NYCPlaywrights August 8, 2026
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NYCPlaywrights
Aug 8, 2026, 5:05:37 PM (10 days ago) Aug 8
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
A Handful of Difficulties
Experience "A Handful of Difficulties," a dynamic new play inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s "Writing the Truth – Five Difficulties."
Through music, movement, and live audience engagement, this theatrical workshop explores the power and responsibility of speaking truth in challenging times. Join us for an evening of connection, questioning, and creative action embodied in story and music.
Limited-edition mini books of the performance text will be available, with proceeds supporting causes chosen by the artists. Be part of this living archive and collective journey to build understanding on telling the truth in creative work and life.
Co-created by Adam Turay, Jamila Khan, Kaveh Haghtalab, Lily Ali-Oshatz, Samantha Kochis, Sierra Michelle, and Sophia Valera Heinecke.
Saturday, August 22 • 7 PM - 9:30 PM
Le Petit Versailles Garden
247 East 2nd Street
New York, NY
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-handful-of-difficulties-tickets-1996656830328?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The annual 10-Minute Play Festival returns to Winters Theatre Company for the 2027 season. To submit your original 10-minute play to be considered for the 2027 Festival, please review the festival requirements and then complete and submit the application form below.
Any play submission must come directly from the original playwright/author of the play.
Every play must be fully performed in 10-minutes or less.
Script should not rely on more than minimalist props.
***
Playwrights First submission window open
$1,000 first place.
Award listing of playwright and play title on our website.
Professional reading in NYC when feasible.
Overall, we look for:
- Imagination and originality in both style and subject or point of view.
- Characters that intrigue and move us.
- A compelling action revealing the human condition.
- Theatricality inherent in the above.
***
Mixed Bag is a variety show for first drafts. We provide artists working in a variety of mediums with a low-tech space and audiences to further develop their works. We hope this will be an opportunity to learn about your piece and discover the next steps in your process.
What we are looking for:
In-development work that has not yet premiered. One or two developmental readings or showings is okay, but we are looking for work in the earlier stages of development.
Works in any medium: performance art, dance, theater, film, music, poetry, multi-media, interactive art, magic, mime, juggling, etc. (these can be excerpts of longer works).
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** A CHORUS LINE ***
How much has “A Chorus Line” changed in 50 years? Or, rather, how much has it changed us?
If you want to measure the musical against your memories, you could pop over to Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., where the director Alan Paul is celebrating its golden anniversary. (Technically the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is 51 years old; it premiered at the Public Theater in the spring of 1975 and moved to Broadway that summer.)
“A Chorus Line” has many authors. Marvin Hamlisch wrote the music, Edward Kleban wrote the lyrics, and credit for the book belongs to James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante. But the stories themselves originated with real Broadway dancers — none of whom are in the program — who participated in interview sessions with Michael Bennett, the show’s gifted young director, conceiver and choreographer.
Bennett then asked them to audition to play, essentially, themselves. Not everyone made the cut. And none of the storytellers earned much — royalty payments topped out around $10,000 per year, even when the show was making millions. So there’s an acidic bite in its tissues. We taste the mold in good cheese; fine wine can taste of dirt. And in the sumptuous “A Chorus Line,” the terroir is fear.
More...
https://archive.ph/jToci
***
A Chorus Line, for the uninitiated, transports audiences to a dance audition being held in a Broadway theatre for the ensemble of a musical. A line of hopeful dancers assembles to try their best at getting this job, but director-choreographer Zach has more in mind than testing their dance abilities. Mostly speaking unseen from the audience, Zach probes the dancers on their childhoods, wanting to know more about the dancers themselves. Songs from Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban’s Tony-winning score include standards like “One” and “What I Did for Love.” If you’re a theatre fan, you may well be able to add the entire remainder of the score to the list of favorites this show introduced, too (personal points to “The Music and the Mirror” and “At the Ballet”).
The show is one of those rare huge successes that hits both artistically and commercially. For obvious reasons, theatre people tend to love A Chorus Line. The show is about us, even if you’re not specifically a dancer. But the brilliance of the show—specifically director-choreographer Michael Bennett’s concept, executed with book writers Nicholas Dante and James Kirkwood Jr.—is that it uncovers stories that are wildly universal. That shows itself very straightforwardly when it’s covering the performers’ adolescence and puberty in the "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love" montage, for instance.
