NYCPlaywrights October 2, 2021

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

CONJECTURES OF A GUILTY BYSTANDER

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander welcomes you into the world of mystical theatre. Whatever you think it is, it's something else. Chuang Tzu said: "If there is existence, there must have been non-existence. And if there was a time when nothing existed, then there must have been a time before that – when even nothing did not exist." So why does Pizza Rat end up in the middle of everything? Well, at least getting a cameo.

WED-SAT, OCT 13-16, 2021, 7PM 

@ THE TANK

312 W 36th St, New York, NY 10018

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*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

FLEAS ON THE DOG is open for submissions

Oh Drat! The gutter press is back!!! Yes, the unnatural heir to ‘The Beats’ is itchin’ and twitchin’ for QUALITY fiction, poetry, plays and nonfiction for our milestone (drum roll, please…) ISSUE 10!!! We’re hungry for junk that’s full of spunk and kick ass funk that will put your family and friends in denial for months! So do the politically incorrect thing and send us your bling! See our guidelines for details and learn new ways to sabotage your literary career!

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The Growing Stage – The Children’s Theatre of New Jersey is committed to expanding the canon of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) through our New Play-Reading Festival. This program provides a wonderful opportunity for artists to have their unpublished and unproduced work presented before a family audience by a cast consisting of both professional and amateur actors. Four finalists will be selected and one script will be presented as a fully mounted production in the Growing Stage’s 2022-2023 season.

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5th Floor Theatre Company has always been committed to helping the New York City theatre community grow and thrive, a mission that has become especially critical as the arts continue to regain their footing in a post-COVID-19 environment. 

Beginning this Fall, 5th Floor Theatre will renew this mission through Groundbreakers, which will award up to five individuals and/or groups to support their development of theatre projects in New York City. Grantees may receive up to $2,500 USD based on the scope of their project. 

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

*** TOP 10* MOST-PRODUCED PLAYS OF 2019 - 2020 ***

~ A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath: 12 (TIE)

~ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens, based on the book by Mark Haddon: 12 (TIE)

~ Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe: 10 

~ Bright Star with music by Steve Martin (also book) and Edie Brickell (also lyrics) 9 (TIE)

~ Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau: 9 (TIE)

~ Tiny Beautiful Things adapted by Nia Vardalos from the book by Cheryl Strayed: 8 (TIE)

~ Admissions by Joshua Harmon: 8 (TIE)

~ Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee: 8 (TIE)

~ The Children by Lucy Kirkwood: 8 (TIE)

~ The Great Leap by Lauren Yee: 8 (TIE)

~ Murder on the Orient Express adapted by Ken Ludwig from the book by Agatha Christie: 8 (TIE)

~ School Girls or, The African Mean Girls Play by Jocelyn Bioh: 8 (TIE)

~ The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse: 8 (TIE)

~ The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe: 8 (TIE)

*Actually 14 because of ties.

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In many ways, the work of the thirty-seven-year-old playwright Lucas Hnath grows out of the authorial complexities of that older generation of writers. (He owes something to Tom Stoppard, too.) But instead of writing directly about the experience of writing or not writing, inventing or not inventing, Hnath has now found himself by parsing and filling in a story he didn’t write, Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”

“A Doll’s House, Part 2” (directed by Sam Gold, at the John Golden), Hnath’s invigorating ninety-minute, intermissionless work, is an irresponsible act—a kind of naughty imposition on a classic, which, in addition to investing Ibsen’s signature play with the humor that the nineteenth-century artist lacked, raises a number of questions, such as What constitutes an individual achievement in this age of the simulacrum, when everything owes something to something else?

Ibsen was born about a hundred and fifty years before Hnath, in Skien, Norway, into a family of merchants. His parents were unusually close, and he was both fascinated and horrified by their relationship. The question of intimacy—and its connections to money, Christian morality, and gender roles, or, more specifically, how a woman should behave—excited his dramatic imagination and also made him a critic of the mores he grew up with. Widely considered the father of modern realism, Ibsen wrote “A Doll’s House” in 1879, and it changed everything. Before that, he’d produced a number of scripts in verse, but poetry had sort of prettified his characters, and the restrictions of the form prevented them from getting to the heart, or the marrow, of their stories. Ibsen switched to prose for its more immediate effects—and as a way of shocking audiences out of their complacency. “A Doll’s House” did just that.

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At its worst, the demon of depression would tell me that my family would be better off without me. When I expressed that sentiment to my therapist, she told me in no uncertain terms that the children of parents who die by suicide never recover. It was a statement that would save my life as I could not bear to put that burden on my son.

“Every Brilliant Thing,” which Hope Summer Repertory Theatre (HSRT) has been producing this summer, explores the effect of a mother’s depression on her son—of what his life is like because of the physical, chemical, and emotional changes wrought upon him by a distant mother. 

When a mother is hospitalized after a suicide attempt, her 6-year old son starts making a list of things worth living for—things in life that are brilliant. The list started with “ice cream” and would grow throughout his life until it reached a million. The audience-participation one-person show displayed in poignant ways how the mother’s depression continued to affect her son throughout his life in ways both expected and unexpected.

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The teacher is trying to explain a poem to her class, but an echo keeps getting in the way. The echo, which reiterates words by Gwendolyn Brooks about young black men marking time on their way to an early grave, comes with a face, which only the teacher, named Nya, and the audience can see.

