We are currently accepting submissions
March 29, 2009
Hello Everyone,
We just wanted to let you know that we are currently accepting submissions for our upcoming projects.
We are looking for full length plays (comedy/drama/serio-comedy ) with up to 8 characters being the MAX
Also, we are looking for short length plays (comedy/drama/serio-comedy) also, with 8 characters being the MAX.
IMPORTANT NOTE -
We will now only accept play “Synopsis” by mail at
Attention: Literary Director
REVOLUTION Theatre Company
P.O. Box 3896
Chicago, Illinois 60654
AND
Full plays may be sent through Email only at:
revolution_theatre@yahoo.com
We look forward to hearing from you.
John Thurner
Executive Artistic Director
REVOLUTION Theatre Company
Call for annual Theatre Festival submissons
July 8, 2008
Hello,
We would like to let you know that the
REVOLUTION Theatre Company is currently accepting submissions for
the “20th annual Abbie Hoffman died for our Sins” theatre festival,
this coming August in Chicago.
We are looking for plays that are 15 to 20 minutes long and
one acts that would run up to 45 minutes in length.
Go to
www.revolutiontheatre.org
for more details and ideas of our past shows.
Submissions can be e-mailed to us at revolution_theatre@yahoo.com
with (Attention – ABBIE) in the subject heading.
We wish you all the best in your creative endeavors.
Sincerely,
REVOLUTION Theatre Company staff
We have chosen the play “DISCRETION”, written by Terry RouecheTerry has become sort of a regular with us because we enjoy his work so muchthat we have mounted several of his plays in the past “Parade Day”, “ColdKill”, and “Farewell Party”.
DISCRETION is a nonlinear play that explores marriage and the upheaval of traditional values in marriage. Claire, a professional, becomes friends with an interim associate at work, Richard. He is nearly 20 years younger. Claire finds Richard’s flattering sexual desire for her arousing and fervent. She advises Richard playfully she has always been a tease with men. During the course of several months, their friendship moves, and settles, into all areas but sexual. Still, desire seethes just below the surface. Claire’s husband, Philip, is confident in the fidelity and solidity of their marriage, their love. His career is demanding of his time and attention, but the relationship between Claire and Richard’s eventually becomes disturbing to Philip. He considers a private and painful decision. He offers Claire his understanding and support, but also the option of a relationship with Richard, if it is what she wants. The decision is hers to make.Claire doesn’t know what she will do, only that her desire is intense and her imagination is dangerous, when the opportunity finally presents itself.
About Terry Roueche –
Terry has written more than 20 plays that have received more than 90 productions or stage readings. His plays “Norman Alexander and Take my wife please” had full productions off-off Broadway, his plays “Parade Day, Coldkill, and Farewell Party” had staged readings with the Revolution Theatre Company last season. He is the playwriting instructor at Wintrop University in Rock Hill, SC. “Writer in residence” with Barebones Theatre Group in Charlotte, former president of the Scriptwriters of South Carolina, and a member of The Dramatists Guild.
Unfortunately this will be our last play at The famous Red Lion Pub, they will be closing their doors at the end of August, for what you would call total overhaul or re-build from the ground up, they expect to open back up in a year. We appreciate Collin and Joe and the rest of the Red Lion Pub staff allowing us the usage of their place these last 5years and wish them the best.
As you know here in Chicago, theatre’s change venues constantly so we will have to move with the times. The second half of our 5th Anniversary Staged Reading Series 2007 / 2008 will continue in the fall at a brand new venue, to be announced.
Come out and join us for “DISCRETION”.
Thanx
JT
VALU-MART was a success for SRS – 5th Anniversary Season
June 26, 2007
VALU-MART was a success, being the first show of our Staged Reading Series 2007 / 2008 – 5th Anniversary Season.
Although, the turn out was alot better for saturday than it was for sunday, with understanding that there had been alot going on in our beloved city i.e. “Pride Fest, the Sox and Cubs playing each, as well as all the other attractions in the city this time of year, but nevertheless it was a success.
We thank everyone that came out and supported us.
RTC
We are currently celebrating our
5th Anniversary Staged Reading Series 2007 /2008
We have chosen the first play “VALU-MART”, a play written by Sean O’Leary
A synopsis -
Two black men – one, a former teacher who still cherishes the idealism of the civil rights era, and the other, a 20 year-old dropout on probation for receiving stolen property – offer compelling and conflicting perspectives on life. When they collide, the results are terrifying, uplifting, and sometimes both.
A display case key has gone missing at a mass merchandise department store. The two men and three other employees are suspected of taking the key and are detained in a break room from which they are removed one-at-a-time for questioning. Humiliated and fearful that they will all be fired if the key and the person responsible are not found, the five employees struggle to find a way out. The path they choose may be one of hope, one of surrender, or one of delusion. But, their struggle will expose the hopes, the fears, the aspirations, and the resentments that arise from five very different lives.
JT
We are accepting play submissions
May 23, 2007
We are accepting submissions for our 5th Anniversary Staged Reading Series 2007 / 2008.
NEW PLAY SUBMISSIONS:
Although we openly accept play submissions, we advise individuals interested to please read our “Mission Statement” and look at past shows from Staged Reading Series, Full Productions, and Our Festival Submissions sections at our main site REVOLUTION Theatre to get a brief idea of what type of plays we are interested in, before doing so. Also, be aware that we do not pay royalties for plays chosen for our “Staged Reading Series”, of course plays chosen for full productions will be paid royalties, all terms to be negotiated under contract and/or other party agreement/s.
