NYCPlaywrights July 26, 2025
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NYCPlaywrights
Jul 26, 2025, 5:21:34 PMJul 26
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
ROMEO & JULIET
7PM
July 31, August 1, 2
Riverside Park Tennis Courts
West 119th Street New York, NY
The Capulets and the Montagues lay claim to Verona. The Prince tries and fails to keep the peace. The citizens are tired of being casualties in a meaningless war. And in the midst of it all, two teenagers fall in love…
Join us for a transformative performance of Shakespeare’s most iconic work, Romeo & Juliet. In the tradition of Shakespeare in the Park with its own unique twist, follow the fearful passage of these star-crossed lovers through Riverside Park on the Upper West Side in this interactive outdoor production that breathes new life into a beloved classic.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/romeo-juliet-in-riverside-park-tickets-1507556866169?aff=oddtdtcreator
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Snowdance® 10 Minute Comedy Festival is a festival of original comedies that run 10 minutes or less. Submitted scripts will be judged by the Snowdance Selection Committee. A selection of scripts will be chosen for production during the Snowdance Festival in the winter of 2026. These selections will round out a complete performance.
Audiences attending Snowdance performances will have the ability to vote for the production they enjoyed the most. The votes will be tallied throughout the five-week festival run, and the Snowdance “Best in Snow” will be awarded to the winning playwright after the final performance on March 9, 2026 with an award of $300.00 to “Best in Snow,” $200.00 awarded to second place, and $100 for third place. All submissions, selected for production, will receive a one-time $50.00 royalty payment.
***
The Phoenix Theatre Company’s 28th Annual Richard P. Stahl Festival of New American Theatre will run January 9, 2026 – January 25, 2026. The 2026 Richard P. Stahl Festival of New American Theatre will feature both curated and submitted works including: one play reading, two musical readings, a composer lyricist cabaret (featuring two different artists or writing teams), and the Choreography Lab which will set movement to musical material featured in the Festival selections. Please note that we will be capping submissions in each category at 300 applicants, so please submit early to ensure you will be considered.
***
L’Esprit Literary Review publishes writing that is fearless, risk-adept, and revolutionary. We accept short fiction, creative non-fiction, novel extracts, drama, literary criticism, autotheory, and book reviews. Pieces incorporating research, footnotes, and/or a works cited page are welcome.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** WHERE ARE THE WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS? ***
Playwrights Horizons wasn’t alone. Other major theatres revealed their programming, some of which reverted to familiar patterns from a decade ago. The Roundabout Theatre will give one slot out of four to a woman, whose work will appear in the nonprofit’s Off Broadway space. The Manhattan Theatre Club, which, like Roundabout, uses both Broadway and Off Broadway theatres, will host two plays written by women of the four shows it has announced so far; however, in what’s become a common trend, both will be produced on its smaller, and thus less remunerative, Off Broadway stage. Classic Stage Company, under its artistic director, Jill Rafson, confirmed a season of three shows, all written and directed by white men. And the Williamstown Theatre Festival, enjoying its first summer under its new director, Jeremy O. Harris—the playwright who, in 2021, requested to withdraw his “Slave Play” from Center Theater Group when it presented a season with only one woman in it—has zero plays written by women among its 2025 productions.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/women-playwrights-lose-the-limelight
***
This finding has caused the most head scratching and skepticism. If those female-written shows were so profitable, why wouldn’t the producers keep them running longer than their less profitable male counterparts?
We offer one possible explanation: Imagine there is a show with a bankable star whose contract is expiring. The producers must predict whether or not the play will continue to sell tickets without that star. Based on the evidence, we can guess that when a play has a male writer, producers are more likely to recast the role and keep the show running. But when a female has written a show, they may be more likely to assume that the high ticket sales were due to the departing star and not the writer’s work. The producers’ prophecy that there will be a revenue drop when the star leaves the show becomes a self-fulfilling one when they close it down.