But on a deeper level, the show is about people who really want something, need something, and have to make themselves vulnerable to get it. That’s always true in auditions—one is never more vulnerable than doing your thing and hoping a decision maker likes you best. But it gets amplified when Zach starts digging into the dancers’ backgrounds, which ends up involving everything from funny anecdotes to painful memories of real trauma. And as a result, it’s pretty hard to not empathize with what you’re seeing on stage in this show, whether you’re a professional performer or an office worker.
More...
https://playbill.com/article/once-more-from-the-top-inside-the-starry-emotional-50th-anniversary-a-chorus-line-concert
***
What WE Did For Love ft. cast of A Chorus Line Philippines | Theatre Group Asia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_jrJAsZgeA
***
The first workshop was on August 4, 1974. A Chorus Line is unique in its development. There was no real script to start with and each role was created organically, individually crafted to suit the talents and personality of the person playing it. Several dancers played versions of themselves and others played characters created from combining several different dancers’ stories. The cast members also contributed their own stories that enhanced the characters. Most fascinating was that all of the stories were true – and the process was deeply emotional for the cast who were used to not being allowed a voice in the creative process. From these character developments and personalities, Hamlisch and Kleban fashioned songs – for instance, they thought of the song that became “Sing!”during the actress’s poor singing audition. But it wasn’t until “At the Ballet” that they knew they had something special.
Throughout the development process, the cast and creative team worried that the show might be too insular, too focused on the business. They needn’t have worried. The show was a massive hit immediately after it premiered at The Public Theater. The glowing reviews poured in. Clive Barnes of The New York Times said, “the conservative word for A Chorus Line is tremendous, or perhaps terrific.” A Chorus Line quickly transferred to Broadway and had its first performance on July 25, 1975.
It is not an exaggeration to say that A Chorus Line saved Broadway. Broadway attendance was at a near all-time low of 6.6 million before the musical premiered. Afterwards, A Chorus Line shot the attendance up to 8.8 million, became the centerpiece for New York City tourist promotion and led to the revitalization of Times Square. In 1983, on its 3,389 performance, A Chorus Line became the longest running musical in Broadway history, a title it would hold until 1997.
More...
https://www.sigtheatre.org/read-watch-and-explore/behind-the-line-the-creation-of-a-chorus-line
***
A Chorus Line changed the course of musical theater. Rejecting traditional sets, costumes and big stars, the show introduced gritty psychological realism to musicals. And all two hours and 10 minutes of its almost non-stop music has enjoyed a life even beyond the show. Marvin Hamlisch composed the backstage musical about dancers auditioning for a chorus line, and Edward Kleban wrote the lyrics.
"One" is the term for that number a chorus performs behind the star to make her or him look good. But in this show, "One" also stands for the united facelessness of all those gypsy hoofers desperate to dance. In 1983, when Chorus Line became the longest running musical in Broadway history — that record was broken in 1997 by Cats -- Kleban talked to me about his show and "One," its singularly sensational song.
I asked him if the lyrics he wrote for "One" were his favorite in the show. "Not at all," he said. "They were the hardest, in a way — the lyrics to 'One,' because they had to sort of say nothing and everything at the same time."
He didn't like the other hit song in the musical, "What I Did for Love," either. "I like that the least, actually," he said. He objected to it precisely because it was written to be a hit. It didn't do what he thought theater songs should do: further the plot, reveal character. In fact, Kleban disliked that song so much that he put a note about it in his last will and testament, read at his 1988 memorial service by Linda Kline, his longtime companion:
"Anyone who wants to play an instrument, or to sing any songs or music — with the exception of the composition 'What I Did for Love,' which I do not wish to be performed at my funeral — should also be allowed."
Kleban was a notorious perfectionist, a stickler, impossible sometimes. He was one of my dearest friends, since high school. Witty, creative and idiosyncratic, he took naps every afternoon from noon to three and simply could not deal with the Lincoln Tunnel. He collected dictionaries and began subscribing to the New Yorker magazine when he was 16, and it was still definitive. After A Chorus Line made him a millionaire, Kleban wore custom-made shirts with stripes.
