NYCPlaywrights October 11, 2025
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NYCPlaywrights
Oct 11, 2025, 5:22:06 PMOct 11
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
REST IN PEACE
Three dark comedies exploring death, dying, and survival
Kill Lesson
Divine Rite
Fish Food
Written by Cesi Davidson
Directed by Gha'il Rhodes Benjamin
Featuring Robert Hoagland, Wendy Ann Powell & Robert Siverls
Presented by Short Plays to Nourish the Mind & Soul
with the George Bruce Library
October 18, 2025 at 3 PM
George Bruce Library
518 West 125th St.
https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2025/10/18/short-plays-nourish-mind-soul
*** NYCPLAYWRIGHTS SEEKS MONOLOGUES ON THE THEME OF "BLACK WOMAN GENIUS" ***
Some genius prompts:
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/2025/10/nycplaywrights-seeks-monologues-on.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Seeking playwrights, directors, and actors for Abingdon Theatre Company's sixth annual Raise the Page, Uplift the Word: A BIPOC Festival of Short Plays in collaboration with AMT Theater. Abingdon Theatre Company continues to be committed to creating opportunities for all voices to be heard. With this in mind, ATC is thrilled to open submissions for our sixth annual festival of short plays; a festival shedding light on stories by people of color.
***
The Actors Studio of Newburyport, MA (TASN) will be holding its 6th National Short Play Festival for two weekends (six performances) during October, 2026. Judges will engage in multiple rounds of reading, with every play being read at least twice. After 16 semi-finalists are chosen, we will hold an All-Day Selection Sunday, putting the semi-finalists on their feet. The seven winners will be announced in August 2026, with the top-scoring play receiving the coveted Clopton Prize.
Length: 5-15 minutes. Send us your best. There is no theme and no restrictions on content. Workshops, readings, and a couple of previous productions are okay.
***
The Spartan Theatre at Spokane Falls Community College proudly announces our Second Annual Festival One Page Plays: Haunting Holidays.
We are seeking submissions from playwrights across the globe to be presented in a reader’s theatre format. Selected plays will be performed live at SFCC’s Spartan Theatre on Friday, December 5, 2025, at 7:30 PM.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BROADWAY ECONOMICS ***
Broadway is big business. Really big business. The latest statistics reveal that Broadway attendance in the 2018-2019 season reached 14.77 million and the season grossed $1.83 billion. Overall, Broadway contributes $14.7 billion to the economy of New York City on top of ticket sales and supports 96,900 local jobs. Broadway is so productive that attendance for the 2018-2019 season topped those of the ten professional NYC Metro-area sports teams combined (Mets, Yankees, Rangers, Islanders, Knicks, Liberty, Giants, Jets, Devils and Nets).
According to Charlotte St. Martin, president of The Broadway League, it is unlikely this year they will reach the same attendance as 2019. “We are currently at between 85-88% of the 2019 numbers,” she says. “But we are continuing to grow the audience and maintain the ones we get so we are confident that by 2025 or 2026 we should be back to similar attendance. International travel was between 14-20% of our attendance and international travel to New York City is still lagging. Domestic travel is greater than anticipated and is making up some, but not all of the difference. NYC & Company is optimistic about the future, and we are closely tied to the tourism numbers.”
More...
https://archive.ph/ONIaK#selection-3451.0-3489.605
***
Broadway box office grosses last season reached a record high, fueled by a handful of starry plays, and union members say that should make it possible to increase their compensation and benefits packages. But postpandemic musicals have been failing at a stunningly high rate, and producers say they must control costs to stabilize the industry.
Both unions say they are frustrated with the slow pace of progress in their talks, and on Friday, they began collecting signatures for an online petition expressing support for union members.
The League declined to comment on the possibility of a strike, but said in a statement, “We look forward to returning to the bargaining table in good faith this week and are ready to get these contracts done.”
More...
https://archive.ph/xgGH8
***
Musical theater, long the bread-and-butter of Broadway, is struggling.
None of the 18 commercial musicals that opened on Broadway last season have made a profit yet. Some still could, but several have been spectacular flameouts. The new musicals “Tammy Faye,” “Boop!” and “Smash” each cost at least $20 million to bring to the stage, and each was gone less than four months after opening. All three lost their entire investments.
