NYCPlaywrights October 29, 2022
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NYCPlaywrights
Oct 29, 2022, 5:52:01 PM10/29/22
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST
Based on Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of An Anarchist.
Translated to Chinese and adapted by Huang Jisu
Translated to English by Zijun (Neil) Wang
Directed by Zijun (Neil) Wang
In an absurdist adaptation of Dario Fo's stirring Anarchist play, the actors experiment with the mixing nature of theater and reality both within the play and in the process of rehearsing this play. A clown that hates authority was chosen to be an authority by the authority. A group of police that scorns the maniac was turned into maniacs by the maniac. Are you living for yourself or a strong yet hidden force you can never specify?
November 3, 4, 5
Playwrights Horizons Theater School
Studio Theater
721 Broadway
3rd Floor
New York, NY
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/accidental-death-of-an-anarchist-tickets-443371775917?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
We are inviting submissions for January 2023 issue of 'Literature Today-An International Literary Journal'. The theme of our January 2023 issue is 'Love'. You can send us poems, short stories, memoirs and one minute plays on:
1. love at first sight
2. poem/story/one minute play in memory of a loved one
3. love as an aesthetic experience
4. love and teenagers
5. love and romance as predestined event
6. love relationships and role of gods
7. love and marriage
8. love as illusion
9. love in the age of internet
10. lovers as rebels
11. platonic love
12. love and immortality
13. disappointment/deceit in love
14. lovers as saints
15 any other theme related to love
***
The Old Lady Project is an initiative to encourage the development of plays and musicals that feature significant roles for women over 50. Plays will be submitted to a national panel of directors and producers and two staged readings will occur in Evanston per year. A directory of works will be featured on the Old Lady Project webpage to facilitate connections between theatre companies, directors and producers.
***
Think Fast Festival 2023 ~ Plays can be either dramas or comedies but must be no more than 15 minutes running time and applicable to a Zoom production (small casts, simple settings, etc.). The running-time restriction is absolute and plays that exceed 15 minutes will not be considered. Plays invited to participate must be rehearsed, ready-to-perform and must supply their own actors and directors. Playwrights may submit only one play – make it your best There is no restriction on previously produced plays.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** HAUNTED PLAYS ***
Professor John Pepper invented his famous spectral effect, the Pepper's Ghost, at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1863. This involved a carefully positioned sheet of glass and clever lighting, allowing what looked like totally corporeal figures to appear through walls, walk through real objects (and people!), and glide smoothly out through the opposite side of the set. The popular theatres seized on this new innovation and very soon dancing skeletons, talking heads and many, many vanishing ladies were appearing (and then disappearing) all over London.
The Victorians even invented a new kind of trap – the spine-chilling "ghost glide", in which the wronged ghost would ascend through the floor of the stage, moving forward without taking a single step. Very X Factor. According to the historian Michael Booth, contemporary reviewers felt that "the manner of introducing the ghost by means of a lateral ascent, instead of a perpendicular one, lent a supernatural appearance to the scene which was irresistibly effective".
***
There are no easy answers to the question of how to stage this scene.
***
Nicol was sensational. In a luxuriant wig and sculpted black tunic and tights, he was utterly persuasive as a dashing, brutally comic Barrymore. He commanded the stage, and seemed to be having the time of his life. He was possessed by Barrymore, both in the play’s more burlesque moments and in his speeches from “Hamlet,” which he delivered with eloquence and simplicity, as a lesson for Andrew and the rest of us. It was too good to last.
After the first few shows, Nicol embarked on a self-destructive binge. He repeatedly propositioned the stage manager, and when she resisted his groping advances he called the management and demanded that she be fired. This didn’t happen, but the atmosphere backstage became poisonous. The cast posed for a raft of promotional photographs, and Nicol tried to block the release of any pictures in which he appeared with another actor. Then he began murmuring directions, while onstage, to other cast members: “Is that what you’re doing?,” “God, that’s awful,” and worse.
***
In 1963, theatrical ghosts would be banned entirely from Chinese stages for “spreading feudal and superstitious thought among the masses,” one of the earliest indications of the increasing radicalization of the cultural world. Between 1949 and 1963, theatrical ghosts had been bound up in larger questions regarding theatre reform and the scope of socialist culture.
Naturally, cultural workers pondered how to incorporate beloved popular stories whose pasts were often questionable from a strictly socialist viewpoint. Ghosts could be read in many ways: as teaching tools, as representations of feudal superstitions, as encouraging fatalism. But until the total ban on ghost opera in 1963, a balance was maintained between two opposing viewpoints. Many cultural workers argued for the inclusion of even potentially problematic forms, such as ghost opera, on their didactic merits: theatrical ghosts were presented in ways that underscored their bravery and righteousness, and their ability to teach people how to resist great evil.
