NYCPlaywrights January 12, 2019

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Jan 12, 2019, 5:01:33 PM1/12/19
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights


*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

Urban Stages Free 2019 Readings
No RSVP Necessary. 
Donate What You Wish For Wine.
Doors open 30 mins before showtime

Monday, January 14, 2019 
7pm
QUEEN OF SAD MISCHANCE 
A play about academia, race, power and belonging.
By John Minigan
Directed by Vincent Scott

Intense, bi-racial college senior Kym thinks she’s lucked into the perfect resume-builder: a research assistantship helping feminist scholar Beverly Norden finish her ground-breaking book on Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret before Alzheimer’s makes the task impossible. As Kym learns that more than Beverly’s failing memory stands in the way of both the book and the carefully-planned trajectory of her own future career, she’s faced with the hardest decisions of her life.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2019
7pm
EGYPTIAN SONG 
A delicate journey where brother turns against sister
By James Christy
Directed by Michael Barakiva

Nalal and Zahia are boy/girl twins growing up in rural Egypt in the 1920s with a domineering (but loving) widowed mother. Zahia has a gorgeous singing voice and from an early age sings Nahal to sleep at night. As she gains attention as a singer, her mother decides that her marriage prospects are more important and forbids her from performing.
While she used to confide in her brother Nahal, he has become more distant as he aligns himself with an ultra-conservative group. She befriends Hamdy, a worker in her mother’s store. They aren’t allowed to speak because Hamdy is a man outside of her family, but they pass notes. When they take a risky outing together alone, Nahal learns what’s happened. His confrontation with his sister lays bare the conflict between their filial bond and his perception of his family’s honor.



*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

Saturday, February 23, 2019
12PM
"Missed Connections"
Short plays by Kyle A. Smith

 • Frisky
 • Miss Direction
 • Intrusive Thoughts
 • Miss Conduct
 • Don
 • Miss Education

Also presenting a monologue by Marjie Conn
as well as a new short play by Johnny Culver.

Ailey Auditorium Harry Belafonte-115th Street Library 
203 West 115th Street New York
More info 631-898-4205


*** DISCOUNT TICKETS PSYKIDZ: A NEW MUSICAL ***

CLASS ACT NY to Stage Concert Performance of Bobby Cronin’s 
PSYKIDZ: A New Musical

$25 discount with the code NYCPLAYWRIGHTS
which brings the ticket price down to $10. 
(This does not include the two-beverage minimum.)

More information...



*** 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 10-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:
2/20: Section F with SUZANNE BRADBEER (The God Game)
2/24: Section D with EDDIE SANCHEZ (Barefoot Boy with Shoes On)

Classes start in February. Payment plans available. 


*** PLAYWRIGHTS OPPORTUNITIES ***

The UC San Diego’s Department of Theatre and Dance seeks from all enrolled undergraduate students submissions of previously unproduced, unpublished scripts highlighting the African-American experience in contemporary or historical terms. Adaptations from books and other forms are not allowed.
A $1000 honorarium will be awarded to the winning playwright.
A staged reading of the winning script on May 12th, 2018, in the Wagner New Play Festival attended by national theatre professionals.

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The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Mississippi, in partnership with the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, seek an emerging, unpublished woman playwright (transgender inclusive) for a 20 day summer residency in Oxford, Mississippi. Participation in the residency does not require the completion of a work but is designed to provide support to advance the creation, production, and presentation of theatrical works by women writers.

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IASH and the Traverse Theatre will commission a play on or inspired by any aspect of the Institute’s current interests. The stipend will be £10,000 and the recipient will have a private office and full Fellowship at IASH, and contribute to the Institute’s events, including giving at least one work-in-progress seminar during the tenure of the Fellowship.  During the period of the fellowship the playwright will receive dramaturgical support from the Traverse’s Literary Department. The recipient must be Edinburgh-based for the duration of the residency, as their regular presence at IASH is expected and they will be encouraged to play a part in the artistic life of the theatre.


*** For more information about these and other opportunities see the web site at http://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** PLAYS ABOUT TREASON ***

Some plays begin with a question and eventually answer it. "Treason," a new play by Sallie Bingham at the Perry Street Theater, does the opposite. It starts with a known quantity, the poet Ezra Pound, and at the end leaves you asking, "What, exactly, was the attraction of this spineless, self-indulgent weasel?"

The play, superbly acted, with an especially prize-worthy performance by Philip Pleasants as Pound, wastes no time getting down to its business, which is not Pound's poetry but his love life and his hate-filled politics. It begins in 1941 with a stark slice of a radio broadcast from Rome in which Pound, at that point well known, excoriates Jews and praises Germany. Later he is charged with treason by the United States, declared insane and committed to an institution in Washington.

