PLAYWORKS
There is nothing more important to the long-term vitality of American theatre as an art form than the nurturing of new voices. PlayWorks is the first step in this process. PlayWorks present readings of new plays by contemporary, often local, playwrights and gives them the opportunity to share their work and include the audience in the creative process.
Plays are read by professional actors, followed by an audience discussion with the author. This gives our supporters a rare opportunity to became and important part of the process - engaging the playwright with questions, comments, and isights into the work.
Plays that have started life at PlayWorks include Bunnies by Joanne Hoersch, recipient of a New Jersey Council on the Arts grant for playwrighting and published in 2022 by Next Stage Press; Eric Conger's Beautiful Boy, produced at Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia; Stand Up Man by Derek Murphy, presented at C21 Theatre in Belfast, Northern Ireland; and 3 Men by Mike Folie, presented at the United Solo Festival, NYC.
All PlayWorks readings are free to the public.
New Jersey Theatre Alliance’s
The Stages Festival
presents
Hudson Theatre Works’
PlayWorks Festival
Readings of New Plays
featuring
“Shelley” by Joanne Hoersch
on March 14
and
“Fever” by Robert Clem
March 21st
both at @7:30pm
at the Theatre at the Wilson School
80 Hauxhurst Avenue
Weehawken, NJ 07086
Readings are FREE
(with a $10 suggested donation)
Be a part of the process of audience talk backs with playwright.
PlayWorks has lead to numerous productions around the U.S. and Europe
and at Hudson Theatre Works.
New Jersey Theatre Alliance presents Hudson Theatre Work’s PlayWorks Festival of new play readings on Monday, March 14th and Monday, March 21st @7:30pm. This event is part of the Alliance’s Stages Festival, the state’s largest annual theatre festival, which provides free and discounted theatre events for all ages throughout the months of March, April, and May. This event is FREE with a $10 suggested donation.
SHELLEY by Weehawken playwright Joanne Hoersch, is set in 1814 Seventeen year old Mary Godwin, runs off to post-Revolutionary France, with Percy Shelley, one of the greatest of the Romantic poets, seeking adventure and enlightenment. What they find instead, sparks her creative talents in a way she could never have imagined.
FEVER by Robert Clem adapts Crime and Punishment and sets the action in New York City’s East Village in 1969. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s early radicalism and death sentence, commuted at the last minute, inspired his Notes from the Underground as well as the later novel in which a young man commits murder and gets away with it, but is unable to hide his guilt.
Join us for tales from Sam Shepard's Cruising Paradise. A reading of rarely heard pieces by one of America's most important writers.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, ex-cowboy, and musician Sam Shepard now stands revealed as a storyteller of dazzling artistry. Bleak and wildly funny, touching but stringently unsentimental, these stories give readers a most intimate view of the writer who has become synonymous with the landscape of America. Some of these pieces are beautifully constructed, fully realized short stories, while others are short bursts of dialogue, meditations, diary entries, letters, monologues, phone calls and plaints. Still others seem like myth and lore gleaned from old texts or barrooms. All are strong voice pieces--no surprise from a major playwright.
Date: Sunday May 22 at 3:00PM
This is a FREE event.