NYCPlaywrights October 23, 2021

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

RITUAL

OCTOBER 29-30, 2021

11:00AM-7:00PM

90 E 3RD ST, NEW YORK, NY

Outside the gates of Argos, Orestes lies in wait at his safe house. The gods have gone quiet, and he can’t figure out why. But he’s desperate, and determined, to make them speak again.

An immersive installation based on the ancient Greek Oresteia, featuring a single actor for the entire 8-hour duration. 

Doors for Ritual will be open starting at 11:00am on both Friday and Saturday, and will close at 7:00pm when the experience ends. The experience is free but has limited capacity, and does not take reservations. If we reach capacity, a line will begin outside the door. Guests may exit and re-enter as many times as they wish, but they must rejoin the line should there be one when they return.

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*** DRAMATISTS GUILD: INCLUSION & NEGOTIATION ***

As part of our commitment to fostering a diverse, equitable, inclusive, accessible, and anti-racist industry, we have crafted a new and groundbreaking Dramatists Guild Inclusion Rider to support all dramatists and producers who have a desire to exercise these principles in the hiring of personnel involved in their productions. 

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*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

Carlo Annoni International Playwriting Prize accepts plays on any topic affecting the LGBTQ+ community, and the promotion of diversity in love, society, politics and culture.

We dedicate the 2022 Carlo Annoni Prize to all those individuals that fight to see their right to love respected both in Italy and in the world, and to those experiencing discrimination because of their identity.

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Harper Productions: The Fright Before Christmas

We’re looking for six original short horror plays to be performed at The Space this December 11th. The night will be MC'd by drag queen extraordinaire, Lady Aria Grey, and each performance will be judged by our panelists and the audience (and, yes, there will be prizes!). 

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ellipsis… literature & art is the annual literary journal published by the students of Westminster College since 1965. We accept original English language submissions in poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, drama, and art. Submit poems in one document, please. 

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

*** CLASHES WITH PLAYWRIGHTS ***

FRANK CHIN v MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

The literary dispute is more than an academic parlor game. Educators from Stanford to Yale are debating the values of non-white thought. Literature reflects a culture, defines a people. In this sense, the struggle between Chin and Kingston is a literary battle for the soul of Asian America.

“Maxine and Frank are brilliant writers,” said Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, the co-author of “Farewell to Manzanar” and a close friend of Kingston. “It’s sad this has all happened.”

The children of immigrants, Kingston and Chin both were born 50 years ago in the Year of the Angry Dragon. Both studied literature at UC Berkeley during the Days of Rage and plunged into the politics of the era. Both envied each other’s early writings.

Chin was the first to rise to literary stardom. After he founded the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco, his groundbreaking plays, “Chickencoop Chinaman” and “Year of the Dragon,” debuted Off Broadway in the early 1970s. Critics from the New Yorker to the Village Voice praised his theater for its power, originality and humor. The playwright raged over the fragile psyches of Asian-American men and against the Charlie Chan and Dr. Fu Man Chu stereotypes. He railed against meek minorities who swallowed the racist images of Asian males as eunuchs or yellow devils.

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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE v ROBERT GREENE

Let me tell you about something that happened to Shakespeare around the time that he turned 30. There was a writer of prose fiction named Robert Greene. He also specialized in writing about the criminal underworld in London. He wrote a book very near his death called A Groatsworth of Wit, and in it he surveys the literary scene in London. He’s basically turning out pulpy gossip about different writers, and towards the end, he mentions a newcomer—not by name. 

Later in the paragraph he refers to this person as “the only shake scene in the country,” but when he starts out, he goes after this guy as “an upstart crow, beautified in our feathers.” He is actually borrowing a line from Horace. Horace once described another poet as a crow decorated with other people’s feather. 

Greene was taking out after Shakespeare and basically accusing him of plagiarism—of stealing other people’s pretty stuff—their feathers. It is interesting, of course, that Greene was stealing Horace’s line to talk about Shakespeare stealing other peoples poetry. There’s a number of other insults that get leveled at Shakespeare in the few sentences that Greene turns out. He accuses him of plagiarism, and he accuses him of bombast, of copying Christopher Marlowe’s style. We all know Marlowe as the author of Dr. Faustus, of Tamburlaine. He also made a very weird attempt to put a bit of Virgil’s Aeneid on stage in a play called Dido, Queen of Carthage.

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LILLIAN HELLMAN v MARY MCCARTHY

Who would guess that by uttering a few harmless words you could trigger lawsuits in the millions, a furor in the literary world, and a Broadway show?

Nora Ephron’s play “Imaginary Friends,” about the feud between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, opens this week at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The play centers on an incident that occurred on my old PBS show, in 1979. I always enjoyed having McCarthy as a guest. She was lively, witty, opinionated, and striking on camera. And there was her smile, hilariously immortalized by Randall Jarrell, in “Pictures from an Institution”: “Torn animals were removed at sunset from that smile.”

My notes for the program that night read, “Miss McCarthy asked if you’d let her say a few words about a young writer she feels is underrated.” During the interview, in an attempt to be clever, I asked McCarthy to name some _over_rated writers, thinking that she would take that as her cue. Instead, she answered the question, mentioning John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, and, finally, Lillian Hellman, “who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.”

