NYCPlaywrights May 8, 2021

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***

GREAT PERFORMANCES | UNCLE VANYA

Tony Award nominee Conor McPherson breathes new life into Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece with his acclaimed adaptation of the drama, portraying life at the turn of the 20th century filled with tumultuous frustration, dark humor and hidden passions.

S48 E18 | 2:24:55 | AIRED: 5/7/2021 | EXPIRES: 6/4/2021 | 

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

The MTB Audio Drama Scriptwriting Competition celebrates exciting aural storytelling with a $250 first prize and $100 second-place prize. Authors retain all script rights.

The theme for 2021’s competition is adventure and comedy scripts that engage and amuse audiences.

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Announcing JOOK’s 2nd Annual Summer Spotlight Series celebrating Southern writers and new Southern plays! After the success of the first series and the subsequent workshop of Seth McNeill’s NATCHETOCHES in 2020, this uplifting project returns for a second round of submissions.

We are open to reading new works by writers from the South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. 

We're also open to reading new plays by writers outside of these states if the work is set in the South. 

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BETC’s new play development program, Generations, features the work of parent playwrights with children under 18. The name comes from BETC’s goals for the program: to welcome all generations into the theater to see new plays, and to empower playwrights to generate new work.

Each season, BETC selects one playwright through a national competition to join us in Boulder for a one-week residency. During the residency week, the playwright works with a professional director, dramaturg, and actors to develop the selected script. The week concludes with a public reading and post-reading conversation.

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

*** ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & THEATER ***

CAN A ROBOT AND A THEATRE HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON?

100 years ago, the word “robot” was invented by the Czechoslovak brothers Karel and Josef Čapek. The word appeared for the first time in Karel’s theatre play titled R.U.R. premiered in 1921. The play is about humanoid robots who seem happy to work for humans at first, but later a robot rebellion leads to the extinction of the human race. The play achieved a fast international success when it was performed not only in Prague but also in London, New York or Chicago.

Karel Čapek was one of the first people who thought of a potential threat if machine-robot inventions happen too fast or without a regulation. Did he predict the threats of the 21st century? Or… are robots no danger for us? So far, robots can perform many quite easy tasks, but we want to challenge them!

To celebrate the centenary of invention of the word “robot” we wanted start a project to know if a robot can write a theatre play. Do you think artificial intelligence is able to create an enjoyable theatre script? Can a robot become a playwright like its own father Karel Čapek 100 years ago? We found out the answer on 26 February 2021 during a premiere of the first play written by AI titled “AI: When a Robot Writes a Play”. The play watched 18 450 devices (perhaps up to 30 000 people).

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One hundred years ago, a play by the Czech author Karel Čapek introduced the word “robot,” telling the story of artificial factory workers designed to serve humans. Now, in a metanarrative twist, a robot itself has written a play. And it premieres online today.

“It’s a kind of futuristic Little Prince,” says dramatist David Košťák, who oversaw the script. Like the classical French children’s book, the 60-minute production—AI: When a robot writes a play—tells the journey of a character (this time a robot), who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death.

The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk’s company OpenAI, this “robot” is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet. (You can test it here.) So far, the technology has been used to write fake news, short stories, and poems. The play is GPT-2’s first theater production, the team behind it claims.

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Computers, at their Turing core, are discrete state machines, i.e. all Turing-complete computers can be sufficiently described by a set of possible discrete states and transition rules (Turing 1936; Hopcroft and Ullman 1979). Importantly, these states are, in the last instance, physical states: configurations of electric charges in the vast integrated circuitry of the hyperobject (Morton 2013) that is the computer. “There is no software”, as Friedrich Kittler famously states (Kittler 2013). Computers are thus fluid, ever-changing objects, jumping from one state to the other, with countless repetitions, loops, and variations.

We find the same kind of objects in theater. We could even say that we find only the same kind of objects in theater: on stage, objects are never static, never resting, always recontextualized with the flow of time. They change when the lighting changes, when the scene changes, when they are picked up or put down. They even change under the gaze of the audience. After all, in the theater, the spectator has the freedom to let their gaze flow freely and focus only on parts of the image that is constructed before them. More importantly however, all of these states are discrete because they are composed. The mis-en-scene establishes a set of theatrical states and transition rules that include each and every thing on stage.

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From the Electric Mouth further capitalizes on the virtual sphere by using technology to speed up the writing process, AI Generation Manager Justin Evans said. As script-writing lead, Evans said there have yet to be any technological challenges despite using AI as a writing tool for the first time. The AI is fed with content from commercials and game shows such as National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” he said. These texts are then used to build the machine’s neural network, which takes the content, learns from it and creates a new script.

Using artificial intelligence has accelerated the script process to a roughly one-week period, Evans said, creating more flexibility for ThEM and its global participants. However, he said he still has to keep the unpredictable AI within the realm of what would be interesting to a human audience. The main concern with this technology, he said, is its tendency to favor overly mundane topics, which can derail the entertainment aspect of the project. On the other hand, there is also a risk of the script becoming really random and absurdist, but such abstract elements contribute to the playful goal of the project, Cohen said.

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Annie Dorsen, a Brooklyn-based director and writer, has been named a recipient of the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship. Her work features a blend of theatrical drama and artificial intelligence — and they involve singing laptops, chatbots and an “algorithmic” take on Shakespeare.

The fellowship, often referred to as the “genius” grant, awards $625,000 to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits,” according to the MacArthur Foundation, which announced its new recipients Sept. 25.

Theater and A.I. might not seem like a natural pairing, but Dorsen recently told the Los Angeles Times that “the double nature of theater seems very similar to computer-generated language.”

She first got the idea to combine tech and theater after reading the essay, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which was written in 1950 by Alan Turing. In it, he posits that humans can artificially produce the effect of thinking.

“The relationship between computer science, machine learning and theater is a strong one, and a fertile ground for exploration,” Dorsen told the Los Angeles Times. “Both have to do with the uncertainty between truth and illusion — what you can trust, how you know what you know, and do your eyes deceive you.”

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The use of expanding technology such as AI (artificial intelligence), AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality) in theatre today is encouraging and presents wonderful challenges to storytellers throughout the world. Watch as we follow the teams of Krzysztof Garbaczewski of Dream Adoption Society and the creative visionaries behind Frankenstein AI at The Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab develop, demonstrate, and perform with new technology that enhances the audience experience and shows us all what is possible in the next generation of storytelling.

For more information on Digital Storytelling Lab visit http://www.digitalstorytellinglab.com.

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Measuring Audience and Actor Emotions at a Theater Play through Automatic Emotion Recognition from Face, Speech, and Body Sensors

Abstract: We describe a preliminary experiment to track the emotions of actors and audience in a theater play through machine learning and AI. During a forty-minute play in Zurich, eight actors were equipped with body sensing smartwatches. At the same time, the emotions of the audience were tracked anonymously using facial emotion tracking. In parallel, also the emotions in the voices of the actors were assessed through automatic voice emotion tracking. This paper demonstrates a first fully automated and privacy-respecting system to measure both audience and actor satisfaction during a public performance.

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Random Plot Generator

The aim of this writing prompt is to help you develop a story-line. When you click the buttons, they will generate two characters, a setting, a situation and a theme. Your job is to put the elements together and come up with an idea for a story.

You can change an element by clicking the button again.

Main character  Character 2  Setting  Situation  Theme Character action