NYCPlaywrights June 4, 2022
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NYCPlaywrights
Jun 4, 2022, 5:10:17 PM6/4/22
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
& THE ADVENTURES OF PERICLES
Hip to Hip Theatre Company
In repertory to twelve parks from July 27th to August 21st
http://hiptohip.org/current-production.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Yale Drama Series is seeking submissions for its 2023 playwriting competition. The winning play will be selected by the series’ current judge, Jeremy O. Harris. The winner of this annual competition will be awarded the David Charles Horn Prize of $10,000, publication of their manuscript by Yale University Press, and a celebratory event. The prize and publication are contingent on the playwright’s agreeing to the terms of the publishing agreement.
***
Cimientos Play Development Program 2022
Playwrights accepted to the program, IATI Theater’s artistic staff and other specially invited theater professionals will converge in workshop meetings to discuss the new works that make up the particular season. Every meeting will be dedicated to a single playwright in the program, the focus being in further advancing the text before it is presented in front of a live audience.
***
Artistic Director David Winitsky and Contest Dramaturg Heather Helinsky are proud to announce that submissions are currently open for the 12th Annual National Jewish Playwriting Contest.
We are currently seeking unproduced full-length (65+ minutes) plays and musicals that focus on aspects of 21st Century Jewish identity, culture, and ideas, and the complex and intersectional nature of contemporary Jewish life.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THE BOYS IN THE BAND ***
NYTIMES review 1968
As the conventional thing to say about Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band" will be something to the effect that it makes Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" seem like a vicarage tea party, let me at least take the opportunity of saying it first.
The play, which opened last night at Theater Four, is by far the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on stage. We are a long way from "Tea and Sympathy" here. The point is that this is not a play about a homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual milieu, and the homosexual way of life, totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis of human experience. Thus it is a homosexual play, not a play about homosexuality.
Just as you do not have to be Negro to appreciate a play about the Negro experience, you do not have to be homosexual to appreciate "The Boys in the Band." On the other hand, it would be equally idle to pretend that, just as a Negro will see the plays of LeRoi Jones differently from the way I do, so some of my best friends (as Alan Brien wrote in The Sunday Times of London the other week, "some of the best homosexuals are my friends") will be able to identify with its specifics more closely than I can myself.
More...
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/04/15/issue.html
***
WATCHING the film version of Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band," which opened yesterday at the Loew's State I and Tower East theaters, I experienced the same sensation I'd had when I saw the Off Broadway play two years ago. It was a feeling of time disorientation, as if, in 1970, I were looking at a well-made Broadway play from the late thirties or early forties, something on the order of Clare Boothe's "The Women" or Joseph Fields's "The Doughgirls."
This is in spite of the fact that "The Boys in the Band" is about male homosexuality, a subject that had to be treated with carefully metered ellipses in "The Green Bay Tree," and in spite of the fact that the film uses four-letter words that once (honest!) were more shocking than glimpses of stocking.The reasons for this are two. One is obvious: "The Boys in the Band" is a well-made play, a little too well-made, too mechanical to be especially interesting. Not as obvious, perhaps, is the fact that many conventions of contemporary stage direction (so evident in both the play and the film), as well as the mannerisms of a certain kind of fake-elegant, American homosexual, are patterned after fashions set 30 or 40 years ago on the Broadway stage.Thus one can understand why William Friedkin, the director, has transferred the play's consciously archaic theatricality so faithfully to the screen— with the original Off Broadway cast, and almost every line of bitchy, fake-elegant dialogue, intact.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/18/archives/screen-boys-in-the-bandcrowley-study-of-male-homosexuality-opens.html
***
ONE EVENING NOT long after “The Boys in the Band” had its Off Broadway premiere in April 1968, Laurence Luckinbill, who played Hank, brought his tool kit to work. Theater Four, as the joint was called, was a dowdy old converted church in a part of Manhattan that the play’s author, Mart Crowley, called a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” But Luckinbill wasn’t lugging tools to make repairs. Instead, he drilled a hole in a piece of the set called a tormentor flat, about waist-high, so that he and his eight castmates, standing backstage, could get a glimpse of whoever was sitting sixth row center: the best seats in the house. Over the coming weeks the actors took turns peeping at the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx and Rudolf Nureyev. Even New York City’s glamorous mayor, John Lindsay, showed up.
