NYCPlaywrights February 23, 2019

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NYCPlaywrights

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Feb 23, 2019, 5:01:14 PM2/23/19
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights


*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

February 25, 2019
7PM
THE SABLE SERIES: 
The History of Black Shakespearean Actors

This evening's special performance of poetry and song features the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar with monologues and scenes from  Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Anthony & Cleopatra along with spirituals and the songs of Paul Robeson. Many know the contributions of Paul Robeson and even Ira Aldridge, but do you know Henrietta Vinton Davis? - (the Celebrated Shakespearean Tragedienne who later became the right hand of Marcus Garvey). Come share, learn, and be inspired!

JULIA DE BURGOS PERFORING ARTS CENTER
1680 Lexington Avenue East Harlem, NYC

AN ENCORE PERFORMANCE, TALK- BACK and SPECIAL RECEPTION MAKE YOUR RESERVATION NOW



*** PLAYWRIGHTS OPPORTUNITIES ***

CVLT began the biennial 10-10 Festival in 2009, putting out the call for short plays to be performed at its River Street Playhouse, the smaller venue adjacent to the main theater building. Ten plays would be chosen, each lasting roughly ten minutes. The first 10-10 that July was a resounding success, receiving submissions from all over Northeast Ohio and beyond. Now The 10-10 is back for its sixth edition!

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The Unleavened Plays Festival is seeking six 10-minute plays, each reflecting the underlying theme of “PLAGUE(S).” The plays will be performed as an evening of staged readings at CBE on Sunday, April 15, 2019 -- the weekend before Passover begins, as people around the world begin to think about the Jewish people’s efforts to escape Egypt and head out into the desert toward freedom.

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Appalachian Festival of Plays & Playwrights seeks plays written by an Appalachian playwright (currently living in the Appalachian Mountains which, for our purposes, run from New York to Alabama) OR the plays must be set in the Appalachian region. Plays must be unpublished and must not have had a full professional production. Full length plays are preferred.

*** For more information about these and other opportunities see the web site at http://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** STRONG ROLES FOR WOMEN ***

On Fourth of July weekend in 2015, while Hillary Clinton campaigned in New Hampshire for the Democratic presidential nomination, theatergoers in Falmouth, Mass., got a look at a work in progress about her — Lucas Hnath’s play “Hillary and Clinton,” now poised for Broadway. 

Set in an alternate universe during the 2008 primaries, as she fights for survival against a charismatic upstart, it was a comic tragedy, and it couldn’t have been more topical. Unfolding around a pivotal moment in the contest, it examined how the strictures of her gender and the baggage of her marriage affected her ability to navigate the men’s world of politics.

Hal Brooks, the artistic director of the Cape Cod Theater Project, remembers his audiences loving the series of staged readings. But he was so sure of the real Mrs. Clinton’s odds in 2016 that when he thought about the future of this play, rooted as it was in a failed White House run, he did have a concern.

“Once she’s president,” he said, “will anybody really be interested?”

Needless worry, that. Bad news for Mrs. Clinton seems to have been a stroke of luck for the play. So, apparently, has the uprising of feminist outrage that followed her defeat, propelling a wave of women into Congress this year and a pack of female candidates into the 2020 presidential race.

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Within the anxiety dream of a lecture hall that is the setting for “What the Constitution Means to Me” — the agreeably baggy and highly topical performance piece that opened Sunday night at the New York Theater Workshop — the writer and actor Heidi Schreck is living out an assortment of roles. They include professor and pupil, class troublemaker and teacher’s pet, the woman in her 40s she is today and the 15-year-old girl she once was.

These various roles, I should add, are not mutually exclusive, and for the most part they are all inhabited by Ms. Schreck simultaneously, in the same exhilarated, frightened and confused breath. If such an all-in-one approach sounds like it might generate ambiguity and ambivalence, well, that’s appropriate to the subject at hand.

That would be the confounding, cohesive and divisive document that is the United States Constitution. This nation-founding set of principles from the late 18th century is — or should be — very much on most Americans’ minds at the moment. For the implementation of said Constitution to meet contemporary needs is largely in the interpretive hands of those men and women (but mostly men) who sit upon the Supreme Court.

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Is it chance or synchronicity that brings “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” a muscular comedy about a woman unbound, to Broadway at this grim transitional moment in gender politics?

Either way, Theresa Rebeck’s new play, which opened on Tuesday at the American Airlines Theater, is so clever it uplifts, so timely it hurts.

That’s a depressing thing to say about a story set in 1899 in that temple of chauvinism, the French popular theater. Janet McTeer stars as Sarah Bernhardt, then in her mid-50s and aging out of the dying courtesan roles that made her world-famous. As far as Shakespeare is concerned, she is caught in the gap between Ophelia and Gertrude.

So why not try Hamlet?