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Cue for Treason (1940) is a children's historical novel written by Geoffrey Trease, and is his best-known work. The novel is set in Elizabethan England at the end of the 16th century.[1] Two young runaways become boy actors, at first on the road and later in London, where they are befriended by William Shakespeare. They become aware of a plot against Queen Elizabeth's life and attempt to prevent it.

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Energetic and impassioned, Richmond author and playwright David L. Robbins seems as if he’s enthusiastic about pretty much everything.

But he was definitely not enthusiastic when The John Marshall Foundation approached him with the possibility of writing a play about Marshall, specifically the Aaron Burr treason trial that Marshall presided over. Oh, and the foundation wanted it to be a production that would appeal to high school students, attorneys and the public at large.

Robbins acknowledged he is typically not enthralled at the notion of commissioned work — especially a scenario with so many prerequisites — but as a once-practicing attorney and admirer of Marshall, another Richmonder, he agreed to take a look. As he settled into his research, he began to see possibilities, and then it dawned on him: This would be a task perfectly suited for him.

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The Bloody Banquet[1] is an early 17th-century play, a revenge tragedy of uncertain date and authorship, attributed on its title page only to "T.D." It has attracted a substantial body of critical and scholarly commentary, chiefly for the challenging authorship problem it presents. It has been attributed to a collaboration between Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton.

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Tale of treason

In 1582, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), a man of humble origins, became Japan’s taiko (prime minister) after the death of the warlord Oda Nobunaga. But the taiko in “Ehon Taikoki (Records of the Taiko),” a bunraku (traditional Japanese puppet) play written by Chikamatsu Yanagi and collaborators in 1799, refers more properly to the general Akechi Mitsuhide, (called Takechi Mitsuhide in the play), who had assassinated Nobunaga (called Oda Harunaga), his and Hideyoshi’s overlord, because of his tyrannical conduct.

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How far must each of us go to reclaim our broken democracy?

By Adam Klugman of Portland, Oregon. Adam is an activist, media strategist, playwright, and the host of "Mad as Hell in America", a show on Portland's KPOJ 620.

Here’s a question that rarely gets asked anymore: what is the role of art in politics? The tradition has been that writers, performance artists, painters and the like would interpret world events and then import them into their art - a play about El Salvador, a painting that explores the theme of poverty, a novel about government corruption, etc. For the most part, these noble, well-intended works always remain, in a word, art. That is to say, they are rarely able to break from the confines of their assigned role to become another category altogether: politics.

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Another thing you can usually count on is history repeating itself. Here we are in the 21st century with accusations of conspiracy and treason filling the country as courtroom drama plays out across cyberspace. This only makes the play more relevant, in seeing how some of the same issues plagued the country 100 years ago. According to Ken Orman, the show’s publicist, “The whole project is as epic as the story.” 

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Hot on the heels of the premiere of Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes,” a dissection of a town council meeting that dissolves into “Lord of the Flies,” comes Brett Neveu’s “Traitor,” a stimulating contemporary adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” the action removed to struggling small-town Illinois, the events cataclysmic and the whole affair directed by no less than Michael Shannon, the Hollywood A-lister and two-time Oscar nominee who remains spectacularly dedicated to A Red Orchid Theatre, the ensemble-based company in Old Town where his career began.

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TREASON! is a story about the love triangle that changed the course of the American Revolution. It is a story about defining loyalty, understanding trust, misunderstanding loyalty and defining trust. It is a story about love gone wrong- big time!

Everyone knows Benedict Arnold. The dictionary, in fact, defines “traitor” as “a Benedict Arnold”. Now, through dramatic acting and sixteen original compelling and whimsical songs, this historical fiction explores the other side of the story!

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Jonathan Lynn has chosen a rich subject for a drama: the intersecting lives of Philippe Pétain and Charles de Gaulle. Covering the years from 1913 to 1945, the play shows how a father-son relationship between two professional soldiers culminated in Pétain’s trial for treason for collaborating with the Nazis. But, while the play covers a lot of ground, it seems torn between psychodrama and history lesson.

The two men, antithetical yet indissolubly linked, totally dominate the play. Pétain, who sees himself as the saviour of France through his defence of Verdun in 1916 and his armistice with the Germans in 1940, is wily, proud and pragmatic. De Gaulle, who regards himself as the embodiment of France and who placed himself at the head of the Free French forces to fight on in second world war exile, is bookish, humourless and arrogant.

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