NYCPlaywrights January 10, 2026
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NYCPlaywrights
Jan 10, 2026, 5:26:22 PMJan 10
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
We're Still Here is a monthly show celebrating wonderful and weird queer performance art including drag, burlesque, dance and theater. A night of drag, burlesque, theater, and queer art in all its messy, beautiful forms. Expect glitter and grief, devotion and delusion, romance, rage, and maybe a little revenge. It’s February, so we’re diving headfirst into the chaos of love, not just the heart-shaped candy kind, but the kind that lingers, haunts, heals, complicates, transforms. Bring your lovers, your exes, your besties, your situationships, but mostly, bring yourself.
February 4, 2026
Doors at 7:45pm. Show at 8pm. Outside food and beverages welcome.
Come feel a lot of things with us. 💔💋💌
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/were-still-here-love-me-tickets-1979865129900?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Dreamscape Theater Company (dreamscapetheater.com) in Corvallis, Oregon, is seeking original plays to be considered for production at Imagine Coffee in April 2026.
Winning plays will be produced at Imagine Coffee Co., Corvallis, Oregon, (imaginecoffee.online) April 11 (7 pm) and April 12 (2 pm), 2026.
The setting for your play should be a coffee shop.
Please ensure that your play can be performed in 15 minutes or less. Plays longer than 15 minutes will not be accepted.
We prefer plays with at least two characters but no more than five that can be staged with a simple set (black boxes/chairs/stools) and minimal light/sound/prop requirements – in a coffee shop.
***
Live & In Color’s June Bingham New Playwright Commission 2026
The commission, named after the late artist and playwright June Bingham, seeks to honor her creative legacy by empowering femme artists to create poignant, evocative, and timely new plays that push boundaries and reflect the nuance of the times we are living in.
***
2026 Annual One-Act Jamboree seeks short plays
Between 6 and 10 winners will receive the prize of a staged production of his or her play at the StageWorks One Act Jamboree, which will be held during the summer of 2026 at StageWorks Studio 237.
Plays will be judged on the following criteria:
Plot
Character Development
Dialogue
Overall writing quality
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER AGAINST FASCISM ***
NYCPlaywrights ran a call for submissions after the 2024 election called RESISTING FASCISM and we posted excerpts from the semi-finalist plays on our site in early 2025. We got pushback from some over this, but the beginning of 2026 has demonstrated that the Republican Party is leading this country into fascism, led by an utterly lawless administration. We encourage playwrights to write something in response to the imperialism and murder of our fascist-led government, and to join non-violent protests.
The RESISTING FASCISM play excerpts can be found here:
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/search/label/Resisting%20Fascism
***
When I interviewed playwright Tiago Rodrigues a few months later, he told me he had first conceived Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists in 2018, when a Portuguese judge, Neto de Moura, was systematically reducing the sentences of men who had assaulted women. In one instance, the judge gave a suspended sentence to a man who had kidnapped his ex-wife and beaten her with a nail-spiked baseball bat.
Rodrigues said, “I wanted to put this judge in a fiction[al] meeting with one of the great antifascists in Portugal, a woman that died when she was 26 in the [19]50s [and had] demand[ed] equal pay for those who worked the land.” That antifascist was Catarina Eufémia, a farm worker and resistance fighter who was shot three times by the fascist police while carrying her infant son.
After a fascist-inspired far-right party gained 50 of the 200 seats in the Portuguese assembly in 2024, Rodrigues evolved this idea. Instead of Eufémia kidnapping the judge, her descendants would gather in the year 2028, during a wholescale return of Portuguese fascism, to kill a fascist in her honor. All the actors, male and female, would dress as Portuguese peasant women from the 1950s and they would all be called Catarina.
***
Six months after Hitler’s accession to power, Rieser decided to stage the play Die Rassen (The Races) by Jewish author Ferdinand Bruckner, which was about the Jewish boycott of 1933. Thomas Mann was invited to the premiere and noted in his diary: “very well received. Big response from the audience to the words: ‘It isn’t German to tell the truth these days’.”
The programme for 1934/35 with such classics as the obligatory William Tell by Schiller, the successful Katharina Knie by Carl Zuckmayer, light comedies and bourgeois dramas grew by more than 20 premieres per season. One play stood out: Professor Mamlock – or Professor Mannheim in Zurich, by doctor and dramatist Friedrich Wolf addresses the antisemitism prevalent at the time. The leading character, Jewish doctor Professor Hans Mamlock, a dedicated democrat, is unable to bear the growing repression of the Jews and in his despair, commits suicide. “A drama from the Germany of today,” as the author described it.