Lavish revivals of much-loved classics are also fizzling. On Sunday, a revival of “Cabaret,” budgeted for up to $26 million and featuring a costly conversion of a Broadway theater into a nightclub-like setting, threw in the towel at a total loss. A $19.5 million revival of “Gypsy” that starred Audra McDonald and earned strong reviews closed last month without recouping its investment. Even a buzzy production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which won this year’s Tony for best musical revival, failed to make back the $15 million it cost to mount.
More...
https://archive.ph/aClWi#selection-4497.0-4529.109
***
The COVID-19 pandemic that shocked the global economy in 2020 left lasting, devastating impacts on the already struggling Broadway industry. The shutdown and social distancing policies that ensued left the live theater industry largely without a source of income (Reinhart, 2022). Nearly half a decade since the initial onslaught of the pandemic policies, Broadway continues to struggle financially, despite continuing to produce new shows. However, the pandemic only exposed the risky and unstable nature of investment in Broadway (The Economist, 2024). These financial troubles have been historically persistent. Broadway supports a large portion of the country’s art community, and both the effects of the pandemic and the historically risky financial attributes of Broadway make it critical to examine to secure one of America’s most iconic forms of entertainment.
The shock of the COVID-19 pandemic reduced Broadway’s gross value by over $1 billion — a 55% decrease from the pre-pandemic 2018-19 season (Reinhart, 2022). Yet, the curtain on financial troubles does not close there. Recent evidence from the 2022-23 cycle indicated that box office revenue was still down 27% from pre-pandemic levels, with fewer than 20% of shows recouping their initial investments (The Economist, 2024).
More...
https://emoryeconomicsreview.org/articles/2025/4/18/broadwaynomics-the-economics-of-american-theaters-risk-finance-and-all-that-jazz
***
What would Broadway be grossing right now, if Covid hadn’t taken that bite out of our box office?
We all talk about how our industry is doing compared to our last full season in 2018-19. We’ve measured our comeback against that benchmark. But to really demonstrate how much of an impact the pandemic had on our industry, and to demonstrate to others (like the politicians in our state considering the extension of Governor Hochul’s essential Broadway tax credit) I wanted to compare our current Broadway grosses with what they would have been if the pandemic had not occurred at all.
I started by calculating our annual Broadway gross growth rate using the CAGR formula in the twenty seasons prior to the pandemic.
Here’s what I got:
In the past twenty Broadway seasons, our grosses have grown by an average of 6.01% each year.
Next, I took our season-ending gross in 2018-19 and extrapolated it to the 2023-24 season using that 6.01% growth rate, to calculate where we WOULD have been had our grosses continued at that same twenty-year average.
The answer?
Our 2023-24 season gross should have been $2.45 billion.
Our actual gross rate for the 2023-24 season was . . . $1.54 billion.
That’s a difference of $910 million.
Yes, you read that correctly. We are missing $910 million.
(Insert “gulp” here.)
What’s worse . . . if we look at the average growth in the last ten years instead of twenty, we get an average yearly increase of 6.7% instead of 6.01%. Taking the position that our grosses would have continued to grow at this higher rate (which is a very valid argument, given how much technology, among other factors, has helped us in the last ten years), the gross in 2023-24 would have been . . . $2.53 billion.
Comparing that to the gross of $1.54 billion in 2018-19?
We’re missing $990 million.
That’s right – just under ONE BILLION DOLLARS.
That’s a billion dollars that would be spread out amongst authors, designers, directors, actors, investors, vendors, and everyone who makes shows happen night after night after night.
More...
https://kendavenport.com/what-broadway-would-have-looked-like-without-the-pandemic/
***
"These results confirm what many suspected, but couldn't prove: the odds are long," Kopac says. "Investing in a Broadway musical is a high-risk endeavor like sports betting."
The research focused on shows that had time to complete their financial cycle and recoup before the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020. Nonprofit productions and those closed to outside investors were excluded to provide a more accurate look at commercial investment outcomes.
For 105 of the 133 shows, the authors found sufficient data to classify recoupment. For the remaining 28, they conducted extensive contextual research to make informed estimates. Their dataset, which is publicly available, also includes information about capitalizations and reported production costs.
"Even among successful shows, profitability often requires years of strong ticket sales," Gutekunst says. "Some shows recouped only after running for two or three years."