Enter the men: Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner), one of France’s greatest young dramatists; Alphonse Mucha (Matthew Saldivar), the Art Nouveau illustrator of Bernhardt’s gorgeous posters; and Louis (Tony Carlin), a critic so parsimonious with praise I suppose it’s only fair that he’s given no surname.

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Noonan really was one of Albany’s great shadowy eminences; 15 years after her death, she still seems to wield power. (Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is her granddaughter.) And yes, the relationship between Noonan and Corning really was the subject of speculation and gossip. Was it proof of something that Corning largely shut his own family out of his will while leaving his insurance business to Noonan and hers?

But in Mr. White’s telling, all is innocent. Polly’s husband, Peter Noonan (Peter Scolari), is one of Corning’s closest friends; when the play begins the two men are drinking scotch and watching basketball in the Noonan living room while Polly sews and strategizes. Running up a new outfit, she argues that if Corning is to turn back the challenge of upstarts like Howard C. Nolan (Glenn Fitzgerald), he will have to be less aloof. Only she doesn’t say it so politely.

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Stockard Channing wields weapons of deflection like a master samurai in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s “Apologia,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Laura Pels Theater in Manhattan. The pre-emptive put-down, the obscuring fog of abstraction, the barbed aside, the motorized monologue — such are the tools expertly deployed by Ms. Channing’s character, a celebrated art historian who has trained herself to live on the defensive.

Her name is Kristin Miller, and she is described by the more temperate of her two sons as “a bloody nightmare.” Since it is Kristin who is the host of the birthday celebration (hers) at the play’s center, and since it is Ms. Channing who is portraying her, you can expect it to become an Olympic event for the hurling of slings and arrows of high wit and low cunning.

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For reasons that likely will require little explanation, Gloria Steinem is experiencing a pop cultural renaissance these days. Two different major motion pictures are in the works with her as their subject: Julie Taymor’s My Life on the Road (from Steinem’s memoir, adapted by playwright Sarah Ruhl, starring Julianne Moore) and Dee Rees’s An Uncivil War, starring Carey Mulligan as a younger Steinem fighting to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. But first, there’s the play Gloria: A Life, a stage experience that’s one part theater, one part consciousness-raising group therapy session.

Written by Tony-nominated Emily Mann, directed by Tony winner Diane Paulus, and put on at the Daryl Roth Theatre (named for the female producer who has produced more Pulitzer Prize–winning plays than any of her male peers), Gloria: A Life offers an experience that promises to be a more intimate recollection of Steinem’s journey, not only because it’s been singularly shaped by the hands of women. Despite the various big Hollywood affairs to come, the play is the production that Steinem has been the most involved with, its particular bent being the public’s introduction to Gloria, the girl, rather than Gloria, the icon, and with its emphasis on amplifying the experiences of its audience.

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Even before those ubiquitous ads in your Facebook feed ruined the phrase “master class,” it had become a tired way of describing an actor, usually one with silver hair, as he or she delivers a performance sans special effects. (See also: “doyenne,” “lion in winter,” “gray eminence.”) But perhaps we can keep it out of retirement just one day longer, for this revival of Three Tall Women really is a staggering example of precisely what a dramatic actor does onstage. Actually three examples. Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf, and Alison Pill — all with significant theater experience, all able to hold a room, all capable of the particular demands of Edward Albee’s simultaneously clipped and spiraling dialogue — just talk and talk and talk some more, for not quite two hours. Although they move around while they do it, there’s almost no action, barely a plot, and (apart from some unusual dynamics involving Miriam Buether’s tricky, clever set design) little that could be called a special effect. They just stand and deliver, or sometimes sit and deliver, and nearly two hours later you realize that you may not have blinked for minutes at a time while they did it.

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It would be easy to regret Glenda Jackson’s 25-year absence from the stage but she has lost none of her innovative instinct. I suspect her experience of political life and the world’s injustice has enriched her understanding of Lear. Even if I jib at the conventional pieties surrounding Shakespeare’s flawed tragedy, there is no doubting that she is tremendous in the role. In an uncanny way, she transcends gender. What you see, in Deborah Warner’s striking modern-dress production, is an unflinching, non-linear portrait of the volatility of old age. Jackson, like all the best Lears, shifts in a moment between madness and sanity, anger and tenderness, vocal force and physical frailty.

Her great gift, however, is to think each moment of the play afresh. She enters, without undue ceremony, hand in hand with her beloved Cordelia. But there is irony when she announces, in a self-mocking drawl, that she will “crawl” unburdened towards death. Having routinely given Goneril and Regan their share of the kingdom, she ecstatically cries “Now our joy” on turning to Cordelia, and initially greets her refusal to play the game with incredulous laughter. But instantly this turns to violence as she hurls Cordelia to the floor and rushes at Kent with one of the blue chairs that adorn the set. Yet, even here, the mood swiftly changes as Jackson registers the banished Kent’s departure with a derisive regal wave.

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