NYCPLAYWRIGHTS MARCH 20, 2021

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***

The 24 Hour Plays - Viral Monologues

New monologues written, rehearsed and recorded in 24 hours by stars of stage and screen! Round 1 through 24 now available for viewing.

*** PRIMARY STAGES ***

The Storytelling of Marginalized People & The Business of Theater Classes at Primary Stages ESPA! 

Learn the history of the art of marginalized populations to then push the boundaries of traditional theater and reimagine what the future can be in The Storytelling of Marginalized People Workshop with Chesney Snow (Boxman in In Transit on Broadway) or learn about theater as a business in order to produce your own work with John Gould Rubin (Director, Turn Me Loose Off-Broadway). Classes begin in March. 

Flexible, artist-friendly payment plans available. 

http://primarystages.org/espa/writing.

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

The 2021 Femme Fatale Festival will be virtual.

1. All playwrights must identify as female.

2. Script can be no longer than 60 minutes in total.

3. Script can have limited previous productions.

4. Submission limited to 1 play per playwright

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Stonecoast Review accept Fictions, Pop Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Dramatic Works, Experimental, and Visual Art. We can’t wait to see your best pieces! Stonecoast Review offers feedback on 10% of declined submissions. Contributors will receive a complimentary copy of the issue in which their work appears.

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The Center at West Park Residencies

In Fall 2021, six individual artists or companies will be offered residencies at CWP to produce and perform original works of theater, dance, music, and interdisciplinary performance as part of THE INTERRUPTION: A Curated Performance Series. Each Residency will culminate in a weekend of three ticketed public performances of an evening-length work at CWP. Fall 2021 Residencies are available between August 30 and December 19, 2021.

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

*** SPRING AWAKENING ***

FRÜHLINGS ERWACHEN: EINE KINDERTRAGÖDIE // Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy remained unperformed for 15 years following its 1891 publication. The play was banned due to its portrayal of controversial content (sex, masturbation, rape, abuse, abortion, homosexuality, suicide). Max Reinhardt directed the first production, which premiered at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on November 20th, 1906. Subsequent productions have encountered varying critical and popular reception. Certainly the most successful iteration of Spring Awakening to date is Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s musical adaptation.

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Frühlings Erwachen

Script in the original German

Script in English translation

A PROEM FOR PRUDES

That it is a fatal error to bring up children, either boys or girls, in ignorance of their sexual nature is the thesis of Frank Wedekind's drama “Frühlings Erwachen.” From its title one might suppose it a peaceful little idyl of the youth of the year. No idea a could be more mistaken. It is a tragedy of frightful import, and its action is concerned with the development of natural instincts in the adolescent of both sexes.

The playwright has attacked his theme with European frankness; but of plot, in the usual acceptance of the term, there is little. Instead of the coherent drama of conventional type, Wedekind has given us a series of loosely connected scenes illuminative of character—scenes which surely have profound significance for all occupied in the training of the young. He sets before us a group of school children, lads and lassies just past the age of puberty, and shows logically that death and degradation may be their lot as the outcome of parental reticence. They are not vicious children, but little ones such as we meet every day, imaginative beings living in a world of youthful ideals and speculating about the mysteries which surround them. Wendla, sent to her grave by the abortive administered with the connivance of her affectionate but mistaken mother, is a most lovable creature, while Melchior, the father of her unborn [Pg vi] child, is a high type of boy whose downfall is due to a philosophic temperament, which leads him to inquire into the nature of life and to impart his knowledge to others; a temperament which, under proper guidance, would make him a useful, intelligent man. It is Melchior's very excellence of character which proves his undoing. That he should be imprisoned as a moral degenerate only serves to illustrate the stupidity of his parents and teachers. As for the suicide of Moritz, the imaginative youth who kills himself because he has failed in his examinations, that is another crime for which the dramatist makes false educational methods responsible.

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Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama

Frank Wedekind is perhaps the most daring dramatic spirit in Germany. Coming to the fore much later than Sudermann and Hauptmann, he did not follow in their path, but set out in quest of new truths. More boldly than any other dramatist Frank Wedekind has laid bare the shams of morality in reference to sex, especially attacking the ignorance surrounding the sex life of the child and its resultant tragedies.

Wedekind became widely known through his great drama “The Awakening of Spring,” which he called a tragedy of childhood, dedicating the work to parents and teachers. Verily an appropriate dedication, because parents and teachers are, in relation to the child’s needs, the most ignorant and mentally indolent class. Needless to say, this element entirely failed to grasp the social significance of Wedekind’s work. On the contrary, they saw in it an invasion of their tradi. tional authority and an outrage on the sacred rights of parenthood.

The critics also could see naught in Wedekind, except a base, perverted, almost diabolic nature bereft of all finer feeling. But professional critics seldom see below the surface; else they would discover beneath the grin and satire of Frank Wedekind a sensitive soul, deeply stirred by the heart — rending tragedies about him. Stirred and grieved especially by the misery and torture of the child, — the helpless victim unable to explain the forces germinating in its nature, often crushed and destroyed by mock modesty, sham decencies, and the complacent morality that greet its blind gropings.

Never was a more powerful indictment hurled against society, which out of sheer hypocrisy and cowardice persists that boys and girls must grow up in ignorance of their sex functions, that they must be sacrificed on the altar of stupidity and convention which taboo the enlightenment of the child in questions of such elemental importance to health and well-being.

The most criminal phase of the indictment, however, is that it is generally the most promising children who are sacrificed to sex ignorance and to the total lack of appreciation on the part of teachers of the latent qualities and tendencies in the child: the one slaying the body and soul, the other paralyzing the function of the brain; and both conspiring to give to the world mental and physical mediocrities.