More...
https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2023/07/the-theatre-that-stood-up-to-fascism/
***
While spending a portion of my sabbatical year conducting research in Vienna, I found that I could not escape the ghosts of Austria’s fascist past. Sometimes I anticipated these encounters, at other times they popped up unexpectedly, but they always left me shaken. The most haunting performance I witnessed was Lass uns die Welt vergessen: Volksoper 1938, a play about the events inside a theatre at the time of the Nazi annexation of Austria. As an American attending this production in the spring of 2025, at the time of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, the play functioned as more than a mere historical lesson. It struck me as an ominous portent.
The majority of Austrians welcomed the 1938 Anschluss (“connection”) that made their country part of Germany’s Third Reich. Immediately, there was an escalation in the persecution of those considered impediments to the greatness of the master race, particularly Austria’s Jews, who had been central to the production of the celebrated Viennese culture.
More...
https://howlround.com/fascism-phantoms-and-future
***
I suspect the popular image of theatre in the 30s is one of gilt-edged escapism. In Britain, Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence romped fastidiously through Private Lives and Tonight at 8.30 while Ivor Novello peddled Ruritanian romance in Glamorous Night and Careless Rapture. On Broadway, it was the decade of sublimely frivolous musicals such as Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms, and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.
Yet it would be misleading to charge theatre guilty of sticking its head in the sand and ignoring political reality. In Europe and America a surprising number of plays alerted audiences to the danger of fascism; no one was more passionate on the subject than Bertolt Brecht.
He and his family had fled Germany in 1933 after the Reichstag fire and settled in Denmark, where Brecht wrote the 24 short plays that make up Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. They derived from eyewitness accounts and newspaper reports, and today offer theatre’s most vivid account of life under the Nazis. Rarely played in full, they acquired an icy relevance when London’s Union theatre presented a selection of them in 2016.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/mar/11/brecht-lorca-playwrights-theatre-freedom-fighters
***
In a groundbreaking theatrical venture designed to be not only the first but also the last of its kind, a Mclean, Va.-based theatre company called the Thule Society plans a summer staging of Eugène Ionesco’s unsettling anti-fascist allegory Rhinoceros, but with a radical 360-degree perspective that will cast the play in a stark new light. With ambitious plans to occupy public parks, restaurants, grocery stories, and big-box establishments in all 50 states, Thule’s immersive production will lend an immediacy and realism to the escalating social devastation delineated in Ionesco’s 1959 classic.
“We want to give viewers a visceral experience of the upheaval and chaos that Ionesco so presciently imagined,” said director and Thule founder Oliver Revilo. “More importantly, we want to recreate a real-time sense of the public passivity and conformity that allows such mayhem to spread unchecked.”
Ionesco’s play depicts the inexorable descent of a provincial French town into senseless mass psychosis, as its inhabitants gradually turn into rampaging rhinoceroses laying waste to the town, spurring the local intellectuals to argue exhaustingly among themselves about whether this mass metamorphosis is happening at all, and, if so, how best to address it. In the end, all but one lonely, doubtful man, Bérenger, faces the threat by succumbing to it.
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2025/04/01/ionescos-rhinoceros-to-be-staged-as-nationwide-immersive-spectacle/
***
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That’s all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you.
The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it’s good, it’s like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you’re in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here’s where it easily can turn into a parlor game. “Hamilton”? Yes, obviously “Hamilton” is political. OK, what about “Death Becomes Her”? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. “The Outsiders”? Class war with songs. The “Great Gatsby” musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on.
Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It’s no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy “Eureka Day,” in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector’s play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner “English,” a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump’s first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape.
More...
https://archive.ph/XSDYS
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
We're Still Here is a monthly show celebrating wonderful and weird queer performance art including drag, burlesque, dance and theater. A night of drag, burlesque, theater, and queer art in all its messy, beautiful forms. Expect glitter and grief, devotion and delusion, romance, rage, and maybe a little revenge. It’s February, so we’re diving headfirst into the chaos of love, not just the heart-shaped candy kind, but the kind that lingers, haunts, heals, complicates, transforms. Bring your lovers, your exes, your besties, your situationships, but mostly, bring yourself.