The study also highlights a key challenge for investors: once a show recoups, the share of profits returned to them shrinks, as royalty rates increase and the remainder is split with producers. For investors to double their money, the show's profits typically need to exceed three times its capitalization — a high bar that only a handful of musicals ever meet.
Still, the researchers say the goal of their work isn't to dissuade investment, but to provide clarity.
"There's nothing wrong with investing in a show because you love the art or want to be part of the process," Kopac says. "But from a fiscal perspective, it's important to know the odds — and now we do."
More...
https://www.bucknell.edu/news/bucknell-study-explores-return-investment-broadway-musicals
***
The 2024-2025 Broadway season is ending up as the highest-grossing in history, its $1.89bn surpassing the 2018-2019 season’s $1.82bn. Given the specialized nature of Broadway productions – they’re less accessible, more expensive, and frankly less physically comfortable than going to the movies, even just within New York City – this seems like a spectacular triumph. What happened?
Some of that boost can probably be attributed to the proliferation of starry, limited productions with sky-high prices. But unlike cinemas, which can usually add more showtimes to meet any outsized demand, there are ultimately limits on how much a handful of shows can contribute to the total. George Clooney’s Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck recently set an individual weeklong record and has raked in a ton of money. Yet grosses for the final week of the season reflect a far deeper bench than just Clooney, Denzel, and the boys of Glengarry Glen Ross. Other shows playing right around 100% capacity over the holiday weekend include fixtures such as Wicked, Hamilton, and The Lion King; relative newcomers to the musical game such as Buena Vista Social Club, Just in Time, Death Becomes Her, and Maybe Happy Ending; and straight plays – traditionally considered a less tourist-friendly proposition – such as Oh, Mary!, Purpose, and John Proctor Is the Villain.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/may/29/broadway-box-office-season
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
REST IN PEACE
Three dark comedies exploring death, dying, and survival
Kill Lesson
Divine Rite
Fish Food
Written by Cesi Davidson
Directed by Gha'il Rhodes Benjamin
Featuring Robert Hoagland, Wendy Ann Powell & Robert Siverls
Presented by Short Plays to Nourish the Mind & Soul
with the George Bruce Library
October 18, 2025 at 3 PM
George Bruce Library
518 West 125th St.
https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2025/10/18/short-plays-nourish-mind-soul
*** NYCPLAYWRIGHTS SEEKS MONOLOGUES ON THE THEME OF "BLACK WOMAN GENIUS" ***
Some genius prompts:
- Ida B. Wells, investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement.
- Aretha Franklin, voted Rolling Stone's greatest singer of all time - "a work of genius" (#2 is Whitney Houston)
- Valerie Brown, the first Black woman animated character on American television, resident genius of the 1970s cartoon "Josie and the Pussycats"
- Alena Analeigh Wicker, in 2021, became the youngest person to intern for NASA
- Simone Biles, athletic genius
- Wanda Sykes, stand-up comedian, actor and writer
- Angela Davis, philosopher and political activist
- Dr. Ayda Mensah, character performed by Noma Dumezweni, the brilliant team leader and "favorite human" of Murderbot, from the sci-fi books and AppleTV+ series.
- Lorraine Hansberry, the young, gifted and Black playwright
- Kamala Harris, America’s first woman, Black and South Asian vice president, became the Democratic presidential candidate half-way through the 2024 campaign when Biden bowed out. She drew record-breaking crowds during her campaign and accurately predicted that Trump would use the US military against US citizens.
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/2025/10/nycplaywrights-seeks-monologues-on.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Seeking playwrights, directors, and actors for Abingdon Theatre Company's sixth annual Raise the Page, Uplift the Word: A BIPOC Festival of Short Plays in collaboration with AMT Theater. Abingdon Theatre Company continues to be committed to creating opportunities for all voices to be heard. With this in mind, ATC is thrilled to open submissions for our sixth annual festival of short plays; a festival shedding light on stories by people of color.
***
The Actors Studio of Newburyport, MA (TASN) will be holding its 6th National Short Play Festival for two weekends (six performances) during October, 2026. Judges will engage in multiple rounds of reading, with every play being read at least twice. After 16 semi-finalists are chosen, we will hold an All-Day Selection Sunday, putting the semi-finalists on their feet. The seven winners will be announced in August 2026, with the top-scoring play receiving the coveted Clopton Prize.
