NYCPlaywrights August 17, 2019

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

August 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31

September 1

Weekdays at 6PM ~ Weekends at 4PM

LADY CAPULET

By Melissa Bell

Directed by Emily Gallagher

What caused the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets? This prequel to Romeo and Juliet follows the story of Rose from country girl to lady of Verona and explores the betrayal, revenge, and manipulations that set the houses of Capulet and Montague against one another in a time when the influence of family, money, power, and gender determine everything. Using evocative language, Lady Capulet asks large questions about women’s place in culture today through a Shakespearean lens.

All performances are at Summit Rock in Central Park (B/C to American Museum of Natural History/81st street).

*** BYLINES ***

If you write other things besides plays, check out BYLINES.ORG for no-fee opportunities from the people who bring you NYCPlaywrights. 

Opportunities that pay this week include:

-> Flash Fiction Online accepts REPRINTS. Please submit in the REPRINT category. Payment is $.02 (two cents) per word.  

-> $50 to the best story that takes the reader on an unexpected journey from the first image to the next. Published online in the bridge the gap gallery.

-> Cherry Tree welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and literary shade. Payment is $20 per contributor and two contributor's copies.

For more no-fee opportunities ~ https://www.bylines.org

*** THE FIRST DRAFT at PRIMARY STAGES ESPA  ***

Whether you're writing your first play or your hundredth, it's not always easy to set your creative wheels in motion. This 8-week class will guide you through the development of your first draft, giving you concrete deadlines and constructive feedback to encourage you to get your ideas on the page. 

FACULTY AND START DATES:

9/22: Section A with EDDIE SANCHEZ (Barefoot Boy with Shoes On)

9/24: Section B with ADAM KRAAR (New World Rhapsody)

9/25: Section C with MICHAEL WALKUP (Producing Artistic Director, Page 73)

10/2: Section D with WINTER MILLER (No One Is Forgotten)

10/7: Section E with MELISA ANNIS  (Faculty, NYU Tisch Dramatic Writing Program)

Classes start in September. Payment plans available. https://primarystages.org/espa/writing/the-first-draft

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

This project is open to any unpublished and unproduced TYA scripts to be considered as one of four plays to be featured in the New Play-Reading Festival this coming season at The Growing Stage Theatre – The Children’s Theatre of New Jersey. 

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Last Frontier Theatre Conference 2020 Play Lab

The  Conference will take place June 14-21, 2020, in Valdez, Alaska.

Selected plays receive public readings, with both public and private feedback sessions led by theatre professionals. Authors must register for the Conference and be in attendance for their reading.

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Edgemar Center for the Arts is still currently seeking play submissions for our 2020 season. We are accepting any one act and full length plays.

We are also hosting a one act festival as well this year and next year.

You may submit as many works as you wish.

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

*** UNIQUE NEW YORK ~ THEATER SET IN NEW YORK CITY ***

HAZEL FLAGG

Hazel is a backwater Vermont girl who is believed to be dying of radium poisoning. A magazine gets hold of her story and brings her to New York, where she is the centre of attention. She finds time to fall in love with sophisticated Wallace Cook. When it is learned that she is really in the pink of health New York loses interest, but Wallace loves her all the same.

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STRAWHEAD begins late in Marilyn Monroe’s life. We find her alone with her memories on two successive nights. This is a play about recollection. In memory, no one ever has to answer the door; people merely walk into one’s mind.

So, our piece is composed of short scenes that cut into one another like a film. Memory, you see, is not unequal to a movie. Cinema, after all, is that delicate membrane between memory and the dream. So Marilyn’s life comes to her each night like a film.

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SO LONG, 174th STREET is a musical with a book by Joseph Stein and lyrics and music by Stan Daniels.

Based on Stein's play Enter Laughing, which had been adapted from the Carl Reiner book of the same name and served as the basis for a 1967 film, it focuses on the journey of young David Kolowitz from factory helper to actor and from insecure adolescence to self-assured adulthood in three whirlwind days in New York City in the late 1930s.

After six previews, the Broadway production, directed by Burt Shevelove and choreographed by Alan Johnson, opened on April 27, 1976, at the Harkness Theatre, where it closed after only 16 performances. The cast included Robert Morse, George S. Irving, Loni Ackerman, and Rita Rudner.

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'Rector's Girl is Disgraceful' 

Trenton Evening Times

January 30, 1909

Offensive vulgar and putrid in spots is THE GIRL FROM RECTOR'S which was produced for the first time in this country at Taylor Opera House last night. At first the audience leaned back and gasped at the rawness of the vulgarity and then it laughed at the ribald jests - that is a portion of the audience laughed. There were ladies present who sat with their eyes glued to the floor unable to believe that such things could actually be tolerated in a playhouse of such reputation as Taylor's.

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Having scored solidly on Broadway with two smashes, "Two for the Seesaw" and "The Miracle Worker," playwright William Gibson now is represented on the off-Broadway stage with DINNY AND THE WITCHES, a play he first wrote in 1950 and has now completely re-written for this production. The protagonist is a jazz trumpeter named Dinny who, in the course of the action is taught the meaning of life by three witches in Central Park.

1959 Billboard review

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POTASH AND PERLMUTTER is an American silent comedy film. The film is based on an ethnic Jewish comedy with characters created by Montague Glass and Charles Klein for a 1913 Broadway play of the same name which ran for 441 performances.[1] The play is based on the 1909 book of the same name by Montague Glass. This film is notable as the first release of Samuel Goldwyn's independent production company.[2][3]

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THEY WALK AMONG US is a one-act play written by Nicholas O'Neill, the youngest victim of the Station nightclub fire, a 2003 blaze that claimed the lives of 100 people in West Warwick, Rhode Island.[1] It is also the name of a film based on the play.[2]

The play deals with issues of grief and loss, as well as the search for meaning in the human existence, and features characters who are "guardian angels," all of whom were apparently teenagers who died young. One of these characters, Cyrus, is believed by O'Neill's family to have been based on himself. For these reasons, friends and family from his local community have suggested that the play is prophetic. The documentary 41 (film), created by Christian de Rezendes and Christian O'Neill, is in part based on this thesis.[2]

The play follows Adam Tyler, a young man in New York City who is struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality, which he feels is sinful. In alternating scenes, the play also follows the story of three guardian angels who have been assigned to watch over him.

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KNICKERBOCKER HOLIDAY ~ a musical comedy written in 1938 by Maxwell Anderson, with music by Kurt Weill, based In Name Only on Washington Irving's history of Old Dutch New York.

The setting of the play is circa 1647, on the day when Pieter Stuyvesant is to assume the title of Governor of New Amsterdam. The day also happens to be Hanging Day, and the council of the city have a hard time finding somebody to hang, despite several of them being guilty of hanging offenses. There is also a hero, Brom Broeck, a poor knife-sharpener who is in love with Mynheer Tienhoven's daughter and suffers from a strange disorder which brings him into conflict first with the council and then with Stuyvesant. Ever since coming to America, Brom has found himself unable to take orders from anybody.

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Other plays and musicals set in New York

ANGELS IN AMERICA

ANNIE

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE

AVENUE Q

etc.