This was an unexpected turn of events. “The Boys in the Band” was very much a ghetto play, a peephole aimed at gay men. In writing it, Crowley had deliberately taken up the challenge tossed down by the theater critic Stanley Kauffmann, who in a 1966 New York Times essay headlined “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises” asked why that era’s most famous gay playwrights — meaning Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and William Inge — didn’t write about themselves and leave straights alone. His premise was faulty: Characters like Martha and George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” are not, as he suggested, gay couples in masquerade. Nor do homosexuals suffer from an “emotional-psychological illness,” as he casually mentions — for this was an era in which such public slurs were chic and permissible, especially in the guise of literary criticism. (In The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth derided Albee’s 1964 drama “Tiny Alice” for its “ghastly pansy rhetoric.”) Still, there was no denying that frank plays about gay male life had never reached the mainstream, never penetrated the circles in which Kauffmanns and Roths and socialites frolicked.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/t-magazine/gay-theater-history-boys-in-the-band.html
***
It’s hardly surprising that most queer actors were closeted in the late 1960s. Few Americans at that time knew any out gay men or lesbians. Sodomy was illegal in 48 states, with only Illinois and Connecticut the exceptions; Canada wouldn’t decriminalize sodomy until 1969. In many places, including New York City, it was illegal for two men to dance with each other. Gay and lesbian characters were either tragic figures with little recourse but suicide, as in 1961’s The Children’s Hour and 1962’s Advise and Consent, or else—as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, from 1948, and The Detective, 20 years later—they were demented killers.
Things weren’t much better in the theatre. Between 1926 and 1968, depictions of homosexuality on stage were illegal in the state of New York under the Wales Padlock Act. The law was passed after the casts of Sholom Asch’s God of Vengeance and Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, two plays dealing with lesbianism, were arrested for obscenity. Some gay dramatic characters slipped through, but they were far from positive representations. Before The Boys in the Band opened, one of the rare Broadway plays dealing with homosexuality was Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, a fictionalized depiction of the Leopold and Loeb case (which also inspired Rope) that treats sexuality as part of the men’s motivation for murder.
More...
https://xtramagazine.com/culture/boys-in-the-band-50-181396
***
Over the years The Boys in the Band became something of a legend in the gay community and was revived occasionally. In 2018 the play finally made it to Broadway in a highly acclaimed production which featured an all-gay cast. Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory, Zachary Quinto (Star Trek) and gay movie star Matt Bomer headlined the revival, which was put together with the full participation of Crowley. Now Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) has produced a new film version of The Boys in the Band in which the entire 2018 cast reprise their roles. The film will premiere on Netflix on September 30.
It’s a stunning production, a reminder of what it meant to be gay a half century ago. Homosexuality was not generally accepted by society in 1968, so many gay men were forced to be “discreet” in front of their neighbors and straight friends. Parsons and Quinto are revelations as two gay men, allegedly best friends, who seem to be involved in an endless game of cat and mouse with each other, each always trying to best the other. Parsons is heartbreaking as Michael, a “bitchy queen” who turns to religion in the hope that he can become straight. Quinto’s performance as Harold, a gay man who can barely stand looking into a mirror, is a sad example of the shame that so many gay men lived with at that time. Brian Hutchison is also memorable as Alan, a married man living a seemingly straight life but who might also be gay. Or is he?
***
Holy social anthropology! What is this strange and barbaric tribal ceremony that our unsuspecting traveler has stumbled upon? Men are actually dancing with — gasp — other men, in a wrist-flicking, hip-wriggling, keister-twitching chorus line.