The higher relative success of work by women is not in any way, shape, or form proof that women are better writers than men. Rather it suggests that the bar is set markedly higher for female writers to be produced. A young male writer who shows promise receives a production, and then a few more, and then he writes a hit. He develops his craft along the way. A young female writer who shows promise, however, is not as likely to be produced until she writes a hit. She must come to the table with her craft highly developed. It’s a Catch-22 that catches all female playwrights. And it explains the statistics that started this whole thing. Female playwrights are twice as likely to land on TCG’s list of the Top Ten Most Produced Plays in the American Theatre as their percentage of productions suggest they should, because the American theatre doesn’t take as many “risks” on women writers. This is corroborated by a quick accounting of last year’s season in New York: out of all the “unknown” writers (i.e., playwrights receiving their first major production), only around 10% were female. The bar is clearly set much higher for women, and there aren’t very many reasons to hope that future conditions will improve.
More...
https://www.giarts.org/article/discrimination-and-female-playwright
***
“Women don’t write good plays, do they?” a rather famous director said to me, over drinks. “They write good novels.”
Another told me to write under a male pseudonym, like George Eliot. Yet another director looked me in the face and said, “But where are the female playwrights, Theresa?” I mean, I was sitting there. Right in front of him.
The justifications for holding women back, for not hiring them or promoting them, as articulated by those in power, were many, all of them lame. Ultimately I was told that women can identify with male characters but men don’t identify with women! I would later hear the same idiotic refrain come out of the mouths of many Hollywood producers. But after I clawed my way through that minefield, I got to work on television shows where I was absolutely used for every script they could get out of me, even while I was shut out of meetings, dinners and editing sessions.
I would ultimately bounce back to the theater, hoping to find a home, scrounging around Off Off Broadway, doing 10-minute one-acts for Naked Angels or the 24 Hour Plays, while the guys I started out with — friends such as the playwrights Doug Wright, David Auburn and Robbie Baitz, the directors Chris Ashley, Michael Mayer and Michael Greif — moved on to Broadway. Then the guys in the generation behind me were moving into that club as well. It was impossible to miss what was going on.
The whole thing was hideous, and the brutal hostility was unapologetic. When female playwrights and directors pushed for accountability from producers as to why women were all but shut out of production opportunities, the discussion was dispiriting. It was something to do with comfort level. Boys just like to hang out with other boys. Girls should stick with the girls. Besides, women were included as actresses, weren’t they?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/opinion/theater-race-gender.html
***
It appears that in many major theaters across the country, men’s roles outnumber women’s by half. One out of every three roles go to women. (An informal survey of 10 theatrical seasons from across the country that I did put women in only 35% of the total roles). This means that men’s stories outnumber women’s by the same amount.
Those of us noticing this could be considered big old whiners if it weren’t for some solid business-y sounding facts:
- Women buy 70% of theater tickets sold
- Women make up 60%-70% of its audience (see here and here)
- On Broadway, shows written by women (who statistically write more female roles than men) actually pull in more at the box office than plays by men
In any other market the majority of consumers would significantly define the product or experience. Why not theater?
I will disclaim right away that this is not about women playwrights, though plays by women represent less than 20% of the works on and off-Broadway and in regional theaters (and also in the UK, as The Guardian illuminates). I consider August: Osage County and In The Red And Brown Water plays about women though men wrote both.
This is about modern theater telling its predominantly female audiences that the human experience deserving of dramatic imagination is still the male one. In TV, this might be a top-down insistence. In politics or business we see it all the time. But in theater?
More...
https://www.laurengunderson.com/press-projects/theaters-audiences-are-mostly-female-why-not-the-roles
***
Ms. JORDAN: Yes. Well, I guess I was a discouraged worker. I had graduated from Juilliard and written a few plays. They had won some awards, but they could not find a production. And it took 10 years. And meanwhile, I was watching my classmates who were male go ahead and start their careers and build them. And I stopped writing for three years. I didn't even touch it. I waited tables. And then, my friend, David Auburn, who wrote "Proof," which is about this subject, came over and he said, why don't you switch the gender? And I think he was really thinking, why don't you switch the gender to free yourself up?
CONAN: Uh-huh.
Ms. JORDAN: But in the end, when I did write my most autobiographical play but with a male lead and called it "Boy," I got my big production. And I know that there's a couple other plays out there called "Boy" also by professional playwrights that are all written by women.
CONAN: And Emily Sands, one of findings of your study was in fact that female characters tended to be, well - plays with female characters don't get produced.