February 4, 2026
Doors at 7:45pm. Show at 8pm. Outside food and beverages welcome.
Come feel a lot of things with us. 💔💋💌
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/were-still-here-love-me-tickets-1979865129900?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Dreamscape Theater Company (dreamscapetheater.com) in Corvallis, Oregon, is seeking original plays to be considered for production at Imagine Coffee in April 2026.
Winning plays will be produced at Imagine Coffee Co., Corvallis, Oregon, (imaginecoffee.online) April 11 (7 pm) and April 12 (2 pm), 2026.
The setting for your play should be a coffee shop.
Please ensure that your play can be performed in 15 minutes or less. Plays longer than 15 minutes will not be accepted.
We prefer plays with at least two characters but no more than five that can be staged with a simple set (black boxes/chairs/stools) and minimal light/sound/prop requirements – in a coffee shop.
***
Live & In Color’s June Bingham New Playwright Commission 2026
The commission, named after the late artist and playwright June Bingham, seeks to honor her creative legacy by empowering femme artists to create poignant, evocative, and timely new plays that push boundaries and reflect the nuance of the times we are living in.
***
2026 Annual One-Act Jamboree seeks short plays
Between 6 and 10 winners will receive the prize of a staged production of his or her play at the StageWorks One Act Jamboree, which will be held during the summer of 2026 at StageWorks Studio 237.
Plays will be judged on the following criteria:
Plot
Character Development
Dialogue
Overall writing quality
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER AGAINST FASCISM ***
NYCPlaywrights ran a call for submissions after the 2024 election called RESISTING FASCISM and we posted excerpts from the semi-finalist plays on our site in early 2025. We got pushback from some over this, but the beginning of 2026 has demonstrated that the Republican Party is leading this country into fascism, led by an utterly lawless administration. We encourage playwrights to write something in response to the imperialism and murder of our fascist-led government, and to join non-violent protests.
The RESISTING FASCISM play excerpts can be found here:
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/search/label/Resisting%20Fascism
***
When I interviewed playwright Tiago Rodrigues a few months later, he told me he had first conceived Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists in 2018, when a Portuguese judge, Neto de Moura, was systematically reducing the sentences of men who had assaulted women. In one instance, the judge gave a suspended sentence to a man who had kidnapped his ex-wife and beaten her with a nail-spiked baseball bat.
Rodrigues said, “I wanted to put this judge in a fiction[al] meeting with one of the great antifascists in Portugal, a woman that died when she was 26 in the [19]50s [and had] demand[ed] equal pay for those who worked the land.” That antifascist was Catarina Eufémia, a farm worker and resistance fighter who was shot three times by the fascist police while carrying her infant son.
After a fascist-inspired far-right party gained 50 of the 200 seats in the Portuguese assembly in 2024, Rodrigues evolved this idea. Instead of Eufémia kidnapping the judge, her descendants would gather in the year 2028, during a wholescale return of Portuguese fascism, to kill a fascist in her honor. All the actors, male and female, would dress as Portuguese peasant women from the 1950s and they would all be called Catarina.
Seeing this play was one of the most extraordinary experiences I have ever had in the theatre. The spectator participation at the end, as in a political demonstration, brought together hundreds of strangers to act as one voice. The theatre became a space of communal expression. While no violence was committed and no unalterable decisions made, we experienced something transformative.
Rodrigues’s play got me thinking about how live theatre can often be more helpful and cathartic than social media, opinion columns, or podcasts for processing global events and thinking seriously about politics. I thought about how political playwrights like Rodrigues aren’t so different from left-wing organizers. They aim to transform a group of strangers from passive spectators into an alert, politicized body. They look at how to provoke people to perceive the world differently. Some even want to impassion and outrage spectators to the point where we want to join in the fight for a better world.
More...
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/theatre-against-fascism
Rodrigues’s play got me thinking about how live theatre can often be more helpful and cathartic than social media, opinion columns, or podcasts for processing global events and thinking seriously about politics. I thought about how political playwrights like Rodrigues aren’t so different from left-wing organizers. They aim to transform a group of strangers from passive spectators into an alert, politicized body. They look at how to provoke people to perceive the world differently. Some even want to impassion and outrage spectators to the point where we want to join in the fight for a better world.
More...