Perhaps they’re enacting some unspeakable mating ritual, the kind an adventurous American couple of the mid-1960s might have seen (and recoiled from) while watching a lurid documentary like “Mondo Cane.” But this is definitely not the sort of activity Joe Average expects to encounter in the apartment of his best friend from college.
That, more or less, is the point of view of a lone, presumably heterosexual man when he arrives as an uninvited guest at the all-gay party of hedonism and hatred that is Mart Crowley’s epochal 1968 drama “The Boys in the Band,” which opened on Thursday night in a starry but disconnected revival at the Booth Theater. And theatergoers, too, may feel an awakening shock at this moment.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/theater/the-boys-in-the-band-review-jim-parsons-zachary-quinto.html
***
As Michael abandons the wreckage of a party he hosted, and subsequently ruined, he leaves the Upper East Side apartment that serves as the backdrop of The Boys In The Band with a killer final line: "As my father said to me when he died in my arms: 'I don't understand any of it. I never did.' Turn the lights out when you leave."
These words, serenely delivered by Jim Parsons as he nears the end of a downward spiral, have long haunted audiences of Mart Crowley's landmark play. In a piece loaded with questions – of authenticity, of sexuality, of intention – it seems to be the biggest mystery hanging over a play that has intermittently pin-balled between Broadway stages, the West End and the big screen.
Finding meaning remains difficult. Crowley, who sadly passed away earlier this year, was happy to play co-pilot to the directors steering his work. "He really encouraged me, and us, to make it our own," says Joe Mantello, the director of both the 2018 Broadway revival and its latest Netflix adaptation. "He wasn't dogmatic about a single approach to the material, and so he was incredibly generous. I don't want to say he was surrendering, as he was part of the process, but it was important to him that our version of this was unique to us, and that he wanted to try capture something that happened 50 years ago."
More...
https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/film/a34206822/the-boys-in-the-band-netflix-ending-explained/
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
& THE ADVENTURES OF PERICLES
Hip to Hip Theatre Company
In repertory to twelve parks from July 27th to August 21st
http://hiptohip.org/current-production.html
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Yale Drama Series is seeking submissions for its 2023 playwriting competition. The winning play will be selected by the series’ current judge, Jeremy O. Harris. The winner of this annual competition will be awarded the David Charles Horn Prize of $10,000, publication of their manuscript by Yale University Press, and a celebratory event. The prize and publication are contingent on the playwright’s agreeing to the terms of the publishing agreement.
***
Cimientos Play Development Program 2022
Playwrights accepted to the program, IATI Theater’s artistic staff and other specially invited theater professionals will converge in workshop meetings to discuss the new works that make up the particular season. Every meeting will be dedicated to a single playwright in the program, the focus being in further advancing the text before it is presented in front of a live audience.
***
Artistic Director David Winitsky and Contest Dramaturg Heather Helinsky are proud to announce that submissions are currently open for the 12th Annual National Jewish Playwriting Contest.
We are currently seeking unproduced full-length (65+ minutes) plays and musicals that focus on aspects of 21st Century Jewish identity, culture, and ideas, and the complex and intersectional nature of contemporary Jewish life.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THE BOYS IN THE BAND ***
NYTIMES review 1968
As the conventional thing to say about Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band" will be something to the effect that it makes Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" seem like a vicarage tea party, let me at least take the opportunity of saying it first.
The play, which opened last night at Theater Four, is by far the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on stage. We are a long way from "Tea and Sympathy" here. The point is that this is not a play about a homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual milieu, and the homosexual way of life, totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis of human experience. Thus it is a homosexual play, not a play about homosexuality.