Ms. SANDS: Absolutely. That was one of the findings in my study based on the data on Doollee.com. Julia's story also rings true in that when I separated the results between the two scripts that were donated with male protagonists and the two scripts that were donated with female protagonists, I found that the gender of the playwright didn't matter in the case of scripts with male protagonists. It did, however, have large effect on how well received the scripts with female protagonists were.
More...
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/105909353
***
Another explanation for the rising number of plays by women is that more and more women are running the theaters. ''There are certainly more women in power, including directors,'' Ms. Meadow said. ''When I was coming out of Yale in 1969, I was the only woman director. Nowadays, that's certainly not the case.''
Ms. Vogel has a more provocative theory for the increase in female playwrights: ''I hesitate to say it, but the current situation makes me think of secretaries. There was a time when only men were secretaries. When women started to become secretaries, the pay went down and the job's status went down.''
''Today,'' she added, ''the critical and economic climate is so harsh that women are more willing than men to take less remuneration.''
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/theater/theater-the-season-of-the-female-playwright.html
***
NYTimes 1973: WHERE ARE THE WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS?
CLEARLY the theater these days is struggle for both men and women. With the exception of the few who make it REALLY BIG, the rest of us all have to be passionate maniacs of one kind or another to stay in it. But why are there so few women playwrights in the struggle?
A few days after my last show closed after a spectacularly brief run on Broadway, a kindly old gentleman in my building accosted me in our lobby and inquired with a pained expression: “Tell ‘me, is this the way you really want to spend your life—writing plays that, are only going to close? Especially when you have children.”
I blanched and decided to take the stairs up to my apartment instead of waiting for the elevator. My mind was flashing back to January midnight: my 9‐year‐old daughter waiting up for me to come home from rehearsal, tears streaking her face. “Mommy, we don't see you any more.”
Ah, the guilt. For a woman in my position (an unmarried head of ‘a household), it would seem to be a kind of grand self‐indulgence to, be spending 14 hours a day away from my children doing a kind of work which may not even make a living for my family. I worked on my latest show over a year, opened on Broadway and closed one month later. A fortune was not made. Nor a living wage.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/20/archives/where-are-the-women-playwrights-where-are-the-women-playwrights-i.html
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
ROMEO & JULIET
7PM
July 31, August 1, 2
Riverside Park Tennis Courts
West 119th Street New York, NY
The Capulets and the Montagues lay claim to Verona. The Prince tries and fails to keep the peace. The citizens are tired of being casualties in a meaningless war. And in the midst of it all, two teenagers fall in love…
Join us for a transformative performance of Shakespeare’s most iconic work, Romeo & Juliet. In the tradition of Shakespeare in the Park with its own unique twist, follow the fearful passage of these star-crossed lovers through Riverside Park on the Upper West Side in this interactive outdoor production that breathes new life into a beloved classic.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/romeo-juliet-in-riverside-park-tickets-1507556866169?aff=oddtdtcreator
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Snowdance® 10 Minute Comedy Festival is a festival of original comedies that run 10 minutes or less. Submitted scripts will be judged by the Snowdance Selection Committee. A selection of scripts will be chosen for production during the Snowdance Festival in the winter of 2026. These selections will round out a complete performance.
Audiences attending Snowdance performances will have the ability to vote for the production they enjoyed the most. The votes will be tallied throughout the five-week festival run, and the Snowdance “Best in Snow” will be awarded to the winning playwright after the final performance on March 9, 2026 with an award of $300.00 to “Best in Snow,” $200.00 awarded to second place, and $100 for third place. All submissions, selected for production, will receive a one-time $50.00 royalty payment.
***
The Phoenix Theatre Company’s 28th Annual Richard P. Stahl Festival of New American Theatre will run January 9, 2026 – January 25, 2026. The 2026 Richard P. Stahl Festival of New American Theatre will feature both curated and submitted works including: one play reading, two musical readings, a composer lyricist cabaret (featuring two different artists or writing teams), and the Choreography Lab which will set movement to musical material featured in the Festival selections. Please note that we will be capping submissions in each category at 300 applicants, so please submit early to ensure you will be considered.
***
L’Esprit Literary Review publishes writing that is fearless, risk-adept, and revolutionary. We accept short fiction, creative non-fiction, novel extracts, drama, literary criticism, autotheory, and book reviews. Pieces incorporating research, footnotes, and/or a works cited page are welcome.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** WHERE ARE THE WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS? ***
Playwrights Horizons wasn’t alone. Other major theatres revealed their programming, some of which reverted to familiar patterns from a decade ago. The Roundabout Theatre will give one slot out of four to a woman, whose work will appear in the nonprofit’s Off Broadway space. The Manhattan Theatre Club, which, like Roundabout, uses both Broadway and Off Broadway theatres, will host two plays written by women of the four shows it has announced so far; however, in what’s become a common trend, both will be produced on its smaller, and thus less remunerative, Off Broadway stage. Classic Stage Company, under its artistic director, Jill Rafson, confirmed a season of three shows, all written and directed by white men. And the Williamstown Theatre Festival, enjoying its first summer under its new director, Jeremy O. Harris—the playwright who, in 2021, requested to withdraw his “Slave Play” from Center Theater Group when it presented a season with only one woman in it—has zero plays written by women among its 2025 productions.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/women-playwrights-lose-the-limelight
***
This finding has caused the most head scratching and skepticism. If those female-written shows were so profitable, why wouldn’t the producers keep them running longer than their less profitable male counterparts?
We offer one possible explanation: Imagine there is a show with a bankable star whose contract is expiring. The producers must predict whether or not the play will continue to sell tickets without that star. Based on the evidence, we can guess that when a play has a male writer, producers are more likely to recast the role and keep the show running. But when a female has written a show, they may be more likely to assume that the high ticket sales were due to the departing star and not the writer’s work. The producers’ prophecy that there will be a revenue drop when the star leaves the show becomes a self-fulfilling one when they close it down.
The higher relative success of work by women is not in any way, shape, or form proof that women are better writers than men. Rather it suggests that the bar is set markedly higher for female writers to be produced. A young male writer who shows promise receives a production, and then a few more, and then he writes a hit. He develops his craft along the way. A young female writer who shows promise, however, is not as likely to be produced until she writes a hit. She must come to the table with her craft highly developed. It’s a Catch-22 that catches all female playwrights. And it explains the statistics that started this whole thing. Female playwrights are twice as likely to land on TCG’s list of the Top Ten Most Produced Plays in the American Theatre as their percentage of productions suggest they should, because the American theatre doesn’t take as many “risks” on women writers. This is corroborated by a quick accounting of last year’s season in New York: out of all the “unknown” writers (i.e., playwrights receiving their first major production), only around 10% were female. The bar is clearly set much higher for women, and there aren’t very many reasons to hope that future conditions will improve.
More...
https://www.giarts.org/article/discrimination-and-female-playwright
***
“Women don’t write good plays, do they?” a rather famous director said to me, over drinks. “They write good novels.”
Another told me to write under a male pseudonym, like George Eliot. Yet another director looked me in the face and said, “But where are the female playwrights, Theresa?” I mean, I was sitting there. Right in front of him.
The justifications for holding women back, for not hiring them or promoting them, as articulated by those in power, were many, all of them lame. Ultimately I was told that women can identify with male characters but men don’t identify with women! I would later hear the same idiotic refrain come out of the mouths of many Hollywood producers. But after I clawed my way through that minefield, I got to work on television shows where I was absolutely used for every script they could get out of me, even while I was shut out of meetings, dinners and editing sessions.
I would ultimately bounce back to the theater, hoping to find a home, scrounging around Off Off Broadway, doing 10-minute one-acts for Naked Angels or the 24 Hour Plays, while the guys I started out with — friends such as the playwrights Doug Wright, David Auburn and Robbie Baitz, the directors Chris Ashley, Michael Mayer and Michael Greif — moved on to Broadway. Then the guys in the generation behind me were moving into that club as well. It was impossible to miss what was going on.
The whole thing was hideous, and the brutal hostility was unapologetic. When female playwrights and directors pushed for accountability from producers as to why women were all but shut out of production opportunities, the discussion was dispiriting. It was something to do with comfort level. Boys just like to hang out with other boys. Girls should stick with the girls. Besides, women were included as actresses, weren’t they?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/opinion/theater-race-gender.html
***
It appears that in many major theaters across the country, men’s roles outnumber women’s by half. One out of every three roles go to women. (An informal survey of 10 theatrical seasons from across the country that I did put women in only 35% of the total roles). This means that men’s stories outnumber women’s by the same amount.