Guidelines:
1.) Full lengths ~ 2hours in duration (MAX)- (2 Acts)
2.) One Acts ~ up to 1hour in duration (MAX)
3.) We don’t accept musicals.(Special Note – please include BIO and Playwrights Synopsis when sending play either by e-mail or snail mail.Also, Plays submitted to the REVOLUTION Theatre Company will not be return.
~Send Plays by e-mail to revolution_theatre@yahoo.com
PLEASE READ – (keep in mind that plays send by e-mail are difficult to read because we have things to tend to that will keep us from looking at a computer screen continuously, as oppose to hard copies which can travel with us, but with that being said regardless, we will read your work sooner or later, more later than sooner in some cases.Thanx)
OR
~Send Plays by regular mail to:
Literary Manager -
REVOLUTION Theatre Company
P.O. Box 3896
Chicago, Illinois 60654
Thanx
Thoughts on the status quo
January 8, 2007
Hello
Here is an interesting essay, sent to me by playwright Mary Fengar Gail, which she found in the LA WEEKLY which says alot:
A Theater Lover’s Lament in the LA WEEKLY
Confessions of a critic trying to keep the bottle at bay
By STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
Watching theater across L.A. is like spending the Fourth of July behind the Hollywood sign” you gaze out over the city and see sporadic bursts of light that have grown less frequent over the years. I once thought the problem with local theater was L.A.’s soaring real estate costs and the consequent pressure the market places on experimental storefront companies to be less edgy and more profitable. Or that it was the famously tawdry motive of doing theater to promote more lucrative careers in Hollywood. However, friends in New York say the same about theater there. A New York Times editor tells me that after a year of seeing three to four plays a week in the world’s center of professional theater, she’s moved by a mere three or four productions per season. Maybe all critics are jaded curmudgeons. But if so, why are theater audiences aging and attendance shrinking?
This isn’t true of opera. The National Endowment for the Arts reports that in the 10 years between 1982 and 1992, opera attendance shot up 35 percent, and then another 8.2 percent between 1992 and 2002, with most new audience members under age 40. (Similar figures have come in from Britain and Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.) Opera is clearly feeding a hunger, offering something that TV, movies and iPods can’t. Maybe it’s the scale, the size of the proscenium, the grandeur of the passion, the spectacle. That 20-year burst of new opera goers has not sustained its pace in the past four years, but opera continues to grow new audiences.
That’s also what downtown’s REDCAT aims for, with its multidisciplinary arts programming from Slovenian dance to Polish puppets. Attendance at this theater, which is connected to Roy O. Disney Hall, is up 12 percent this year, with the bulk of its audiences 25 to 35 years old” a pleasing aberration of the statistical profile of most theaters. It’s also a hint of the future, of the operatic canvases and mythic stories that hold a key to our theater’s survival.
Such expansion ”of both artistry and attendance” has eluded most American theater, whose support organizations presume that the problem starts with marketing and so concentrate on new technologies for reaching youth. Marketing is a legitimate concern, but maybe the problem starts with what’s on the stage, with the timidity of vision. How many more revivals of Glengarry Glen Ross and Closer and Nunsense do we have to sit through? How does a lackluster, out-of-tune reimagining of Dames at Sea really serve the audiences of Silver Lake in 2006?
How about, instead, gambling on that unknown writer in our own neighborhood whose unwieldy play or poem rattled bones when some literary manager first read it, but which the theater is just too afraid to produce, fearful that it’s flawed and that nobody will come? If producer Michael Ritchie can take such a risk at Center Theatre Group (as he did with Douglas Steinberg’s Nighthawks), where there’s real money being invested, why have our smaller theaters, with a fraction of the overhead, become so squeamish? Such fear is suffocating our theater, as it is in New York. There wasn’t a critic I met during recent visits there who believed that the dearth of quality on Manhattan stages was due to a lack of energy or talent. They speculated that the most interesting plays and playwrights simply aren’t getting produced.
I don’t presume to speak for everyone, but I know what I want” to feel something real, something authentic. Of course, it’s paradoxical to ask this from an art form that, by definition, is built on artifice. But I’m not complaining about razzle-dazzle, which I like a lot. I don’t care if it’s an autobiographical one-woman show, or a circus, a magic show, a play by August Wilson or a literary salon. I’m speaking of the attempt by artists to investigate an idea with honesty, intelligence, conviction and perhaps some humor. I need this in a culture that, like most cultures, is saturated in distortions and lies and arbitrary mandates and sales pitches. I need some relief, to be in a space with live actors where somebody is trying to speak the truth.
Welcome and Happy New Year 2007
January 5, 2007
Hello there, We would like to first off, welcome everyone to our
“renewed and updated” Playwrights Exchange and wish everyone a
Happy New Year 2007 from the REVOLUTION Theatre Company.
The Playwrights Exchange has always been meant as a place were
people can share, learn, teach, create, and discover plays in all its
forms, whether it be for the stage, screen, or even the web. As
Shakespeare once said “the plays the thing”, without words on the
page there would be no actors on the stage(no disrespect to actors).
Unless your doing improvisation which is something else, unless its
scripted but, thats something else especially here in our beloved
Chicago. Anyway, we look forward to meeting new people, making
new friends, working with, and discovering the art, which is the play.
(TNT) til next time.
Best wishes,
John Thurner/artistic director
