-and-mark-strong-electrify-ancient-saga-turned-political-thriller
***
Caedit nos pestis: “The plague falls upon us.” The dire opening of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” should have had a chilling effect when L.A. Opera presented the work at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on June 6th. The chorus sings of the Plague of Thebes over five darkly screaming chords in the key of B-flat minor, with an obdurate bass line grating against the upper harmonies. Flutes and trumpets slide from the first chord to the second in an anguished whoop. L.A. Opera’s orchestra and chorus executed a series of impeccable attacks, each sonority landing with a splendid thud. This is the sound of an inescapable catastrophe, one that leaves its human victims in a state of fear and fury. Stravinsky wrote “Oedipus” in the nineteen-twenties, in the wake of the twin disasters of the First World War and the flu pandemic of 1918. It sounds no less fearsome a century on.
My immediate reaction, though, was one of joy—and I felt a similar stir of pleasure in the crowd around me. Few of us could have heard unamplified music in more than a year. No big-budget American opera house had given a full-scale indoor performance since March of 2020. We had missed a particular kind of loudness, one that is the direct sum of human work, without technological enhancements. To hear such big sound after long silence brought me back to my first encounters with full orchestras in childhood: the National Symphony playing Mahler, the New York Philharmonic playing Richard Strauss.
More...
https://archive.ph/UtutI
***
Only the insensate among us can dwell on the Book of Job without feeling horror at the suffering this man endured as the result of a divine wager. And so, too, one does not finish Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex altogether free from the impression that all our talk of free will here on earth is not really just one big cosmic farce. The first of Sophocles’ three “Theban” plays, and likely the most famous tragedy ever written, Oedipus Rex forces us to consider the nature of human agency and seems, at least on the surface, to indicate something rather unpleasant: an inscrutable fate or destiny—not free will or reason—governs man.
But that’s not quite right.
For, while Oedipus Rex does raise the above problems, it does not, ultimately, answer them in the way that’s popularly understood, i.e. Oedipus, cursed by the gods, was fated to kill his father and marry (and sire children with) his mother. An alternative reading, and here I recommend the interpretation set out by political theorist Peter J. Ahrensdorf, argues it was Oedipus himself who, through the abdication of his famed rationality and subsequent turn to soothsayers and oracles, precipitated a downfall that could have otherwise been avoided.
More...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbahr1/2017/08/31/its-elementary-my-dear-oedipus-sophocles-oedipus-rex/
***
THE moment for ''Oedipus Rex'' has come round again. It popped up on Broadway in the late 1940's, when I, an eager student, saw the most acclaimed actor on the English-speaking stage, Laurence Olivier, portray the hapless young man who solves the riddle of the Sphinx, is rewarded with a kingdom and a queen, attempts to rid his land of a plague and discovers the truth.
It is one of the greatest plays ever written, certainly on the short list and close to first prize. What it says about our great American lack of culture -- and just plain lack of common sense -- that it has taken a large part of my lifetime for a major production to come to New York, I, as an American theater person, don't even want to know.
Now, the National Theater of Greece is bringing ''Oedipus Rex'' to City Center, beginning Wednesday for -- my gosh -- six whole performances, through next Sunday.
As it happens, I am privileged to be directing the play myself in another production, having been nudged into that position by -- once again -- one of the most acclaimed actors in the English-speaking world, Al Pacino. I share with him longevity at the Actors' Studio, where we developed our version over six months. (We expect to surface this season in New York in a commercial production under the auspices of Robert Fox when we find the right performance space.) There were a number of actors who worked with us early on because we were double and triple cast, so that people could grow with the play and still do their mainstream gigs. But only one of these actors had played in ''Oedipus'' before, and that was a college production. Am I going to name all the leading actors who came together because of this great play and to be with one another? No. These thoughts are about ''Oedipus Rex,'' the National Theater of Greece and directing, not celebrity.
More...
https://archive.ph/Ggbds
***
Though it be dangerous to raise too great an expectation, especially in works of this Nature, where we are to please an insatiable Audience, yet 'tis reasonable to prepossess them in favour of an Author, and there-fore both the Prologue and Epilogue inform'd you, that Oedipus was the most celebrated piece of all Antiquity. That Sophocles, not only the greateft Wit, but one of the greatest Men in Athens, made it for the Stage at the Publick Cost, and that it had the reputation of being his Masterpiece, not only amongst the Seven of his which are still remaining, but of the greater Number which are perished. Aristotle has more than once admir'd it in his Book of Poetry, Horace has mention'd it : Lucullus, Julius Caesar, and other noble Romans, have written on the fame Subject, though their Poems are wholly lost, but Seneca's is still prefer'd.
In our own Age, Corneille has attempted it, and it appears by his Preface, with great success : But a judicious Reader will easily observe, how much the Copy is inferiour to the Original. He tells you himself that he owes a great part of his success to the happy Episode of Theseus and Dirce; which is the same thing, as if we should acknowledge, that we were indebted for our good fortune, to the underplot of Adrastus, Eurydice, and Creon. The truth is, he miserably failed in the Characier of his Hero: if he desired that Oedipus should be pitied, he shoud have made him a better man...
From OEDIPUS: A TRAGEDY. As it is ACTED at His Royal Highness THE DUKE's Theatre 1679
More...
https://archive.org/details/oedipustragedyas00dryd/page/n5/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater
***
Reversal of the Situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity. Thus in the Oedipus, the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from his alarms about his mother, but by revealing who he is, he produces the opposite effect. Again in the Lynceus, Lynceus is being led away to his death, and Danaus goes with him, meaning, to slay him; but the outcome of the preceding incidents is that Danaus is killed and Lynceus saved. Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation, as in the Oedipus.
Aristotle - Poetics
More...
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1974/pg1974-images.html
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