However, an opposite line lumped ghostly literature in with other “superstitious” practices that the CCP was dedicated to stamping out. In this view, ghosts represented real-world forces that were frightening, and thus needed to be resisted. When this tension came to the fore in 1963, the critique of ghostly literature became the harbinger of increasingly vitriolic attacks on veteran cultural workers such as [writer] Meng Chao, which ultimately culminated in the launch of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
More...
https://www.asianstudies.org/ghost-plays-socialist-modernity-and-cultural-politics-in-twentieth-century-china/
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST
Based on Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of An Anarchist.
Translated to Chinese and adapted by Huang Jisu
Translated to English by Zijun (Neil) Wang
Directed by Zijun (Neil) Wang
In an absurdist adaptation of Dario Fo's stirring Anarchist play, the actors experiment with the mixing nature of theater and reality both within the play and in the process of rehearsing this play. A clown that hates authority was chosen to be an authority by the authority. A group of police that scorns the maniac was turned into maniacs by the maniac. Are you living for yourself or a strong yet hidden force you can never specify?
November 3, 4, 5
Playwrights Horizons Theater School
Studio Theater
721 Broadway
3rd Floor
New York, NY
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/accidental-death-of-an-anarchist-tickets-443371775917?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
We are inviting submissions for January 2023 issue of 'Literature Today-An International Literary Journal'. The theme of our January 2023 issue is 'Love'. You can send us poems, short stories, memoirs and one minute plays on:
1. love at first sight
2. poem/story/one minute play in memory of a loved one
3. love as an aesthetic experience
4. love and teenagers
5. love and romance as predestined event
6. love relationships and role of gods
7. love and marriage
8. love as illusion
9. love in the age of internet
10. lovers as rebels
11. platonic love
12. love and immortality
13. disappointment/deceit in love
14. lovers as saints
15 any other theme related to love
***
The Old Lady Project is an initiative to encourage the development of plays and musicals that feature significant roles for women over 50. Plays will be submitted to a national panel of directors and producers and two staged readings will occur in Evanston per year. A directory of works will be featured on the Old Lady Project webpage to facilitate connections between theatre companies, directors and producers.
***
Think Fast Festival 2023 ~ Plays can be either dramas or comedies but must be no more than 15 minutes running time and applicable to a Zoom production (small casts, simple settings, etc.). The running-time restriction is absolute and plays that exceed 15 minutes will not be considered. Plays invited to participate must be rehearsed, ready-to-perform and must supply their own actors and directors. Playwrights may submit only one play – make it your best There is no restriction on previously produced plays.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** HAUNTED PLAYS ***
Professor John Pepper invented his famous spectral effect, the Pepper's Ghost, at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1863. This involved a carefully positioned sheet of glass and clever lighting, allowing what looked like totally corporeal figures to appear through walls, walk through real objects (and people!), and glide smoothly out through the opposite side of the set. The popular theatres seized on this new innovation and very soon dancing skeletons, talking heads and many, many vanishing ladies were appearing (and then disappearing) all over London.
The Victorians even invented a new kind of trap – the spine-chilling "ghost glide", in which the wronged ghost would ascend through the floor of the stage, moving forward without taking a single step. Very X Factor. According to the historian Michael Booth, contemporary reviewers felt that "the manner of introducing the ghost by means of a lateral ascent, instead of a perpendicular one, lent a supernatural appearance to the scene which was irresistibly effective".
***
There are no easy answers to the question of how to stage this scene.
Certainly, Banquos sneaking on undecorously under tablecloths is the most common, and laughable, solution. Unfortunately, "invisible" Banquos don't always alleviate this problem. The challenge of making this scene dramatically convincing with no Banquo present requires an actor of great skill and intensity.
There is a recently available video version with Ian McKellen playing Macbeth where you can see the "invisible" option handled with great intelligence. He holds out for a very long time in the scene, almost underplaying it, until he suddenly erupts into a completely terrifying, over-the-top, slobbering fit. His insanity is more frightening than the ghost, but it works. The BBC version used the same option, but it doesn't work because the performance is much less skillfully controlled.
More...
https://shaksper.net/archive/1995/110-october/3764-re-ghost-of-banquo
More...
https://shaksper.net/archive/1995/110-october/3764-re-ghost-of-banquo
***
Nicol was sensational. In a luxuriant wig and sculpted black tunic and tights, he was utterly persuasive as a dashing, brutally comic Barrymore. He commanded the stage, and seemed to be having the time of his life. He was possessed by Barrymore, both in the play’s more burlesque moments and in his speeches from “Hamlet,” which he delivered with eloquence and simplicity, as a lesson for Andrew and the rest of us. It was too good to last.
