NYCPlaywrights July 11, 2026

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Jul 11, 2026, 5:07:59 PMJul 11
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

The Summer Legacy Ball
Brought to you by icon and activist Qween Jean, this two-night extravaganza is a celebration of ballroom culture, personal expression and finding your community. Featuring a panel of guest judges, neighborhood partners and talented youth, the stage is set for a dazzling display of performances and a vibrant runway.
Run time: 80 minutes

FACE
Grand Prize: $500
3 trophies: FF, MF, GNC
Face Card Never Declines My Gawd. Bring it in an all-white look worthy of a Magazine cover!

RUNWAY
Grand Prize $500
4 trophies: FQ, European, All American, GNC
Baybee When They See You Coming They Clear The Floor: Pump Down The Catwalk In a Sickening Effect in Honor of our Transcestor Tommy Playboy.

COMMENTATOR VS. COMMENTATOR
Grand Prize: $250
OTA: 1 trophy
Ballroom Is Rhythm of Life: Honor our past legacy and use your words to create an anthem that inspires the future generation!

PERFORMANCE
Grand Prize: $500
OTA: 1 TROPHY
Can’t No NOBODY Vogue Like You. Bring It In A ShowStopping SKIN OUT!!!!And Karrie From The Door!
THIS IS FOR THE KIKI COMMUNITY

More...
https://littleisland.org/event/summer-legacy-ball/


*** WORKSHOP: WRITE A NEW PLAY IN FIVE WEEKS ***

Thursdays August 6, 13, 20, 27 and September 3  

6-9PM EASTERN, ON ZOOM

$250

Having trouble getting started? Kickstart your process with this five-week workshop which includes exercises to revitalize your creativity, weekly office hours to discuss your progress, a complimentary post-workshop one-on-one, and a supportive, non-competitive environment.

Instructor: John J. Caswell, Jr. was a recent fellow at Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program and holds an MFA from Hunter College.

MORE INFO: WWW.JOHNJCASWELLJR.COM/WORKSHOPS

***


*** RHINESTONES, TIGERS & REVENGE — SHANGRI-LA-LA Comes to NYC July 25 & 26 ***

Come for the tigers. Stay for the revenge.

Shangri-La-La is a wildly funny new comedy musical inspired by a real-life Las Vegas lawsuit against Siegfried & Roy — told with rhinestones, tigers, courtroom chaos, showbiz glitter, and the wisecracking ghost of Bugsy Siegel.

Written by Mike Meier, with co-writer Peter Giambalvo, the one-hour festival version of Shangri-La-La leaves the courtroom behind and dives into the dazzling creation myth of Siegfried & Roy — two outsiders who transform themselves into Las Vegas legends through ambition, illusion, rhinestones, reinvention, and a little help from the ghosts of Sin City.

Tickets/info: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shangri-la-la-a-comedy-musical-about-siegfried-roy-tickets-1989267183696?aff=odcleoeventsincollection


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

Vidalia Theatre Company of Atlanta, Georgia is accepting submissions for its Winter Yield collection of 10-minute plays to be produced in January 2027.
The setting for this show is planes, trains & automobiles. We’re looking for plays that take place in the vessel itself. It can be while in motion or during boarding/unboarding. We are only seeking plays that take place in this setting at this time.

***

Open: Journal of Arts & Letters will consider fee-free submissions of drama whose effects can be experienced either on the page or in production.
Submit a file with up to 5000 lines, including title, byline, dramatis personae, and stage direction.

***

Go Try Play Write July 2026
The prompt for July 2026 is a morning-after prompt:
Write a 10-page maximum scene about a hook-up between a couple. It’s the morning after and either one of them or both of them feel it was a horrible mistake. What makes it a mistake?

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MISOGYNY? ***

The Sound of Music -- Here's one about a damaged young woman who falls for an angry, abusive, distant daddy figure, who has raised some monster children. Aw, isn't that sweet? What's that rule about workplace romances? Yeah, but the Alps are so pretty! Maria is never allowed to decide her own fate -- everybody tells her what to do, and then she does. And how about the treatment of the Baroness -- how did Georg's legitimate fiancee become the villain here...? It's not exactly the old "virgin vs. whore" scenario, but it's close...