Length: 5-15 minutes. Send us your best. There is no theme and no restrictions on content. Workshops, readings, and a couple of previous productions are okay.
***
The Spartan Theatre at Spokane Falls Community College proudly announces our Second Annual Festival One Page Plays: Haunting Holidays.
We are seeking submissions from playwrights across the globe to be presented in a reader’s theatre format. Selected plays will be performed live at SFCC’s Spartan Theatre on Friday, December 5, 2025, at 7:30 PM.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BROADWAY ECONOMICS ***
Broadway is big business. Really big business. The latest statistics reveal that Broadway attendance in the 2018-2019 season reached 14.77 million and the season grossed $1.83 billion. Overall, Broadway contributes $14.7 billion to the economy of New York City on top of ticket sales and supports 96,900 local jobs. Broadway is so productive that attendance for the 2018-2019 season topped those of the ten professional NYC Metro-area sports teams combined (Mets, Yankees, Rangers, Islanders, Knicks, Liberty, Giants, Jets, Devils and Nets).
According to Charlotte St. Martin, president of The Broadway League, it is unlikely this year they will reach the same attendance as 2019. “We are currently at between 85-88% of the 2019 numbers,” she says. “But we are continuing to grow the audience and maintain the ones we get so we are confident that by 2025 or 2026 we should be back to similar attendance. International travel was between 14-20% of our attendance and international travel to New York City is still lagging. Domestic travel is greater than anticipated and is making up some, but not all of the difference. NYC & Company is optimistic about the future, and we are closely tied to the tourism numbers.”
More...
https://archive.ph/ONIaK#selection-3451.0-3489.605
***
Broadway box office grosses last season reached a record high, fueled by a handful of starry plays, and union members say that should make it possible to increase their compensation and benefits packages. But postpandemic musicals have been failing at a stunningly high rate, and producers say they must control costs to stabilize the industry.
Both unions say they are frustrated with the slow pace of progress in their talks, and on Friday, they began collecting signatures for an online petition expressing support for union members.
The League declined to comment on the possibility of a strike, but said in a statement, “We look forward to returning to the bargaining table in good faith this week and are ready to get these contracts done.”
More...
https://archive.ph/xgGH8
***
Musical theater, long the bread-and-butter of Broadway, is struggling.
None of the 18 commercial musicals that opened on Broadway last season have made a profit yet. Some still could, but several have been spectacular flameouts. The new musicals “Tammy Faye,” “Boop!” and “Smash” each cost at least $20 million to bring to the stage, and each was gone less than four months after opening. All three lost their entire investments.
Lavish revivals of much-loved classics are also fizzling. On Sunday, a revival of “Cabaret,” budgeted for up to $26 million and featuring a costly conversion of a Broadway theater into a nightclub-like setting, threw in the towel at a total loss. A $19.5 million revival of “Gypsy” that starred Audra McDonald and earned strong reviews closed last month without recouping its investment. Even a buzzy production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which won this year’s Tony for best musical revival, failed to make back the $15 million it cost to mount.
More...
https://archive.ph/aClWi#selection-4497.0-4529.109
***
The COVID-19 pandemic that shocked the global economy in 2020 left lasting, devastating impacts on the already struggling Broadway industry. The shutdown and social distancing policies that ensued left the live theater industry largely without a source of income (Reinhart, 2022). Nearly half a decade since the initial onslaught of the pandemic policies, Broadway continues to struggle financially, despite continuing to produce new shows. However, the pandemic only exposed the risky and unstable nature of investment in Broadway (The Economist, 2024). These financial troubles have been historically persistent. Broadway supports a large portion of the country’s art community, and both the effects of the pandemic and the historically risky financial attributes of Broadway make it critical to examine to secure one of America’s most iconic forms of entertainment.
The shock of the COVID-19 pandemic reduced Broadway’s gross value by over $1 billion — a 55% decrease from the pre-pandemic 2018-19 season (Reinhart, 2022). Yet, the curtain on financial troubles does not close there. Recent evidence from the 2022-23 cycle indicated that box office revenue was still down 27% from pre-pandemic levels, with fewer than 20% of shows recouping their initial investments (The Economist, 2024).
More...
https://emoryeconomicsreview.org/articles/2025/4/18/broadwaynomics-the-economics-of-american-theaters-risk-finance-and-all-that-jazz
***
What would Broadway be grossing right now, if Covid hadn’t taken that bite out of our box office?