After the first few shows, Nicol embarked on a self-destructive binge. He repeatedly propositioned the stage manager, and when she resisted his groping advances he called the management and demanded that she be fired. This didn’t happen, but the atmosphere backstage became poisonous. The cast posed for a raft of promotional photographs, and Nicol tried to block the release of any pictures in which he appeared with another actor. Then he began murmuring directions, while onstage, to other cast members: “Is that what you’re doing?,” “God, that’s awful,” and worse.
During scenes in which the script called for him to hover, as a ghost, and eavesdrop on the action, he would leave the stage. He gradually and deliberately alienated almost everyone, until the production became a war zone. One night, I stopped by his dressing room to make a final attempt to repair our relationship. When I entered, he took a wobbly swing at me, aimed at my head and connecting with my shoulder. I was more surprised than hurt; it was like being assaulted by a sleeping bag. Further revisions to the script became impossible.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/i-hit-hamlet
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/i-hit-hamlet
***
I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who 20 years later would become Donald Trump’s personal attorney, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest .
ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.
ROY: But am I dead?
ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.
(Pause)
ETHEL:
I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finally died.) It burns acid green.
I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ’cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.” ~~~
We know from decades of evidence going back 50 years, when Trump and Roy Cohn blocked Black families from moving into federally funded Trump-owned apartments in Brooklyn, that the ex-President is capable of unencumbered evil, as he proved again and again, with his calls for the death of the ultimately innocent Central Park Five, the fabrications over Barack Obama’s birth certificate and Mexicans storming the border, and the continuing Big Lie about the 2020 Election, and the incitement of people to violence on his behalf.
More...
https://stevevillano.medium.com/ethel-rosenberg-roy-cohn-donald-trump-53bebca8d0bc
I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who 20 years later would become Donald Trump’s personal attorney, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest .
ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.
ROY: But am I dead?
ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.
(Pause)
ETHEL:
I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finally died.) It burns acid green.
I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ’cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.” ~~~
We know from decades of evidence going back 50 years, when Trump and Roy Cohn blocked Black families from moving into federally funded Trump-owned apartments in Brooklyn, that the ex-President is capable of unencumbered evil, as he proved again and again, with his calls for the death of the ultimately innocent Central Park Five, the fabrications over Barack Obama’s birth certificate and Mexicans storming the border, and the continuing Big Lie about the 2020 Election, and the incitement of people to violence on his behalf.
More...
https://stevevillano.medium.com/ethel-rosenberg-roy-cohn-donald-trump-53bebca8d0bc
***
By the beginning of World War II, Noel Coward was hugely famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He adored the creative energy of New York, where he starred in Broadway productions of Design for Living opposite Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and Private Lives opposite Gertrude Lawrence, Coward’s lifelong crush Laurence Olivier and Olivier’s then-wife, Jill Esmond. He traveled the world to drum up support for Britain’s war effort, but an ever-present need for money spurred him write a new comedy about a man haunted by the ghost of his first wife.
Blithe Spirit “fell into my mind and on to the manuscript,” Coward later wrote of writing the play in less than a week. In a production schedule that seems unbelievably fast by today’s standards, the play opened at London’s Piccadilly Theatre just six weeks later, on July 2, 1941, and premiered on Broadway at the now-demolished Morosco Theatre on November 5, 1941. Even more amazing is the fact that only two lines were dropped and none were altered during rehearsal of what the playwright dubbed “An Improbable Farce in Three Acts.”
More...
https://www.broadway.com/buzz/5770/the-haunting-history-of-noel-cowards-blithe-spirit/
By the beginning of World War II, Noel Coward was hugely famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He adored the creative energy of New York, where he starred in Broadway productions of Design for Living opposite Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and Private Lives opposite Gertrude Lawrence, Coward’s lifelong crush Laurence Olivier and Olivier’s then-wife, Jill Esmond. He traveled the world to drum up support for Britain’s war effort, but an ever-present need for money spurred him write a new comedy about a man haunted by the ghost of his first wife.
Blithe Spirit “fell into my mind and on to the manuscript,” Coward later wrote of writing the play in less than a week. In a production schedule that seems unbelievably fast by today’s standards, the play opened at London’s Piccadilly Theatre just six weeks later, on July 2, 1941, and premiered on Broadway at the now-demolished Morosco Theatre on November 5, 1941. Even more amazing is the fact that only two lines were dropped and none were altered during rehearsal of what the playwright dubbed “An Improbable Farce in Three Acts.”