Just as you do not have to be Negro to appreciate a play about the Negro experience, you do not have to be homosexual to appreciate "The Boys in the Band." On the other hand, it would be equally idle to pretend that, just as a Negro will see the plays of LeRoi Jones differently from the way I do, so some of my best friends (as Alan Brien wrote in The Sunday Times of London the other week, "some of the best homosexuals are my friends") will be able to identify with its specifics more closely than I can myself.
More...
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/04/15/issue.html
***
WATCHING the film version of Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band," which opened yesterday at the Loew's State I and Tower East theaters, I experienced the same sensation I'd had when I saw the Off Broadway play two years ago. It was a feeling of time disorientation, as if, in 1970, I were looking at a well-made Broadway play from the late thirties or early forties, something on the order of Clare Boothe's "The Women" or Joseph Fields's "The Doughgirls."
This is in spite of the fact that "The Boys in the Band" is about male homosexuality, a subject that had to be treated with carefully metered ellipses in "The Green Bay Tree," and in spite of the fact that the film uses four-letter words that once (honest!) were more shocking than glimpses of stocking.The reasons for this are two. One is obvious: "The Boys in the Band" is a well-made play, a little too well-made, too mechanical to be especially interesting. Not as obvious, perhaps, is the fact that many conventions of contemporary stage direction (so evident in both the play and the film), as well as the mannerisms of a certain kind of fake-elegant, American homosexual, are patterned after fashions set 30 or 40 years ago on the Broadway stage.Thus one can understand why William Friedkin, the director, has transferred the play's consciously archaic theatricality so faithfully to the screen— with the original Off Broadway cast, and almost every line of bitchy, fake-elegant dialogue, intact.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/18/archives/screen-boys-in-the-bandcrowley-study-of-male-homosexuality-opens.html
***
ONE EVENING NOT long after “The Boys in the Band” had its Off Broadway premiere in April 1968, Laurence Luckinbill, who played Hank, brought his tool kit to work. Theater Four, as the joint was called, was a dowdy old converted church in a part of Manhattan that the play’s author, Mart Crowley, called a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” But Luckinbill wasn’t lugging tools to make repairs. Instead, he drilled a hole in a piece of the set called a tormentor flat, about waist-high, so that he and his eight castmates, standing backstage, could get a glimpse of whoever was sitting sixth row center: the best seats in the house. Over the coming weeks the actors took turns peeping at the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx and Rudolf Nureyev. Even New York City’s glamorous mayor, John Lindsay, showed up.
This was an unexpected turn of events. “The Boys in the Band” was very much a ghetto play, a peephole aimed at gay men. In writing it, Crowley had deliberately taken up the challenge tossed down by the theater critic Stanley Kauffmann, who in a 1966 New York Times essay headlined “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises” asked why that era’s most famous gay playwrights — meaning Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and William Inge — didn’t write about themselves and leave straights alone. His premise was faulty: Characters like Martha and George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” are not, as he suggested, gay couples in masquerade. Nor do homosexuals suffer from an “emotional-psychological illness,” as he casually mentions — for this was an era in which such public slurs were chic and permissible, especially in the guise of literary criticism. (In The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth derided Albee’s 1964 drama “Tiny Alice” for its “ghastly pansy rhetoric.”) Still, there was no denying that frank plays about gay male life had never reached the mainstream, never penetrated the circles in which Kauffmanns and Roths and socialites frolicked.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/t-magazine/gay-theater-history-boys-in-the-band.html
***
It’s hardly surprising that most queer actors were closeted in the late 1960s. Few Americans at that time knew any out gay men or lesbians. Sodomy was illegal in 48 states, with only Illinois and Connecticut the exceptions; Canada wouldn’t decriminalize sodomy until 1969. In many places, including New York City, it was illegal for two men to dance with each other. Gay and lesbian characters were either tragic figures with little recourse but suicide, as in 1961’s The Children’s Hour and 1962’s Advise and Consent, or else—as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, from 1948, and The Detective, 20 years later—they were demented killers.