“The Awakening of Spring” is laid in three acts and fourteen scenes, consisting almost entirely of dialogues among the children. So close is Wedekind to the soul of the child that he succeeds in unveiling before our eyes, with a most gripping touch, its joys and sorrows, its hopes and despair, its struggles and tragedies.

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Moritz Stiefel faces expulsion due to poor marks. When he is caught with an essay titled “Shame and Lust”, he is indeed kicked out – instead of classmate Melchior Gabor, who actually penned it. Gabor was drawing on his experiences with neighbourhood girl Wendla. Then Wendla turns up pregnant. Stiefel descends into despair ... Exploitation between Eros and Thanatos in this “sexual tragedy of youth” based on Frank Wedekind’s play. That piece provided inspiration for many films of the Weimar era that anticipated later teenage movies, including Geschminkte Jugend (Painted Youth, Carl Boese), Zwischen vierzehn und siebzehn (Between Fourteen and Seventeen, E. W. Emo) or Die Halbwüchsigen (The Adolescents, Edmund Heuberger, all 1929). Setting the film in the 1920s provided a chance to explore “modern” youth culture, complete with cigarettes, jazz music, the gramophone, and a goodly bit of alcohol. Richard Oswald, a master of films of manners and young sex beginning in the 1910s, fully explores the temptations of the youthful body, even early childhood flirtatiousness. At the same time, with his target audience in mind, the film laments the bigotry and double standards of the adult world.

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As the tragically misunderstood teens of “Spring Awakening” could tell you, sometimes parents just don’t get it.

“I remember being on the phone with my mom about five years ago,” singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik recalled recently, sitting between a pair of vintage rock organs in a makeshift music studio in Manhattan.

In 2003, Sheik was touring to support what would be his last major-label album, “Daylight,” and Mom had some unsolicited staging suggestions.

“She was like, ‘Duncan, I saw Madonna on the “Today” show this morning, and they showed footage from her concert. She’s got dancers and lights, it’s a whole experience -- I don’t understand, why don’t you have that?’ ”

Sheik patiently pointed out the exponential budgetary chasm between a brand-name pop extravaganza and a solo tour by an artist with a single major chart hit (1996’s “Barely Breathing”). But if he was looking to tout his own theatrical ambitions, he could have pointed to a project he had begun with playwright Steven Sater: a pop/rock musical based on Frank Wedekind’s oft-banned 1891 play “Spring Awakening.”

At the time, of course, Sheik, a theater newbie, didn’t foresee the Broadway phenom that would emerge in 2006 from this unlikely premise -- complete with lights and dancers, Ma -- let alone the eight Tony Awards, the long Broadway run, the nearly assured place in the musical theater canon. A sit-down production in London opens next January, and the show’s U.S. tour docks at the Ahmanson this week.

For his part, playwright and lyricist Sater vividly recalls another momentous phone conversation along the show’s bumpy road.

“I still remember, I was on the phone, walking down West 57th, and Duncan was saying that what he disliked in musical theater was when people talked, then started singing -- it seemed arbitrary,” said Sater recently from L.A., where he spends most of his time. “And I said that the songs in our show could function as interior monologues. That’s where this concept was born.”

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...in 1999, Sheik, a practicing Buddhist, met Steve Sater at a Buddhist organization in New York City. Sater asked Sheik if he would write a song for a play he has been writing; Sheik took the bait, and eventually found himself inundated with lyrics from his new writing partner. “Phantom Moon” turned out to be a full collaboration between the two Sheik composing and Sater providing lyrics.

During the process of creating “Phantom Moon,” Sater gave his partner a copy of “Spring Awakening,” a German play from the late 19th century whose content ” teenage sex, suicide, criticism of the church ” made it controversial on both sides of the Atlantic. This was not merely recommended reading; Sater floated the idea that he and Sheik put songs to the play and produce a musical theater piece. Sheik resisted ” after all, he wrote songs meant to be heard on CDs and radio and in concert, not in the theater. But when Sater proposed doing that their “Spring Awakening” didn’t need to alter the approach they were already taking, Sheik began thinking about theater in a different light.

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In “Spring Awakening,” with a ravishing rock score by the playwright Steven Sater and the singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik, flesh makes only a single, charged appearance. And for all its frankness about the quest for carnal knowledge, it is blessedly free of the sniggering vulgarity that infects too many depictions of sexuality onstage and on screen.

But in exploring the tortured inner lives of a handful of adolescents in 19th-century Germany, this brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill and quite a bit of the terror to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls sometime around the age of 13, well before most of us have the intellectual apparatus in place to analyze its impact. “Spring Awakening” makes sex strange again, no mean feat in our mechanically prurient age, in which celebrity sex videos are traded on the Internet like baseball cards.

Wait a minute. Nineteenth-century Germany? Was sex even invented back then? Officially no. When the Frank Wedekind play on which the musical is firmly based was self-published by the author in 1891, Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” was still almost a decade away, and the subject of adolescent sexuality was so controversial that it was 15 years before the play was produced, even in a heavily censored form.

The smartest decision made by the creators of this adaptation was to retain the original setting in provincial Germany, to resist a facile attempt at updating the material. It wouldn’t have worked. The painful public silence on the subject of sex that warps the characters’ minds and in some cases destroys their lives would make no sense in a contemporary context. But the yawning gap between the force of desire and the possibilities for its release is not exactly an antique phenomenon.

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