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/theatre-against-fascism
***
Six months after Hitler’s accession to power, Rieser decided to stage the play Die Rassen (The Races) by Jewish author Ferdinand Bruckner, which was about the Jewish boycott of 1933. Thomas Mann was invited to the premiere and noted in his diary: “very well received. Big response from the audience to the words: ‘It isn’t German to tell the truth these days’.”
The programme for 1934/35 with such classics as the obligatory William Tell by Schiller, the successful Katharina Knie by Carl Zuckmayer, light comedies and bourgeois dramas grew by more than 20 premieres per season. One play stood out: Professor Mamlock – or Professor Mannheim in Zurich, by doctor and dramatist Friedrich Wolf addresses the antisemitism prevalent at the time. The leading character, Jewish doctor Professor Hans Mamlock, a dedicated democrat, is unable to bear the growing repression of the Jews and in his despair, commits suicide. “A drama from the Germany of today,” as the author described it.
More...
https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2023/07/the-theatre-that-stood-up-to-fascism/
***
While spending a portion of my sabbatical year conducting research in Vienna, I found that I could not escape the ghosts of Austria’s fascist past. Sometimes I anticipated these encounters, at other times they popped up unexpectedly, but they always left me shaken. The most haunting performance I witnessed was Lass uns die Welt vergessen: Volksoper 1938, a play about the events inside a theatre at the time of the Nazi annexation of Austria. As an American attending this production in the spring of 2025, at the time of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, the play functioned as more than a mere historical lesson. It struck me as an ominous portent.
The majority of Austrians welcomed the 1938 Anschluss (“connection”) that made their country part of Germany’s Third Reich. Immediately, there was an escalation in the persecution of those considered impediments to the greatness of the master race, particularly Austria’s Jews, who had been central to the production of the celebrated Viennese culture.
More...
https://howlround.com/fascism-phantoms-and-future
***
I suspect the popular image of theatre in the 30s is one of gilt-edged escapism. In Britain, Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence romped fastidiously through Private Lives and Tonight at 8.30 while Ivor Novello peddled Ruritanian romance in Glamorous Night and Careless Rapture. On Broadway, it was the decade of sublimely frivolous musicals such as Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms, and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.
Yet it would be misleading to charge theatre guilty of sticking its head in the sand and ignoring political reality. In Europe and America a surprising number of plays alerted audiences to the danger of fascism; no one was more passionate on the subject than Bertolt Brecht.
He and his family had fled Germany in 1933 after the Reichstag fire and settled in Denmark, where Brecht wrote the 24 short plays that make up Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. They derived from eyewitness accounts and newspaper reports, and today offer theatre’s most vivid account of life under the Nazis. Rarely played in full, they acquired an icy relevance when London’s Union theatre presented a selection of them in 2016.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/mar/11/brecht-lorca-playwrights-theatre-freedom-fighters
***
In a groundbreaking theatrical venture designed to be not only the first but also the last of its kind, a Mclean, Va.-based theatre company called the Thule Society plans a summer staging of Eugène Ionesco’s unsettling anti-fascist allegory Rhinoceros, but with a radical 360-degree perspective that will cast the play in a stark new light. With ambitious plans to occupy public parks, restaurants, grocery stories, and big-box establishments in all 50 states, Thule’s immersive production will lend an immediacy and realism to the escalating social devastation delineated in Ionesco’s 1959 classic.
“We want to give viewers a visceral experience of the upheaval and chaos that Ionesco so presciently imagined,” said director and Thule founder Oliver Revilo. “More importantly, we want to recreate a real-time sense of the public passivity and conformity that allows such mayhem to spread unchecked.”
Ionesco’s play depicts the inexorable descent of a provincial French town into senseless mass psychosis, as its inhabitants gradually turn into rampaging rhinoceroses laying waste to the town, spurring the local intellectuals to argue exhaustingly among themselves about whether this mass metamorphosis is happening at all, and, if so, how best to address it. In the end, all but one lonely, doubtful man, Bérenger, faces the threat by succumbing to it.
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2025/04/01/ionescos-rhinoceros-to-be-staged-as-nationwide-immersive-spectacle/
***
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That’s all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you.
The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it’s good, it’s like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you’re in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here’s where it easily can turn into a parlor game. “Hamilton”? Yes, obviously “Hamilton” is political. OK, what about “Death Becomes Her”? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. “The Outsiders”? Class war with songs. The “Great Gatsby” musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on.
Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It’s no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy “Eureka Day,” in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector’s play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner “English,” a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump’s first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape.
More...
https://archive.ph/XSDYS
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