More...
https://www.npr.org/2000/05/22/1074450/npr-100-i-a-chorus-line-i
***
NYTimes, May 22, 1975
The conservative word for “A Chorus Line” might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific. Michael Bennett's newstyle musical opened at the Newman Theater of the New Shakespeare Festival Public Theater on Lafayette Street last night, and the reception was so shattering that it is surprising if by the time you read this, the New York Shakespeare Festival has got a Newman Theater still standing in in its Public Theater complex on Lafayette Street. It was that kind of reception, and it is that kind of a show.
We have for years been hearing about innovative musicals; now Mr. Bennett has really innovated one. “A Chorus Line” takes a close, hard squint at Broadway babies on parade—here and now. The scene is a Broadway gypsy encampment—and the chorus, and how to get into it, is the line of battle.
It is easy to see from where “A Chorus Line” evolved. It is in direct succession to Harold Prince's “Company,” and, to a lesser extent, “Cabaret” and “Follies.” The debt is unmistakable, but it has been paid in full. What makes “A Chorus Line” so devastatingly effective is its honesty of subject matter—so that even its faults can work for it.
Show‐business musicals always start with a certain advantage. Even their clichés can pass for justifiable observation of the form, and Mr. Bennett was obviously aware of this when he had his idea. But the idea is bright—indeed, it glows like a beacon heavenward. Like most great ideas it is simple. It is nothing but the anatomy of a chorus line. And the gypsies themselves—those dear, tough, soft‐bitten Broadway show dancers, who are the salt and the earth of the small white way —are all neatly dissected as if they were a row of chickens. Their job‐hunger, their sex lives, their failures (because even the best of them never thought of themselves forever in the chorus but 99 per cent of them will be there until they drop or drop out), their feeling toward dancing, why they started and what they might do when they stop—all is under a coruscatingly cruel microscope.
More...
https://archive.ph/f7NZx#selection-625.0-637.872
***
A CHORUS LINE '76 Tony Awards
The opening sequence from "A Chorus Line" with the original cast, as seen on the 1976 Tony Awards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vFQRmqut2E
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
A Handful of Difficulties
Experience "A Handful of Difficulties," a dynamic new play inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s "Writing the Truth – Five Difficulties."
Through music, movement, and live audience engagement, this theatrical workshop explores the power and responsibility of speaking truth in challenging times. Join us for an evening of connection, questioning, and creative action embodied in story and music.
Limited-edition mini books of the performance text will be available, with proceeds supporting causes chosen by the artists. Be part of this living archive and collective journey to build understanding on telling the truth in creative work and life.
Co-created by Adam Turay, Jamila Khan, Kaveh Haghtalab, Lily Ali-Oshatz, Samantha Kochis, Sierra Michelle, and Sophia Valera Heinecke.
Saturday, August 22 • 7 PM - 9:30 PM
Le Petit Versailles Garden
247 East 2nd Street
New York, NY
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-handful-of-difficulties-tickets-1996656830328?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The annual 10-Minute Play Festival returns to Winters Theatre Company for the 2027 season. To submit your original 10-minute play to be considered for the 2027 Festival, please review the festival requirements and then complete and submit the application form below.
Any play submission must come directly from the original playwright/author of the play.
Every play must be fully performed in 10-minutes or less.
Script should not rely on more than minimalist props.
***
Playwrights First submission window open
$1,000 first place.
Award listing of playwright and play title on our website.
Professional reading in NYC when feasible.
Overall, we look for:
- Imagination and originality in both style and subject or point of view.
- Characters that intrigue and move us.
- A compelling action revealing the human condition.
- Theatricality inherent in the above.
***
Mixed Bag is a variety show for first drafts. We provide artists working in a variety of mediums with a low-tech space and audiences to further develop their works. We hope this will be an opportunity to learn about your piece and discover the next steps in your process.
What we are looking for:
In-development work that has not yet premiered. One or two developmental readings or showings is okay, but we are looking for work in the earlier stages of development.
Works in any medium: performance art, dance, theater, film, music, poetry, multi-media, interactive art, magic, mime, juggling, etc. (these can be excerpts of longer works).