More...
https://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2018/11/as-soft-and-as-pink-as-nursery-13.html

***

Artists and scholars have been thinking about how to grapple with the apparent misogyny in the masterful midcentury musicals since long before Me Too became a hashtag. Meanwhile, the tight licensing grip that creators (or their estates) have long maintained, demanding absolute fidelity to the original stage versions of their works, has started to loosen, allowing—to cite just a few examples—a female Bobbi in Marianne Elliott’s upcoming London production of Company; new choreography by Hofesh Shechter for the most recent Broadway revival, in 2015, of Fiddler on the Roof; and same-sex couples as the parallel romantic pairs in Bill Rauch’s version of Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. So the questions for the “golden age” musicals now on Broadway—as for any production, anywhere—must be: Why now? And, especially, how now?

More...
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/longing-to-tell-you/

***

In classic Broadway musicals, working women are often presented as victims of circumstance. Julie Jordan in Carousel and Magnolia Hawks in Show Boat need to work because they married “bad” men incapable of supporting them. Hello, Dolly!‘s Dolly Gallagher Levi and Irene Molloy are widows. South Pacific‘s Nellie Forbush is a nurse, providing support for the war effort. Generally, their jobs are stereotypical “women’s work,” like matchmaking (the title character in Hello, Dolly!), baking (Jenna in Waitress) or serving as a nanny for two (the title character in Mary Poppins) or many more (Maria Rainer in The Sound of Music). Sometimes, these women are only working until they can find a man to marry and move to the burbs. It always seems to be Westchester: Guys and Dolls‘ Sarah Brown is dreaming of a “Scarsdale Galahad” in a Brooks Brothers suit while How to Succeed…‘s Rosemary Pilkington can’t wait to keep dinner warm for her “darling tycoon” in New Rochelle.

Working women can also be presented as villains (Eva Peron in Evita) or comic relief (Hildy Esterhazy in On the Town) or both (Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper in Anyone Can Whistle), which arguably dehumanizes them. At the very least, it prevents the audience from taking them too seriously.

More...
https://www.tdf.org/on-stage/tdf-stages/my-unfair-lady-why-are-smart-women-in-musicals-treated-so-poorly-by-men/

***

In CAROUSEL, relocated to the coast of Maine, carousel barker Billy Bigelow and millworker Julie Jordan fall in love and marry, but the frowned-upon romance results in both of them losing their jobs. When Julie becomes pregnant, Billy takes part in a robbery to obtain money to raise the baby. It goes badly, and rather than spend time in prison, he kills himself. Fortunately, heaven’s “Starkeeper” gives him a chance to make things right by returning to Earth 15 years later to help his daughter, Louise, who has grown up lonely and ostracized by her peers because her father was a murderer.

In the show, Billy succeeds in redeeming himself, but modern audiences — including my wife and I — are left with a sour taste due to the show’s apparent condoning of domestic violence. Early on, Julie confides to her best friend that her husband hits her. Later, he explains to the Starkeeper, I wouldn’t beat a little thing like that — I hit her. While that’s pretty jarring to hear in the middle of a show featuring some of the most gorgeous music ever written for stage, the kicker comes later. Billy’s ghost, visible to his teenage daughter Louise, slaps her hand when she refuses his gift, a star from heaven. She runs to her mother, with the original dialog reading:

Louise: Has it ever happened to you? Has anyone ever hit you without hurtin’?
Julie: It is possible, dear, fer someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.

More...
https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2020/aug/2/growing-old-ungracefully-carousel-wife-beater-musi/

***

Mamet’s Oleanna manufactures a fictional power dynamic in order to undermine feminism (it was the Anita Hill hearings that inspired him to finish the play). The play’s misogyny becomes literal violence in the third act. This should show that John, the university professor, gets everything he deserves, yet the play begs for sympathy with him—it is a “false” accusation, after all, that drives him to violent action. Mamet’s later play, Race, offers a similar treatment to its title subject.