Those of us noticing this could be considered big old whiners if it weren’t for some solid business-y sounding facts:
- Women buy 70% of theater tickets sold
- Women make up 60%-70% of its audience (see here and here)
- On Broadway, shows written by women (who statistically write more female roles than men) actually pull in more at the box office than plays by men
In any other market the majority of consumers would significantly define the product or experience. Why not theater?
I will disclaim right away that this is not about women playwrights, though plays by women represent less than 20% of the works on and off-Broadway and in regional theaters (and also in the UK, as The Guardian illuminates). I consider August: Osage County and In The Red And Brown Water plays about women though men wrote both.
This is about modern theater telling its predominantly female audiences that the human experience deserving of dramatic imagination is still the male one. In TV, this might be a top-down insistence. In politics or business we see it all the time. But in theater?
More...
https://www.laurengunderson.com/press-projects/theaters-audiences-are-mostly-female-why-not-the-roles
***
Ms. JORDAN: Yes. Well, I guess I was a discouraged worker. I had graduated from Juilliard and written a few plays. They had won some awards, but they could not find a production. And it took 10 years. And meanwhile, I was watching my classmates who were male go ahead and start their careers and build them. And I stopped writing for three years. I didn't even touch it. I waited tables. And then, my friend, David Auburn, who wrote "Proof," which is about this subject, came over and he said, why don't you switch the gender? And I think he was really thinking, why don't you switch the gender to free yourself up?
CONAN: Uh-huh.
Ms. JORDAN: But in the end, when I did write my most autobiographical play but with a male lead and called it "Boy," I got my big production. And I know that there's a couple other plays out there called "Boy" also by professional playwrights that are all written by women.
CONAN: And Emily Sands, one of findings of your study was in fact that female characters tended to be, well - plays with female characters don't get produced.
Ms. SANDS: Absolutely. That was one of the findings in my study based on the data on Doollee.com. Julia's story also rings true in that when I separated the results between the two scripts that were donated with male protagonists and the two scripts that were donated with female protagonists, I found that the gender of the playwright didn't matter in the case of scripts with male protagonists. It did, however, have large effect on how well received the scripts with female protagonists were.
More...
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/105909353
***
Another explanation for the rising number of plays by women is that more and more women are running the theaters. ''There are certainly more women in power, including directors,'' Ms. Meadow said. ''When I was coming out of Yale in 1969, I was the only woman director. Nowadays, that's certainly not the case.''
Ms. Vogel has a more provocative theory for the increase in female playwrights: ''I hesitate to say it, but the current situation makes me think of secretaries. There was a time when only men were secretaries. When women started to become secretaries, the pay went down and the job's status went down.''
''Today,'' she added, ''the critical and economic climate is so harsh that women are more willing than men to take less remuneration.''
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/theater/theater-the-season-of-the-female-playwright.html
***
NYTimes 1973: WHERE ARE THE WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS?
CLEARLY the theater these days is struggle for both men and women. With the exception of the few who make it REALLY BIG, the rest of us all have to be passionate maniacs of one kind or another to stay in it. But why are there so few women playwrights in the struggle?
A few days after my last show closed after a spectacularly brief run on Broadway, a kindly old gentleman in my building accosted me in our lobby and inquired with a pained expression: “Tell ‘me, is this the way you really want to spend your life—writing plays that, are only going to close? Especially when you have children.”
I blanched and decided to take the stairs up to my apartment instead of waiting for the elevator. My mind was flashing back to January midnight: my 9‐year‐old daughter waiting up for me to come home from rehearsal, tears streaking her face. “Mommy, we don't see you any more.”
Ah, the guilt. For a woman in my position (an unmarried head of ‘a household), it would seem to be a kind of grand self‐indulgence to, be spending 14 hours a day away from my children doing a kind of work which may not even make a living for my family. I worked on my latest show over a year, opened on Broadway and closed one month later. A fortune was not made. Nor a living wage.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/20/archives/where-are-the-women-playwrights-where-are-the-women-playwrights-i.html
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