Thursday January 22, 2015
This month I read a successful playwright from the UK currently living in Brooklyn - Dipika Guha. Though well known, she has yet to reach her greatest success. On November 11, 2014 Dipika won the First Shakespeare's Sisters Playwriting Fellowship. Good luck Dipika. You are amazing.
Speaking of playwrights and Shakespeare - we come to Francis Bacon born on this date in 1561. The Rumor Mill ... Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare plays?
Francis Bacon Google Videos
Francis Bacon was an English philosopher, statesman, freemason
with interests in the occult trends of Hermeticism and Alchemy.
A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works may be written specifically to be performed by actors, or they may be closet dramas - simple literary works - written using dramatic forms, but not meant for performance.
The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks. These early plays were written for annual Athenian competitions among playwrights held around the 5th century BC. Such notables as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes established forms still relied on by their modern counterparts. For the ancient Greeks, playwriting involved po•esis, "the act of making". This is the source of our word poet.
Contemporary playwrights in the United States often do not reach the same level of fame or cultural importance as others did in the past. No longer the only outlet for serious drama or entertaining comedies, theatrical productions must compete for an audience with films, television, and the Internet. In addition, the perilous state of funding for the arts in the United States and a growing reliance by non-profit theatres with ticket sales as a source of income, has caused many of them to reduce the number of new works being produced. For example, Playwrights Horizons produced only six plays in the 2002-03 seasons, compared with thirty-one in 1973-74. As revivals and large-scale production musicals become the de rigueur of Broadway (and even Off-Broadway) productions, playwrights find it difficult to earn a living in the business, let alone achieve major successes. Read more ...