“What’s dishonest about her?” I asked.

“Everything,” McCarthy replied, smiling. “I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” There was an “ooh” and a laugh from the audience, but otherwise the moment passed innocuously. After the taping, the network’s lawyer—paid to anticipate litigation—did not utter even his occasional “Dick, we may have a problem.” Instead, he said, “Nice show.”

During breakfast the next morning, my assistant called. “Have you seen the papers?” she said. “Hellman is suing Mary McCarthy, PBS, and you for two and a quarter million.”

“And me?” I replied, in a prepubescent squeak. The other phone rang, and the familiar whiskey-and-cigarettes baritone rasped, “Why the hell didn’t you defend me?”

“I guess I never thought of you as defenseless, Lillian,” I managed.

“That’s bullshit. I’m suing the whole damn bunch of you.” In that, at least, she proved a woman of her word.

I had been to dinner at Lillian’s, and she, too, had been on my show. She was a sharp and entertaining guest—an eager appearer, arriving early, looking as if she’d just stepped out of Elizabeth Arden. No one was neutral about Lillian. She had a famous friendship with Dorothy Parker, yet to Jean Stafford she was “Old Scaly Bird.”

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MARTIN MCDONAGH v CONOR MCPHERSON

McDonagh was given the ridiculous press line as a “bad boy” of theater long ago, not just for his decidedly bleak, violent, profanity-laced plays, but for the candid interviews he gives (when he gives him), and also, that one time he told Sean Connery to fuck off. Recently, he was lamented in The New Yorker as a racist for a few of the characters in Behanding. Trouble follows the guy’s work. Either he can’t get away from it, or he relishes it.

Count this one as a vote for the latter: he used said New York Times interview to slam the (also Irish and critically lauded) playwright Conor McPherson.

In an interview four years ago Conor McPherson, a Dublin writer of similar stature, questioned how Irish he really was. “More like stage Irish,” he told me.

Mr. McDonagh responded to this comment with a flash of anger, disregarding a pledge he had made minutes before to give up harshly judging other living writers in the press, firing off one of those hilariously belligerent rants that his characters are known for and that can’t possibly be printed here. Translated from the profane to the mundane, he said he was going to beat up Mr. McPherson next time he saw him.

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BEN JOHNSON v GABRIEL SPENCER

On September 22, 1598, playwright Ben Jonson killed a prominent young actor named Gabriel Spencer in a duel near Hogsden Fields in Shoreditch, London. No one knows for certain what the duel was about, but two years earlier Spencer had stabbed a man to death in a brawl and was let off after pleading self-defence.

The cause of the duel most probably stemmed from a scandal in 1597 when Jonson co-wrote a satirical play with Thomas Nashe called The Isle of Dogs in which Spencer appeared.

The Privy Council declared the play to be seditious and ordered the arrest of the entire company, The Earl of Pembrooke’s Men.

Only Jonson, Spencer and another actor were taken into custody and they spent eight weeks in Marshalsea Prison. The Earl of Pembrooke’s Men was forced to disband, meaning that Spencer had to find a new company of players. Presumably, he blamed Jonson for the whole mess.

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HEDI TILLETTE DE CLERMONT-TONNERRE v SIR DAVID BARCLAY

Sir David Barclay has lost a lawsuit he filed in France against a little-known playwright who wrote a theatrical work that the British billionaire alleged hewed too closely to his rags-to-riches life story.

The decision is a setback for Mr Barclay, one of the twins who own the Telegraph newspaper and properties including London’s Ritz hotel.

Civil judges in the French city of Caen on Tuesday ruled that Mr Barclay did not adequately prove that the artist Hedi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre had invaded his privacy and defamed him by performing the play Two Brothers and the Lions.

They based the decision in part on a technicality that Mr Barclay never had a live performance recorded, but also wrote in the decision that the artist’s right to free expression outweighed the alleged harm to the billionaire.

Although Mr Barclay was seeking €100,000 in damages and a ban on further performances, the court ruled instead that Mr Barclay must pay roughly €56,000 in damages to Mr Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre, his publisher, and the theatres that backed the production to address the harm the lawsuit did to their respective reputations. He will also have to pay for a statement to that effect to be published in two French newspapers and two magazines.

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OSCAR WILDE v MARQUESS OF QUEENSBERRY

In the late 19th century, Oscar Wilde was one of the most celebrated writers in England. A member of London’s High Society, an extravagant personality and the author of successful books such as The Importance of Being Earnest and Dorian Gray. To this day, the books are still considered all-time classics.

Although he was married and had a child, Wilde was gay, which at the time, was not altogether acceptable. In fact, to act on it was a crime.

In 1895, he was involved with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, the son of the Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas Marquess of Queensberry. The Marquess was so incensed about this affair with his son, that he became intent on destroying Wilde. He put in place an evil and cunning plan. Wilde walked straight into it.

The Marquess left his calling card with a hall porter in Albermarle Club, an establishment where Wilde often dined. He told the porter to hand it to Wilde. The card said this: “To Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite.” While his spelling was not so good, and no-one who read it understood it, it had the desired effect on Wilde. It set in motion an unstoppable train.

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