Things weren’t much better in the theatre. Between 1926 and 1968, depictions of homosexuality on stage were illegal in the state of New York under the Wales Padlock Act. The law was passed after the casts of Sholom Asch’s God of Vengeance and Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, two plays dealing with lesbianism, were arrested for obscenity. Some gay dramatic characters slipped through, but they were far from positive representations. Before The Boys in the Band opened, one of the rare Broadway plays dealing with homosexuality was Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, a fictionalized depiction of the Leopold and Loeb case (which also inspired Rope) that treats sexuality as part of the men’s motivation for murder.
More...
https://xtramagazine.com/culture/boys-in-the-band-50-181396
***
Over the years The Boys in the Band became something of a legend in the gay community and was revived occasionally. In 2018 the play finally made it to Broadway in a highly acclaimed production which featured an all-gay cast. Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory, Zachary Quinto (Star Trek) and gay movie star Matt Bomer headlined the revival, which was put together with the full participation of Crowley. Now Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) has produced a new film version of The Boys in the Band in which the entire 2018 cast reprise their roles. The film will premiere on Netflix on September 30.
It’s a stunning production, a reminder of what it meant to be gay a half century ago. Homosexuality was not generally accepted by society in 1968, so many gay men were forced to be “discreet” in front of their neighbors and straight friends. Parsons and Quinto are revelations as two gay men, allegedly best friends, who seem to be involved in an endless game of cat and mouse with each other, each always trying to best the other. Parsons is heartbreaking as Michael, a “bitchy queen” who turns to religion in the hope that he can become straight. Quinto’s performance as Harold, a gay man who can barely stand looking into a mirror, is a sad example of the shame that so many gay men lived with at that time. Brian Hutchison is also memorable as Alan, a married man living a seemingly straight life but who might also be gay. Or is he?
***
Holy social anthropology! What is this strange and barbaric tribal ceremony that our unsuspecting traveler has stumbled upon? Men are actually dancing with — gasp — other men, in a wrist-flicking, hip-wriggling, keister-twitching chorus line.
Perhaps they’re enacting some unspeakable mating ritual, the kind an adventurous American couple of the mid-1960s might have seen (and recoiled from) while watching a lurid documentary like “Mondo Cane.” But this is definitely not the sort of activity Joe Average expects to encounter in the apartment of his best friend from college.
That, more or less, is the point of view of a lone, presumably heterosexual man when he arrives as an uninvited guest at the all-gay party of hedonism and hatred that is Mart Crowley’s epochal 1968 drama “The Boys in the Band,” which opened on Thursday night in a starry but disconnected revival at the Booth Theater. And theatergoers, too, may feel an awakening shock at this moment.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/theater/the-boys-in-the-band-review-jim-parsons-zachary-quinto.html
***
As Michael abandons the wreckage of a party he hosted, and subsequently ruined, he leaves the Upper East Side apartment that serves as the backdrop of The Boys In The Band with a killer final line: "As my father said to me when he died in my arms: 'I don't understand any of it. I never did.' Turn the lights out when you leave."
These words, serenely delivered by Jim Parsons as he nears the end of a downward spiral, have long haunted audiences of Mart Crowley's landmark play. In a piece loaded with questions – of authenticity, of sexuality, of intention – it seems to be the biggest mystery hanging over a play that has intermittently pin-balled between Broadway stages, the West End and the big screen.
Finding meaning remains difficult. Crowley, who sadly passed away earlier this year, was happy to play co-pilot to the directors steering his work. "He really encouraged me, and us, to make it our own," says Joe Mantello, the director of both the 2018 Broadway revival and its latest Netflix adaptation. "He wasn't dogmatic about a single approach to the material, and so he was incredibly generous. I don't want to say he was surrendering, as he was part of the process, but it was important to him that our version of this was unique to us, and that he wanted to try capture something that happened 50 years ago."
More...
https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/film/a34206822/the-boys-in-the-band-netflix-ending-explained/
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