This phantom has the voice and visage of a lanky teenager who is still very much alive, Nya’s son. And this ghostly, reproachful recitation of Brooks’s elegy to doomed youth shatters the composure of a woman for whom self-possession is as essential as oxygen. The words on the blackboard behind Nya magically erase themselves, and she finds herself sliding out of consciousness.

That haunting rendering of a panic attack provides the strongest moment in “Pipeline,” Dominique Morisseau’s passionate but frustratingly unresolved play about a family struggling to outrun social prophecy. It’s a scene that captures the wrenching sense of helplessness that pervades this intensely acted production, which opened on Monday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.

The play’s title refers to the “school-to-prison pipeline,” wherein underprivileged students are channeled directly from the public education system into American penal institutions. The subject was trenchantly explored in Anna Deavere Smith’s journalistic drama “Notes From the Field,” seen last year in New York at Second Stage Theater.

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Clap your hands, everybody, and sing along with Pol! That’s as in Pol Pot, the leader of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which wiped out nearly a quarter of that country’s population during the second half of the 1970s.

All right, to be exact, it’s not Pol himself who’s shaking a tambourine and urging the audience to get up and dance at the Pershing Square Signature Center, where Lauren Yee’s adventurous, tonally scrambled “Cambodian Rock Band” opened on Monday night. Instead, this enthusiastic master of ceremonies is called Duch. That is the nom de guerre of the former math teacher Kang Kek Iew, a Pol confederate known as “Cambodia’s Himmler,” who ran the notorious S21 prison (read: death) camp.

The real Duch, who was the first of the Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried for mass murder, is now serving out a life prison sentence. But Yee, a playwright of great heart and audacity to match, has seen fit to give her version of Duch the run of her brash but conventionally sentimental play, which features the songs of the Los Angeles-based Cambodian surf rock group Dengue Fever.

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Pack your bags, people — the apocalypse is coming. This warning comes to you courtesy of Lucy Kirkwood, whose cautionary disaster drama, “The Children,” scared the wits out of audiences at London’s Royal Court Theater and promises to do the same on Broadway, where it recently opened in a Manhattan Theatre Club production.

Its sterling cast intact, Kirkwood’s harrowing play exposes us to the drab lives and dark pasts of three nuclear physicists who meet in a cottage by the sea to contemplate the end of the world. Long-married Hazel (Deborah Findlay) and Robin (Ron Cook) live alone in this dreary cottage and seem to have no neighbors — understandably, since their snug little corner of the world has seen earthquakes, tsunamis, and a nuclear meltdown at the nearby power plant where they once worked.

After an absence of almost 40 years, a former colleague and friend named Rose (Francesca Annis) arrives on a mission that she dramatically refrains from revealing until the very end. But when the play opens, she’s splattered with blood from a fierce nosebleed – a plot detail that can’t be ignored in a talky but ultimately chilling play about the consequences of nuclear fallout.

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The reach of American culture may be wide, but it is not always as profound as Americans might hope. At a girls’ boarding school in Africa, dreams are built on the backs of whatever Western brands the students have heard of. Walmart and White Castle (“a castle with food!”) are just as good grist for the fantasy mill as a “Calvin Klean” dress to wear to the dance.

And so it is for theater. “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which opened on Thursday evening in an MCC Theater production, is a comedy built on borrowed templates: not just “Mean Girls,” as the subtitle admits, but also a whole genre of clique-bait movies including “Heathers,” “Jawbreaker” and “Legally Blonde.”

But something fascinating happens when the author, Jocelyn Bioh, a New York playwright and actor, applies those templates to the world of her parents, who emigrated from Ghana in 1968. The nasty-teen comedy genre emerges wonderfully refreshed and even deepened by its immersion in a world it never considered.

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The unfortunate truth is that we we’re being manipulated. In the first half of Harmon’s show, we’re being pushed to let our Secret Racist flags fly (“admissions” also means “confessions”), and in the second half we are, like Roberta, being taken to task. It’s a strangely religious structure: Confession and Repentance. Serving as maestro of this tonal shift — and Harmon’s voice-of-the-playwright character — is Sherri’s 17-year-old son Charlie.

Charlie comes raging into the play in its third scene, sounding less like a precocious 17-year-old and more like a jaded, hepped-up 30-something playwright. He’s been screaming in the woods for four hours, he informs us, and now he arrives in his parents’ living room, a logorrheic volcano spewing forth his fury, frustrations, blame, and justifications both racist and sexist for the fact that he just got deferred by Yale while his friend Perry (son of a white mother and mixed-race father) got accepted. While clearly not a teenager, Ben Edelman is a powerful, fiercely articulate actor, and his Charlie takes the play hostage with an epic monologue of white-boy angst.

“I am drowning over here, okay?” Charlie fumes, “I’m not an idiot, I don’t have white pride, but I don’t hate myself … And by the way, who even decides? Cause I would really like to meet the person who decides who counts as a person of color and who doesn’t … Cause my mom’s dad had to escape before like half his family was murdered by Nazis, but now when we all apply to college, I go in the shit pile … [because] — shocker! — they found a new way to keep Jews out: They just made us white instead, and the grandsons of Nazis who came to America go in the exact same pile as me, which makes absolutely no sense … But keep pushing me, keep fucking pushing me … tell me how white I am and how disgusting I am, I’ll just stand in the corner taking it all in until I can’t fucking take it anymore and I all of a sudden break out into a FUCKING SIEG HEIL!!!!!”

That’s just a fraction of Charlie’s rant, and it’s a frankly terrifying thing to listen to. It’s terrifying because the audience loves it

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