Neil LaBute, too, does similar maneuvers. In The Shape of Things, he creates a straw man “feminist” who is more caricature than character. His Some Girl(s), too, is a misogynist fantasy: a man, given the genericizing and universalizing name Guy, visits his exes—and records the conversations for some future exploitation. In an afterword to Some Girl(s) introducing a deleted scene, where Guy faces a woman whom he sexually assaulted when she was a pre-teen, LaBute writes in his afterword for the play that “Guy (in the wrong hands) runs the risk of coming off as a self-serving, deceitful shit-head.” A remarkable concern that reveals LaBute’s politics, considering Guy is written as a self-serving, deceitful misogynist. The play’s sympathetic treatment of him makes not just for a misogynist character, but for a misogynist play.

More...
https://howlround.com/no-more-mamets

***

From TALLEY'S FOLLY

                     MATT
You're not getting away from me.

                     SALLY
Get out of here!

                     MATT
Do you realize what you said? Did you hear yourself?

                    SALLY
             (Yelling toward the door.)
Buddy! Cliffy! Here he is. Matt Friedman is down here!

(Her last words are muffled by Matt's hand as he grabs her and holds her fast. She tries to speak over his lines.)

                     MATT
              (Grabbing her.)
Vilde chaya! you are a crazy woman! We could both be shot with that gun. People do not scream and yell and kick.

              (She stops struggling.)

People are blessed with the beautiful gift of reason and communication.

              (He starts to release her.)

                    SALLY
Cliffy!

                    MATT
               (Grabbing her again.)
How can such a thing happen? When they passed out logic everybody in the Ozarks went on a marshmallow roast. You are rational now?

(He releases her. She moves away. Matt stands where he can block her exit.)

More...
https://www.mcclernan.com/2012/09/theatre-essay-bitches-is-crazy-or-why-i.html

***

Protagonist's monologue from THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES:

It's kind of funny, a chimpanzee knocked me in the back and kinked my back out of whack and I went to this health club to work it out and in the steam section with all the steam I got lost and I went into this steam room and there was Bunny—yeah, just towels-I mean you could make a movie out of this, it was so romantic— She couldn't see me and she started talking about the weight she had to take off and the food she had to give up and she started talking about duckling with orange sauce and oysters baked with spinach and shrimps baked in the juice of melted sturgeon eyes which caviar comes from—well, you know me and food and I got so excited and the steam's getting thicker and thicker and I ripped off my towel and kind of raped her...

(Audience laughter)

And she was quiet for a long time and then she finally said one of the greatest lines of all time.... She said, "There's a man in here."

(Audience laughter)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqn9ovVV7vk&t=2504s

***

Welp, internet. I’ve hit my limit. It’s finally happened.

After five years running The Craptacular, and more years loving theater than I can accurately tally, I just cannot take another minute of Broadway’s sexist, misogynistic bullshit and stay silent. Just cannot be done.

Because guess what? Women make up close to 70% of your audience. Theater as a commercial enterprise literally doesn’t exist without women. And yet, every time I turn around, it seems like Broadway is going out of it’s way to make us feel unwelcome. To tell us we’re worthy of little more than the opportunity to fork over our hard-earned cash to buy your tickets.

Sometimes you’re just mounting generally sexist musicals, like Wonderland and Bullets Over Broadway (and, I hear, Honeymoon in Vegas). Other times charmers like John Why-the-Fuck-Are-You-Still-Writing Simon go about insulting little girl’s looks for kicks (turns out Little Red just wasn’t little and lithe enough for that dirty old man), while lovely gentlemen like Michael Riedel publish lovely little bon mots like this one:

Female empowerment is fine for daytime television, but it’s flesh-crawling in a musical.

Still other times it gets even worse, and producers and casting directors hire men who are confessed sex offenders — with a penchant for teenage girls — to take leading roles on Broadway without batting an eye.

And I’m supposed to keep giving you my money?

More and more I wish I could say ‘fuck no.’ Because honestly. Sometimes I don’t understand why I’m even here. Why I keep coming back for more in a space that is openly hostile to me just because I was born with a vagina and, 32-some-odd-years later, I continue to identify as a woman.

And worse, I don’t know how to change it. Other than this. Then calling it out.

Because I’m tired of being silent about it.

More...
https://thecraptacular.com/2015/01/dear-broadway-honestly-why-the-fuck-am-i-even-here/
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