NYCPlaywrights December 16, 2023
NYCPlaywrights
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
BROTHER ACT
by David Shaw
Daniel and Sarah are living the high life in New
York City until a visit from Daniel's brother threatens to bring it all
crashing down. Brother Act asks, "How can we know what really happened,
what didn't and what can be forgiven?
With Lucy McMichael, Jennifer Nolan, William
Considine, Douglas Bradford Smith and Cam Korman
December 19, 2023 7PM
Polaris North
245 West 29th Street
Fourth Floor
https://polarisnorth.org
*** NYCPLAYWRIGHTS ZOOMERS ***
NYCPlaywrights is starting a Zoom writers group
for 2024. We will meet once a week on Mondays between 7PM and 10PM on Zoom to
read from our work.
For more information go to
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/p/nycplaywrights-zoomers.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
ABINGDON
VIRTUAL FESTIVAL OF SHORT PLAYS 2024
We continue to be committed to creating
opportunities for all voices to be heard. With this in mind, we are thrilled to
be producing our fourth annual Virtual Festival of Short Plays, a virtual
festival shedding light on stories by people of color.
***
Courtship of the Winds currently open for
submissions
The Courtship of Winds publishes poetry, fiction,
short dramatic pieces, essays, photography, art, and short pieces of music. We
accept submissions throughout the year. Please read the guidelines for the
specific type of work you are submitting. Please do not submit work in a
particular genre more than once in a six-month period. Please include a short,
third-person bio with your submission.
***
The Very Useful Theatre Company is now accepting
play submissions for the eighth annual Newmarket International Festival of One
Act Plays to be held Sept. 5 to 8, 2024 at the Old Town Hall Auditorium, 460
Botsford St., Newmarket.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other
opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** DRAMA THEORIES ***
(Viola) Spolin devotees call her approach the
Theater Games System. While that term encompasses many specific
improvisation-based exercises, it became a school of thought for performers
across the U.S. throughout the 20th century and popularized the improv comedy
movement.
Spolin designed her improvisation games to make
actors feel grounded in the present moment, organically creating action and
character development with their scene partners (and even their audience) on
the fly. Many of her exercises encourage freedom of expression and discourage
self-consciousness, thus enabling actors to explore and invent fearlessly
onstage.
More...
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/what-is-viola-spolin-technique-theater-games-74829/
***
(Konstantin)
Stanislavski believed that an actor needed to take his or her own personality
onto the stage when he or she began to play a character. This innovation was a
clear break from previous modes of acting that held that the actor’s job was to
become the character and leave his or her own emotions behind. Later,
Stanislavski concerned himself with the creation of physical entries into these
emotional states, believing that the repetition of certain acts and exercises
could bridge the gap between life on and off the stage.
More...
https://stellaadler.la/about/about-stanislavski/
***
From his late twenties (Bertholdt) Brecht remained
a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and
practice of his “epic theatre”, synthesized and extended the experiments of
Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for
political ideas.
Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause
the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him
or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view
of the action on the stage. They must not sit back and feel, but sit forward
and think. He wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to
recognise social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from
the theatre and effect change in the world outside.
More...
https://www.actorhub.co.uk/259/brechts-epic-theatre-and-verfremdungseffekt-techniques
***
Still, we all learned one overriding message.
Discipline. The one trait that (Jerzy) Grotowski actors share is earnest,
dedicated striving. There is no arrogance in taking on this superior
self-discipline. Our only reward must be found in the fullest commitment to the
Work. I had also found or rediscovered a lesson in Jerzy’s principle of
blasphemy, of confronting roots. My old wish for a credo seemed answered as
Jerzy and his assistants guided performers to a deeply revealing expression
that was not pushing an agenda, but exposed our very selves to an audience we
trusted to decide who or what we were. We all gave ourselves to the Work with a
wonderful modesty.
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2014/01/08/student-assistant-to-jerzy-grotowski-reveals-secrets-from-inside-the-writing-lab/
***
(Joan) Littlewood’s genius lies both in the new
material she introduced to the English stage and the new methods by which she
achieved it. She was the first English director to create an ensemble on the
lines of Bertolt Brecht’s or Jean Vilar’s. She not only encouraged a new breed
of working class actor, but, through her pioneering improvisatory techniques,
drew on their own experiences liberally tearing up texts in order to arrive at
a deeper truth. The result was a series of productions that has passed into
theatrical myth.
More...
https://michaelarditti.com/non-fiction/joan-littlewood-making-a-scene/
***
Dario Fo, born 24 March 1926, is an Italian
satirist, playwright, theatre director, actor, composer and recipient of the
1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. His dramatic work employs comedic methods of
the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte, a theatrical style popular with the
working classes. Fo's work is characterized by criticism of organized crime,
political corruption, political assassination, the doctrine of the Catholic
Church and the conflict in the Middle East.
Fo’s first theatrical experience was collaborating
on satirical revues for small cabarets and theatres. He and his wife, the
actress Franca Rame, founded the Campagnia Dario Fo–Franca Rame in 1959, and
their humorous sketches on the television show Canzonissima soon made them
popular public personalities. They gradually developed an agitprop theatre of
politics, often blasphemous and scatological, but rooted in the tradition of
commedia dell’arte and blended with what Fo called “unofficial leftism.” In 1968
Fo and Rame founded another acting group, Nuova Scena, with ties to the Italian
Communist Party, and in 1970 they started the Collettivo Teatrale La Comune and
began to tour factories, parks, and gymnasiums.
More...
https://world-theatre-day.org/dario_fo.html#:~:text=His%20dramatic%20work%20employs%20comedic,conflict%20in%20the%20Middle%20East.
***
Keith Johnstone’s celebrated work as an innovator
of impro began over 50 years ago at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Today,
classrooms everywhere—within and beyond the traditional theatre—apply the Impro
System into their curriculum. Theresa R. Dudeck, Ph.D., argues in her book
Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) that the Impro
System is a “system” because it cannot be reduced down to its parts without
decreasing its efficacy. But because Johnstone’s work has also had
extensive commercial success, the fundamentals (i.e., the underpinning
theories) of the system often get compromised and impro gets branded as
competitive or in ways that do not express its infinite possibilities.
Like Johnstone, Dudeck understands the
importance of incorporating the
theories into the range of applied impro courses she teaches at Chapman
University; because once students grasp the theories, it becomes possible for
them to identify how an exercise, game, or technique can be applied to solve
problems in diverse situations.
More...
https://coupdecomedy2015.sched.com/event/30fT/keith-johnstones-impro-system-in-theory-practice