We all talk about how our industry is doing compared to our last full season in 2018-19. We’ve measured our comeback against that benchmark. But to really demonstrate how much of an impact the pandemic had on our industry, and to demonstrate to others (like the politicians in our state considering the extension of Governor Hochul’s essential Broadway tax credit) I wanted to compare our current Broadway grosses with what they would have been if the pandemic had not occurred at all.
I started by calculating our annual Broadway gross growth rate using the CAGR formula in the twenty seasons prior to the pandemic.
Here’s what I got:
In the past twenty Broadway seasons, our grosses have grown by an average of 6.01% each year.
Next, I took our season-ending gross in 2018-19 and extrapolated it to the 2023-24 season using that 6.01% growth rate, to calculate where we WOULD have been had our grosses continued at that same twenty-year average.
The answer?
Our 2023-24 season gross should have been $2.45 billion.
Our actual gross rate for the 2023-24 season was . . . $1.54 billion.
That’s a difference of $910 million.
Yes, you read that correctly. We are missing $910 million.
(Insert “gulp” here.)
What’s worse . . . if we look at the average growth in the last ten years instead of twenty, we get an average yearly increase of 6.7% instead of 6.01%. Taking the position that our grosses would have continued to grow at this higher rate (which is a very valid argument, given how much technology, among other factors, has helped us in the last ten years), the gross in 2023-24 would have been . . . $2.53 billion.
Comparing that to the gross of $1.54 billion in 2018-19?
We’re missing $990 million.
That’s right – just under ONE BILLION DOLLARS.
That’s a billion dollars that would be spread out amongst authors, designers, directors, actors, investors, vendors, and everyone who makes shows happen night after night after night.
More...
https://kendavenport.com/what-broadway-would-have-looked-like-without-the-pandemic/
***
"These results confirm what many suspected, but couldn't prove: the odds are long," Kopac says. "Investing in a Broadway musical is a high-risk endeavor like sports betting."
The research focused on shows that had time to complete their financial cycle and recoup before the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020. Nonprofit productions and those closed to outside investors were excluded to provide a more accurate look at commercial investment outcomes.
For 105 of the 133 shows, the authors found sufficient data to classify recoupment. For the remaining 28, they conducted extensive contextual research to make informed estimates. Their dataset, which is publicly available, also includes information about capitalizations and reported production costs.
"Even among successful shows, profitability often requires years of strong ticket sales," Gutekunst says. "Some shows recouped only after running for two or three years."
The study also highlights a key challenge for investors: once a show recoups, the share of profits returned to them shrinks, as royalty rates increase and the remainder is split with producers. For investors to double their money, the show's profits typically need to exceed three times its capitalization — a high bar that only a handful of musicals ever meet.
Still, the researchers say the goal of their work isn't to dissuade investment, but to provide clarity.
"There's nothing wrong with investing in a show because you love the art or want to be part of the process," Kopac says. "But from a fiscal perspective, it's important to know the odds — and now we do."
More...
https://www.bucknell.edu/news/bucknell-study-explores-return-investment-broadway-musicals
***
The 2024-2025 Broadway season is ending up as the highest-grossing in history, its $1.89bn surpassing the 2018-2019 season’s $1.82bn. Given the specialized nature of Broadway productions – they’re less accessible, more expensive, and frankly less physically comfortable than going to the movies, even just within New York City – this seems like a spectacular triumph. What happened?
Some of that boost can probably be attributed to the proliferation of starry, limited productions with sky-high prices. But unlike cinemas, which can usually add more showtimes to meet any outsized demand, there are ultimately limits on how much a handful of shows can contribute to the total. George Clooney’s Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck recently set an individual weeklong record and has raked in a ton of money. Yet grosses for the final week of the season reflect a far deeper bench than just Clooney, Denzel, and the boys of Glengarry Glen Ross. Other shows playing right around 100% capacity over the holiday weekend include fixtures such as Wicked, Hamilton, and The Lion King; relative newcomers to the musical game such as Buena Vista Social Club, Just in Time, Death Becomes Her, and Maybe Happy Ending; and straight plays – traditionally considered a less tourist-friendly proposition – such as Oh, Mary!, Purpose, and John Proctor Is the Villain.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/may/29/broadway-box-office-season
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