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** A CHORUS LINE ***
How much has “A Chorus Line” changed in 50 years? Or, rather, how much has it changed us?
If you want to measure the musical against your memories, you could pop over to Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., where the director Alan Paul is celebrating its golden anniversary. (Technically the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is 51 years old; it premiered at the Public Theater in the spring of 1975 and moved to Broadway that summer.)
“A Chorus Line” has many authors. Marvin Hamlisch wrote the music, Edward Kleban wrote the lyrics, and credit for the book belongs to James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante. But the stories themselves originated with real Broadway dancers — none of whom are in the program — who participated in interview sessions with Michael Bennett, the show’s gifted young director, conceiver and choreographer.
Bennett then asked them to audition to play, essentially, themselves. Not everyone made the cut. And none of the storytellers earned much — royalty payments topped out around $10,000 per year, even when the show was making millions. So there’s an acidic bite in its tissues. We taste the mold in good cheese; fine wine can taste of dirt. And in the sumptuous “A Chorus Line,” the terroir is fear.
More...
https://archive.ph/jToci
***
A Chorus Line, for the uninitiated, transports audiences to a dance audition being held in a Broadway theatre for the ensemble of a musical. A line of hopeful dancers assembles to try their best at getting this job, but director-choreographer Zach has more in mind than testing their dance abilities. Mostly speaking unseen from the audience, Zach probes the dancers on their childhoods, wanting to know more about the dancers themselves. Songs from Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban’s Tony-winning score include standards like “One” and “What I Did for Love.” If you’re a theatre fan, you may well be able to add the entire remainder of the score to the list of favorites this show introduced, too (personal points to “The Music and the Mirror” and “At the Ballet”).
The show is one of those rare huge successes that hits both artistically and commercially. For obvious reasons, theatre people tend to love A Chorus Line. The show is about us, even if you’re not specifically a dancer. But the brilliance of the show—specifically director-choreographer Michael Bennett’s concept, executed with book writers Nicholas Dante and James Kirkwood Jr.—is that it uncovers stories that are wildly universal. That shows itself very straightforwardly when it’s covering the performers’ adolescence and puberty in the "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love" montage, for instance.
But on a deeper level, the show is about people who really want something, need something, and have to make themselves vulnerable to get it. That’s always true in auditions—one is never more vulnerable than doing your thing and hoping a decision maker likes you best. But it gets amplified when Zach starts digging into the dancers’ backgrounds, which ends up involving everything from funny anecdotes to painful memories of real trauma. And as a result, it’s pretty hard to not empathize with what you’re seeing on stage in this show, whether you’re a professional performer or an office worker.
More...
https://playbill.com/article/once-more-from-the-top-inside-the-starry-emotional-50th-anniversary-a-chorus-line-concert
***
What WE Did For Love ft. cast of A Chorus Line Philippines | Theatre Group Asia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_jrJAsZgeA
***
The first workshop was on August 4, 1974. A Chorus Line is unique in its development. There was no real script to start with and each role was created organically, individually crafted to suit the talents and personality of the person playing it. Several dancers played versions of themselves and others played characters created from combining several different dancers’ stories. The cast members also contributed their own stories that enhanced the characters. Most fascinating was that all of the stories were true – and the process was deeply emotional for the cast who were used to not being allowed a voice in the creative process. From these character developments and personalities, Hamlisch and Kleban fashioned songs – for instance, they thought of the song that became “Sing!”during the actress’s poor singing audition. But it wasn’t until “At the Ballet” that they knew they had something special.
Throughout the development process, the cast and creative team worried that the show might be too insular, too focused on the business. They needn’t have worried. The show was a massive hit immediately after it premiered at The Public Theater. The glowing reviews poured in. Clive Barnes of The New York Times said, “the conservative word for A Chorus Line is tremendous, or perhaps terrific.” A Chorus Line quickly transferred to Broadway and had its first performance on July 25, 1975.
It is not an exaggeration to say that A Chorus Line saved Broadway. Broadway attendance was at a near all-time low of 6.6 million before the musical premiered. Afterwards, A Chorus Line shot the attendance up to 8.8 million, became the centerpiece for New York City tourist promotion and led to the revitalization of Times Square. In 1983, on its 3,389 performance, A Chorus Line became the longest running musical in Broadway history, a title it would hold until 1997.