More...
https://www.broadway.com/buzz/5770/the-haunting-history-of-noel-cowards-blithe-spirit/
***
In 1963, theatrical ghosts would be banned entirely from Chinese stages for “spreading feudal and superstitious thought among the masses,” one of the earliest indications of the increasing radicalization of the cultural world. Between 1949 and 1963, theatrical ghosts had been bound up in larger questions regarding theatre reform and the scope of socialist culture.
Naturally, cultural workers pondered how to incorporate beloved popular stories whose pasts were often questionable from a strictly socialist viewpoint. Ghosts could be read in many ways: as teaching tools, as representations of feudal superstitions, as encouraging fatalism. But until the total ban on ghost opera in 1963, a balance was maintained between two opposing viewpoints. Many cultural workers argued for the inclusion of even potentially problematic forms, such as ghost opera, on their didactic merits: theatrical ghosts were presented in ways that underscored their bravery and righteousness, and their ability to teach people how to resist great evil.
However, an opposite line lumped ghostly literature in with other “superstitious” practices that the CCP was dedicated to stamping out. In this view, ghosts represented real-world forces that were frightening, and thus needed to be resisted. When this tension came to the fore in 1963, the critique of ghostly literature became the harbinger of increasingly vitriolic attacks on veteran cultural workers such as [writer] Meng Chao, which ultimately culminated in the launch of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
More...
https://www.asianstudies.org/ghost-plays-socialist-modernity-and-cultural-politics-in-twentieth-century-china/
***
Does Hamlet “believe” in the ghost? Shakespeare seems to leave it ambiguous. In the “to be or not to be” soliloquy he has Hamlet refer to the “thought of something after death” as “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” This would suggest that death is final: once dead “no traveler returns.” In that same soliloquy however, Hamlet, at war with his philosophically conflicted self, ponders two afterlife scenarios: “to die, to sleep- no more” and “to die, to sleep- to sleep, perchance to dream.”
An atheistic and a religious motif seem to be at war here. “What dreams may come” Hamlet wonders “when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?” “Dream” is being used here, not in the Freudian sense of a limited, nocturnal hallucination in which “ghosts”, at the dream work’s bidding, beguile the sleeper with manifest trickery that conceals the latent message.
No, this afterlife sense of “what dreams may come” is viewed by Hamlet as a supernatural cautionary tale, “a pale cast of thought” “that puzzles the will”, “makes cowards of us all” forcing “enterprises of great pith and moment” “to lose the name of action.” This is castration anxiety in a supernatural key that “enterprises of great pith and moment” experience unconsciously all the time prior to death in the “natural” imaginative fictions of neurosis. What I am calling the “natural imaginative fictions of neurosis” are private matters that the ars poetica must make public on stage or page, using ghosts if necessary to dramatize conflict and its displacements and projections in that “willing suspension of disbelief….which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge 1817).
More...
https://www.psychoanalysis.today/en-GB/PT-Articles/Mahon105110/The-ghost-in-Hamlet.aspx
Does Hamlet “believe” in the ghost? Shakespeare seems to leave it ambiguous. In the “to be or not to be” soliloquy he has Hamlet refer to the “thought of something after death” as “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” This would suggest that death is final: once dead “no traveler returns.” In that same soliloquy however, Hamlet, at war with his philosophically conflicted self, ponders two afterlife scenarios: “to die, to sleep- no more” and “to die, to sleep- to sleep, perchance to dream.”
An atheistic and a religious motif seem to be at war here. “What dreams may come” Hamlet wonders “when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?” “Dream” is being used here, not in the Freudian sense of a limited, nocturnal hallucination in which “ghosts”, at the dream work’s bidding, beguile the sleeper with manifest trickery that conceals the latent message.
No, this afterlife sense of “what dreams may come” is viewed by Hamlet as a supernatural cautionary tale, “a pale cast of thought” “that puzzles the will”, “makes cowards of us all” forcing “enterprises of great pith and moment” “to lose the name of action.” This is castration anxiety in a supernatural key that “enterprises of great pith and moment” experience unconsciously all the time prior to death in the “natural” imaginative fictions of neurosis. What I am calling the “natural imaginative fictions of neurosis” are private matters that the ars poetica must make public on stage or page, using ghosts if necessary to dramatize conflict and its displacements and projections in that “willing suspension of disbelief….which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge 1817).
More...
https://www.psychoanalysis.today/en-GB/PT-Articles/Mahon105110/The-ghost-in-Hamlet.aspx
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