Break A Leg has opened submissions for our One Act Slam Reading Series / Short Play Competition. Make us Laugh! - Make us Cry! - Win $100!
We are looking for short plays (no musicals/no one person shows/no child roles under age 15) that have not yet been produced or published.
One Acts 5-10 pages (8-10 minutes) accepted. A cash prize of $100 will be awarded to the winner of the One Act Slam by audience vote as part of a live reading taking place in Midtown NYC in September.
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Left Coast Theatre Co.'s newest anthology reading - "Unheard Voices"
This will be an anthology of 6 or 7 pieces written by and for members of queer communities who have been underserved by the broader/mainstream LGBTQ+ movement. Are you trans, non-binary, QTBIPOC, bi, pan, ace, aro, demi, neurodivergent, have a disability, or are part of any community that has been underserved by the LGBTQ+ community? We want to hear your stories!
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There is no fee to apply for or participate in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. Musical Theatre Bookwriting Basics
This nine-month course explores the fundamentals of writing book for the musical theatre.
Drama Desk Award winning bookwriter Adam Mathias (he/him) unlocks the toolkit for musical theatre librettists. Through lecture, discussion, and assignments students learn how to apply the fundamentals of playwriting to the craft of creating musicals. As a class, writers deep-dive into the DNA of the musical theatre canon — from the Golden Age through today — dissecting what works and why and then applying it to their own work.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** MONODRAMA ***
One of the most infamous monodramas on the London stage was The Captive by Matthew G. Lewis. Lewis was already famous for his gothic play The Castle Spectre as well as his novel The Monk when Harriett Litchfield performed this monodrama on the stage of Covent Garden on March 22, 1803. The piece was an unqualified disaster, but for all the right reasons.
Much like the heroine of Mary Wollstonecraft's novel Maria, Litchfield's character had been committed to a madhouse by her husband even though she was in fact perfectly sane. Over the course of the monologue, the audience got to see her descend into madness due to the inhuman conditions inside the asylum. Her performance was powerful. So powerful, it seems, that the audience couldn't take it.
More...
http://armstrongplays.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-captive.html
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...Nurul Momen's next play turned out to be a tragedy called “Nemesis”, which again set a milestone in the history of Bengali plays because of its unique feature and modern plot. National professor Kabir Chowdhury explains, “Nemesis is his (Nurul Momen's) most famous work. It is an experimental drama where through dialogues the main and only character remembers his past. It shows how a promising personality falls prey to greed and loses his morality. Though it is a play based on one actor, the scope of the plot is wide and a number of other characters come in through the main character's reminiscences.”
Before Nemesis only four playwrights had attempted a one-character play, but none had the full form of a play continuing for one and a half hours without break. Nurul Momen did not only adorn the play with witty dialogues, but also made the character recite poems and even sing. His conversations over the phone, with neighbours, with his conscience and lastly with his murderer is drawn in such an ingenious way that the absence of these characters on the stage is never felt. Not for once the audience can get bored because of the unpredictable turn of the events cleverly knitted in the plot.
More...
http://archive.thedailystar.net/magazine/2010/12/01/tribute.htm
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'Krapp's Last Tape' stars Sir Michael Gambon as Krapp who follows in the footsteps of notables such as Harold Pinter, John Hurt and Corin Redgrave who have all played the role. But the play was written for actor Patrick Magee, who tackled the play when first produced in 1958. The première was at the Royal Court Theatre, and acted as a kind of curtain raiser for another of Beckett's plays, 'Endgame'.
Krapp is a writer, and the play is set appropriately in his study, or den as he calls it. Each year on his birthday, Krapp takes out a tape he has recorded on a previous birthday to examine his former self and to record a new tape about the direction his life is taking. In a sense it's self-examination or recollection by tape recorder.
More...
https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/reviews/krapps-last-tape
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When the polymathic musician André Previn died in 2019, he left behind an unfinished score: “Penelope,” a monodrama he was writing for the star soprano Renée Fleming.
It was set to premiere that year at Tanglewood to celebrate Previn’s 90th birthday. Instead, the performance became, “as it were, in memoriam,” the playwright Tom Stoppard, who wrote the work’s text, said in a recent interview.
That the premiere happened at all was something of a miracle; the incomplete score’s pages weren’t even in an easily discernible order. But David Fetherolf, Previn’s longtime editor, reconstructed and completed the piece, then published a final version after the Tanglewood performance. And now the original performers — Fleming; the pianist Simone Dinnerstein; the Emerson String Quartet; and the actress Uma Thurman, as Fleming’s speaking avatar — are reuniting to bring “Penelope” to Carnegie Hall on Sunday.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/arts/music/renee-fleming-uma-thurman-penelope.html
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Since the 1990s, Black British poets have been at the forefront of developing the “one-person poetry show” or spoken-word play, an apt format for negotiating diasporic history and cultural memory in a public arena. The focus of this article is Kat François’s one-woman show Raising Lazarus (2009/2016), which stages the poet’s own quest for information about her Grenadian relative Lazarus François, a World War I soldier. A media-specific analysis explores how François’s text is semantically enriched when translated into a live performance. The authenticity effect typically produced in spoken-word poetry through the unity of author and performer is compounded in Raising Lazarus by textual and paratextual keys that frame François’s show as embodied auto/biography. Merging life writing, monodrama, and spoken-word poetry, Raising Lazarus reveals the one-person show to be an effective and popular medium for Black British poets to articulate personal experience and negotiate collective identities through performance.
More...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7484909/
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Richard Strauss’s 1897 “monodrama for speaker and piano” Enoch Arden Op.38, TrV.181 is something of an oddity in his output. It dates from when his main focus was on the orchestral tone-poem (following Also Sprach Zarathustra and contemporary with Don Quixote), though these years also saw a considerable output of songs with piano accompaniment. It was written as a thank-you to the actor Ernst von Possart, who had helped Strauss gain the post of Chief Conductor at the Bavarian State Opera, and he and Possart toured together widely with the melodrama.
More...
https://www.laopus.com/2018/02/a-rare-outing-for-strausss-and.html
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Fleabag must have sounded like an odd prospect on paper when it was first performed in 2013.
A monologue about an unnamed woman with a considerable sexual appetite who runs a guinea pig-themed cafe while mourning the death of her best friend is an unconventional premise to say the least.
But the TV series which the original play birthed has since become hugely successful and made a bona fide star out of its creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
The second and final series concluded earlier this year and now Waller-Bridge is back in the West End performing the original play. "As a hot ticket, it's on a par with Harry Potter, as high on the list as Hamilton," wrote Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-49482752
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