More...
https://www.sigtheatre.org/read-watch-and-explore/behind-the-line-the-creation-of-a-chorus-line
***
A Chorus Line changed the course of musical theater. Rejecting traditional sets, costumes and big stars, the show introduced gritty psychological realism to musicals. And all two hours and 10 minutes of its almost non-stop music has enjoyed a life even beyond the show. Marvin Hamlisch composed the backstage musical about dancers auditioning for a chorus line, and Edward Kleban wrote the lyrics.
"One" is the term for that number a chorus performs behind the star to make her or him look good. But in this show, "One" also stands for the united facelessness of all those gypsy hoofers desperate to dance. In 1983, when Chorus Line became the longest running musical in Broadway history — that record was broken in 1997 by Cats -- Kleban talked to me about his show and "One," its singularly sensational song.
I asked him if the lyrics he wrote for "One" were his favorite in the show. "Not at all," he said. "They were the hardest, in a way — the lyrics to 'One,' because they had to sort of say nothing and everything at the same time."
He didn't like the other hit song in the musical, "What I Did for Love," either. "I like that the least, actually," he said. He objected to it precisely because it was written to be a hit. It didn't do what he thought theater songs should do: further the plot, reveal character. In fact, Kleban disliked that song so much that he put a note about it in his last will and testament, read at his 1988 memorial service by Linda Kline, his longtime companion:
"Anyone who wants to play an instrument, or to sing any songs or music — with the exception of the composition 'What I Did for Love,' which I do not wish to be performed at my funeral — should also be allowed."
Kleban was a notorious perfectionist, a stickler, impossible sometimes. He was one of my dearest friends, since high school. Witty, creative and idiosyncratic, he took naps every afternoon from noon to three and simply could not deal with the Lincoln Tunnel. He collected dictionaries and began subscribing to the New Yorker magazine when he was 16, and it was still definitive. After A Chorus Line made him a millionaire, Kleban wore custom-made shirts with stripes.
More...
https://www.npr.org/2000/05/22/1074450/npr-100-i-a-chorus-line-i
***
NYTimes, May 22, 1975
The conservative word for “A Chorus Line” might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific. Michael Bennett's newstyle musical opened at the Newman Theater of the New Shakespeare Festival Public Theater on Lafayette Street last night, and the reception was so shattering that it is surprising if by the time you read this, the New York Shakespeare Festival has got a Newman Theater still standing in in its Public Theater complex on Lafayette Street. It was that kind of reception, and it is that kind of a show.
We have for years been hearing about innovative musicals; now Mr. Bennett has really innovated one. “A Chorus Line” takes a close, hard squint at Broadway babies on parade—here and now. The scene is a Broadway gypsy encampment—and the chorus, and how to get into it, is the line of battle.
It is easy to see from where “A Chorus Line” evolved. It is in direct succession to Harold Prince's “Company,” and, to a lesser extent, “Cabaret” and “Follies.” The debt is unmistakable, but it has been paid in full. What makes “A Chorus Line” so devastatingly effective is its honesty of subject matter—so that even its faults can work for it.
Show‐business musicals always start with a certain advantage. Even their clichés can pass for justifiable observation of the form, and Mr. Bennett was obviously aware of this when he had his idea. But the idea is bright—indeed, it glows like a beacon heavenward. Like most great ideas it is simple. It is nothing but the anatomy of a chorus line. And the gypsies themselves—those dear, tough, soft‐bitten Broadway show dancers, who are the salt and the earth of the small white way —are all neatly dissected as if they were a row of chickens. Their job‐hunger, their sex lives, their failures (because even the best of them never thought of themselves forever in the chorus but 99 per cent of them will be there until they drop or drop out), their feeling toward dancing, why they started and what they might do when they stop—all is under a coruscatingly cruel microscope.
More...
https://archive.ph/f7NZx#selection-625.0-637.872
***
A CHORUS LINE '76 Tony Awards
The opening sequence from "A Chorus Line" with the original cast, as seen on the 1976 Tony Awards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vFQRmqut2E
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