Playwrights
Sesame Street Writer’s Room Fellowship – Apply today!
Sesame Workshop Writers’ Room is a writing fellowship from the creators of Sesame Street. And we’re looking for YOU! Fresh new writing talent from underrepresented racial backgrounds. Emerging storytellers who are selected to join the Writers’ Room will receive hands-on writing experience guided by Sesame Street veterans and other media industry leaders. Each participant will develop and write a pilot script for their own original kids concept. Past fellows have gone on to develop their own original content with Sesame Workshop, as well as write for Sesame Street and various programs at Nickelodeon, Disney, DreamWorks, and more! Learn about the 2019 fellows and speakers HERE. Applications for the 2020 Fellowship Program are NOW OPEN! Application must be submitted by January 10, 2020 5PM ES...
How Writer-Director Robert O’Hara Decides Which Plays to Direct and Which to Hand Over
BY MERVYN ROTHSTEIN via www.playbill.com It’s a unique voice, an exciting young voice, dealing with issues around race and identity and sexuality,” Obie-winning director and playwright Robert O’Hara says. “New ideas and new thoughts. I love plays that capture the imagination, that take you on a ride and an adventure. And I think this play does.” O’Hara is talking about Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, which O’Hara directs at New York Theatre Workshop. The play, about black and white in white America, was called “willfully provocative, gaudily transgressive and altogether staggering,” as well as “furiously entertaining,” by The New York Times. Robert O’Hara and Jeremy O. Harris Marielle Solan O’Hara often directs his own plays, but recently directed works by Kirsten Childs and will direc...
Summer 2018 Industry Conferences – Register Today!
Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas Conference – “Crossing Borders” June 21 – 23, 2018 The Lucie and Thornton Blackburn Conference Centre – Toronto, Ontario (Canada) Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas was founded in 1985 as the volunteer membership organization for the professions of literary management and dramaturgy. LMDA is a not-for-profit tax-exempt organization with members throughout North America and abroad. LMDA holds the belief that theater is a vital art form that has the power to nourish, educate, and transform individuals and their communities and that dramaturgy is central to the process of theater-making. Registration Information All full-conference registration fees are per person and include one banquet ticket. LMD...
#TBT: May 3rd – Birthday of Lyricist Betty Comden
Throwback Thursday: May 3, 1917, Broadway & Hollywood lyricist and librettist Betty Comden is born. “A risk was taken with ‘On the Town’, and look what happened: Betty and Adolph burst onto the scene. A shout-out to Comden & Green!” (Title of Show). Lyricists and librettist Betty Comden, of t Comden & Green, was born May 3, 1917. She and Adolph Green are known for several works, such as On the Town (1944), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and Bells are Ringing (1956). Together, this duo’s musical comedy talents became theatrical classics that are still performed and beloved today. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Comden had always considered herself a performer, and she was first seen on the stage at the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School (jwa.org). Comden went on to major in drama at New York U...
Sarah Ruhl – On Happy Endings
BY SARAH RUHL via www.breakingcharactermagazine.com On happy endings Happy endings are not in vogue. I have noticed that ambivalent endings are in vogue — the equivalent of a character hopping on one foot as the lights go down. Playwrights might be wary of happy endings because these are not happy times. Or maybe we are wary of happy endings because we are wary in the contemporary theatre of unmixed genres — a full-out comedy, or a full-on tragedy. In Shakespeare, comedies end happily with a marriage, and tragedies end with a body pile up. But unmixed genres are now the province of Hollywood, not theatre. Our American stages are more full of dramas than they are of comedies and tragedies. So what of a title like How to Transcend a Happy Marriage? That seems fairly bold given the climate. ...
How “SpongeBob SquarePants” Writer Kyle Jarrow Found the Story for the Stage
BY: BETHANY RICKWALD via www.theatremania.com There’s nothing quite like the world of Bikini Bottom that’s currently bubbling to life onstage at Broadway’s Palace Theatre — including the Bikini Bottom that’s been delighting television audiences since 1999. “There was the process of getting the SpongeBob world and then there was the process of getting our SpongeBob world and it’s not exactly the same,” said book writer Kyle Jarrow. “Figuring out ‘What is our stage version of that tone and that pace and that energy?’, that took a while — that took a couple years.” For Nickelodeon, the trick was in finding the right SpongeBob guy to partner with director Tina Landau in breathing a breath of fresh sea water into the suboceanic w...
Tree Hugger
A New Musical by Matt Wolfe and Bruce Monroe Are you a fan of national parks? For several years now, I’ve been working with Bruce Monroe and some extremely talented friends to develop a musical about the life of John Muir, without whom the parks wouldn’t be what they are today. He was an adventurer with a poet’s heart, writing prose about nature that rivaled anything Thoreau or Emerson dared, and he spoke about America and its future with an authority and wit as sharp as Twain. At a crucial moment in American history, he was there to speak of the need for the beauty of the earth to be preserved, not just for survival’s sake, but for the soul’s. It’s a conversation that never goes away, and it’s certainly timely now. I finally finished a website f...
