A $15,000 announcement.
Spread the word, my darlings!!!!
A CROSSOVER MOMENT!
I’ve been sitting on this for weeks—months??—and am very VERY excited to finally be sharing the news: InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia, PA, (where I just so happen to be the literary manager…) announced its two-year project, The Philly Cycle, in which InterAct will commission three playwrights to write three original plays about and with Philadelphia communities that are underrepresented on local and national stages.
Yes, you read that right: a commission. A $15,000 commission.
And the other thing? A guaranteed production.
For anyone new to our world of the The Theatre, hear this: a guaranteed production is a rare, rare thing. (Commissions are nothing to sneeze at either, but it often happens that a play gets commissioned, but doesn’t necessarily get more than a reading or a workshop or the like.) For the full details on The Philly Cycle commissioning process, check out the InterAct website, my friends.
Another thing to note: each one of the three plays will center a different underrepresented community. Now when we say “underrepresented”, we don’t mean underrepresented in, say…a census. We mean underrepresented on stage. A perfect example of this is our very first community: African American Muslims.
Here in Philadelphia, African American Muslims are an enormous and diverse community. (For interested parties: a census tells us that 200,000 Philadelphians identify as African American Muslims.) And yet…it’s unfortunately rare to see a Black American Muslim story on stage. (That is…in the experience of InterAct.)
An especially exciting part of this project is that we’ll be facilitating meetings between the playwright at Black Muslim community here in Philadelphia, the idea being that we (as an institution) allow the community we mean to center to tell the storyteller directly how they want to see themselves represented. I’m proud to report that such meetings have already started, as we’ve had a couple of meetings now with the Council on American-Islam Relations (CAIR), and had a brainstorming meeting with a hilarious and thoughtful group that CAIR called together. In that meeting, we listened to what the group feels is important to prioritize as we start our national search for a playwright.
Today’s newsletter is short because I wanted to drop this bit of news and then let you spread it far and wide.
Tell your playwright friends! Black and Muslim writers to the front, though all are welcome to apply!
And hey while you’re here: we are actively soliciting suggestions for future communities to center in our upcoming Philly Cycle projects. So if there are communities (race, gender, sexuality, class, labor, niche interest) that you’re conspicuously not seeing on American stages, I want to know! Not to be this person but…let me know in the comments. (Ugh gross I am so sorry.)
Happy Friday, my sweets! So looking forward to reading your applications!
For the full details on The Philly Cycle, check out the InterAct website. You can also take a look at the application form here: