NYCPlaywrights November 4, 2023

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

Now in its 35th year, NAMT’s Festival of New Musicals is the cornerstone of NAMT’s mission to be a catalyst for nurturing musical theatre development and production. Every year, we feature eight musicals in short presentations for an audience of over 700 industry professionals. We look for new musicals at all stages of development from the broadest possible range of voices.

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SheNYC is the City’s premier festival showcasing new, original works by gender-marginalized writers, composers, & directors.
Musicals – musicals of any size, shape, and form are welcome to apply. Just keep in mind that 2-hour run time limit. You can submit a show that runs longer than that in its current form, as long as you’re okay with making some trims for the festival.
Plays – again, plays of any size, shape, and form are welcome to apply!

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great weather for MEDIA seeks flash fiction, short stories, dramatic monologues, and creative nonfiction for our annual print anthology. One prose / creative nonfiction piece, two if both under 500 words. Maximum word count: 2,500. Please include the word count on the first page.

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


*** CATHARSIS ***

The goal, the telos, of theater, as set out in Aristotle’s Poetics, is catharsis. Aristotle emphasizes this point in his summarizing section, “What has been said” at the beginning of Poetics. As Belfiore states, “The definition of tragedy, the conclusion… include[s] the final cause (telos) of tragedy, and Aristotle’s phrasing, ‘Accomplishing katharsis,” suggests that Katharsis is this final cause’”(158). In his definition of tragedy, which he considered the only worthy form of performance, Aristotle stated that tragedy would “Effect through pity and fear, the purification of such emotions” (23). Acknowledging that catharsis is the goal of theater demands that we interrogate the term, which has been contested and debated by scholars since Poetics was rediscovered in the Renaissance. For a proper evaluation of the ways in which The Theater of Cruelty as laid out by Artaud shares this desired effect, we must come to an understanding of what Aristotle actually meant by a cathartic theater.

More...
https://bostonexperimentaltheatre.com/artauds-aristotelian-overture/

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Aristotle. He knows a lot, right? And if you choose to believe Aristotle, then you must believe all the mechanics of tragedy that Mike is about to lay on you. This week, we're looking at Aristotle's rules for the basic elements of theater, and how those can be used to bring about catharsis, the emotional release triggered by onstage trauma. You know you love the catharsis.

VIDEO:
https://pbswisconsin.org/watch/crash-course-theater/tragedy-lessons-from-aristotle-wviqal/

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As a performer turned director, Mitchell recalls the first time he felt a calling to be on stage. He was in eighth grade and touring Scotland as a member of his middle school’s production of Cole Porter’s "Ain't Misbehavin’." The experience was mind-opening and solidified in him the desire to pursue a career in musical theater.

Since then, he attended Florida A&M University, performed in powerful plays like author Alice Walker’s stage adaptation of "The Color Purple," and ultimately received a Bachelor of Arts in theater. Shortly after, he began teaching elementary school theater and directing throughout Tallahassee. The journey he took his first time directing helped to shape his approach to arts education.

Although he was only 28 while directing high school students in the production of playwright Samm-Art Williams' "Home," he knew he could tell stories through theater. “I’m a teacher. I tell people I'm not training actors. I’m not training technicians. I’m training another generation of theater appreciators,” says Mitchell. Currently, he teaches kindergarten to 5th-grade musical theater at Apalachee Tapestry Magnet School of the Arts.

Mitchell’s process is one that values the actor. He likes to think of himself as an “actor’s director” whose primary goal is guiding actors toward discovering their character and story. The catharsis chased by actors and audiences alike is one Mitchell relies on to help push the story forward.

For Mitchell, the intimacy shared between the audience and the actors leads to such a catharsis, and as a director, he feels honored to share in such a moment.

More...
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/entertainment/things-to-do/2023/07/21/director-chases-catharsis-with-james-baldwins-the-amen-corner/70440340007/

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As I watched Broken Theater unfold, all of these emotions felt almost too accessible. Waves of anxiety, love, and bitterness crashed over me. I thought it was all going to fall apart. It never did. The stakes among the creators are high, personal but shared. Broken Theater is a gift that the actors, musicians, and dancers gave each other under the watchful eye of Smith, who for the past decade has forged a reputation for creating rich tents for others. Watching Broken Theater, I felt wrung out by some ancient ocean. Catharsis is a rare medicine. I swam out of the theater bathed in it—smiling like a maniac baptized in love.

More...
https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2023/06/13/broken-theater-american-modern-opera

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When I go to the theater, the search for catharsis is the same, but the result is more discouraging. I find even less catharsis at the theater than I do online. And this time, the problem isn’t me. The Internet is flooded with cathartic content and can deliver it in an instant. Anyone with a smartphone carries catharsis in their pocket. It has theatre hopelessly outmatched.

As such, the best shows that I have seen in Chicago no longer focus on enacting a private catharsis. They’ve gotten out of that game altogether. Instead, they seek to create a communal catharsis, one in which the barrier between the actor and the audience is broken down, and the experience is shared freely, back and forth between them. It’s something that can only be created IRL, the one place the Internet still can’t quite reach.

More...
https://magazine.art21.org/2015/10/13/long-live-catharsis/

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The purpose of catharsis can be transformational, or its purpose can be to reconcile the individual to the status quo, the consensus view of reality.

That’s why Brecht wanted his audiences to experience the Verfremdungseffekt instead of catharsis. He wanted them to look askance at the consensus view of reality, the status quo, and ask why it was like that.

Some rituals are intended to be transformational. Their purpose may be to accustom the participant to their new status in life (which is the case with rites of passage), or it may be to awaken them to new ways of looking at the world, in which case it is more like the Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect), which provides a new perspective on life.

More...
https://dowsingfordivinity.com/2020/05/18/theatre-and-ritual/

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An act performed on stage is not that straightforward. Though the protagonist may resolve their problems by the end of the play and vent all their negative emotions during the process, there is an audience that can feel them too. The theatre is a curious place. The stage and the seats represent two complementary worlds: fiction and reality. 

Catharsis is a process which connects the two. It is a wave of emotion that spreads across the audience. The term means ‘purification’ or ‘purgation’, and refers primarily to pity and fear. Aristotle was the first to mention it in his acclaimed work Poetics, and believed that if the audience could actually release all the negativity along with the character, they would be able to cope better with similar situations in life. Since Aristotle did not provide any definition of the term catharsis or describe it in detail, we may come up with our own explanation. We could possibly conclude that the portrayal of a character then was not so much about the narration of a story as it was about imparting a lesson to the spectators. They were to actually feel catharsis in its true sense, for the actor was feeling it intentionally all the while.

Although the term ‘catharsis’ has been defined many times over the centuries, it seems that catharsis is, till date, viewed by most as a process experienced during a performance, a play or dance, or even while watching a movie. The COVID-19 pandemic witnessed a novel kind of catharsis - a purgation of the negativity that had bottled-up during the lockdown. A study shed light on a trend that gathered pace during the pandemic. People preferred to watch films or TV series that dealt with epidemics, contagions, or viruses. It is somewhat counterintuitive that individuals chose to watch movies or TV series that discussed the very pain they were going through themselves. But viewing a similar situation on screen served as a means of an emotional release for the growing audience. The spectators could project their fears and uncertainties onto the movies or TV series which not only depicted but also suggested possible solutions to the situation they had to face in real life, albeit unrealistically.

More...
https://www.monkprayogshala.in/blog/2022/6/3/catharsis-purgation-pleasure-or-a-precautionary-measure