New Plays

Green Stage Scratch Night Part of the Branching Out festival (also actors needed)

@ Rosemary Branch Theatre in Islington

November 28th, 7:30pm

Calling actors and directors:

We are looking for actors interested in participating in the a night of rehearsed reading for 3 exciting new plays!

We are also looking for one director who is interested in directing one of the plays.

Green Stage is an exciting new theatre project that plants sustainability at the heart of the creative process and at the root of new works themselves. Over the past 7 months they have devised original work inspired by environmental debates and interesting green spaces. Their short play Unplugged imagined how London would respond to a week long power cut and was performed at Spitalfields City Farm and Camden Green Fair. An interactive piece called Forest Trails & Urban Tales, inspired by King Henry’s Walk community garden, gave audiences a chance to reconnect with the forest through encounters with creatures both mythical and real. Now they venture inside a theatre building, with excerpts from 3 intriguing new plays tackling themes of activism, energy production and the frenzied detachment of urban living.

About the plays:

Good Fix by Meghan Moe Beitiks

A radical do-gooder art collective’s converted warehouse: a world of miso soup, grant applications, drunken hysteria and toxic sludge.
A play about the high we get from ‘right’ actions, the difficulty of pursuing lasting solutions, and the danger of defining ‘good’ too narrowly.

Cogent Park by Ian Lane

There is C. There is P. Together they make CHP.
P does the pacing. H hitches a ride.
P makes things happen. H makes things the happenings more bearable.
An absurdist physical theatre piece about the relationship between heat and power, and the benefits of cogeneration.

Hollow Glass by Lara Stavrinou

“The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital”—Bookchin, Murray, Post Scarcity Anarchism
Witness the dysfunctional social arrangements of six twenty-somethings as they struggle to accustom themselves to life in the city. Activism, vintage shoes and microwave brownies provide instant gratification, but in the midst of rising crime and distrust, can they find the space and time to relate to one another?

Rehearsals:

Thursday, Nov. 25th 6:30-9:30pm
Sunday, Nov. 28th 10:00 – performance at 7:30pm.

Unfortunately this is an unpaid opportunity but your travel expenses will be covered.

Please email: greenstageuk@gmail.com if you are interested and available for the rehearsals.

The Oikos Project

A theatre hand-built entirely from salvaged material is being constructed in an abandoned playground in Southwark.

The 120-seat Jellyfish Theatre will be the venue for the Oikos Project, which aims to “explore how a new sustainable society can flourish in a world altered by climate change”. To that end, two new plays have been commissioned and will be performed this autumn: Simon Wu’s OIKOS and Kay Adshead’s Protozoa.

The idea for the project came from Topher Campbell of The Red Room, and work to build the theatre began during the London Festival of Architecture earlier this summer. Constructed from scraps begged and borrowed from building sites, struck theatrical sets, and fruit ‘n veg palettes taken from New Covent Garden Market, the theatre has taken shape slowly over the past eight weeks, with the build completed by volunteers guided by German husband-and-wife architects Martin Kaltwasser and Folke Köbberling in a vaguely improvisational manner.

It will be used to host talks and workshops before the plays begin, and the whole thing will be taken down by mid-October, leaving little in its trace. Cedric Price would have been proud.

The Jellyfish Theatre, Marlborough Playground, 11 – 25 Union Street, London SE1 1LB. For more information visit the Oikos Project website.

via The Oikos Project: A Theatre Built From Junk – Londonist.

Climate changes: Steve Waters interview

Many had considered climate change an impossible subject to dramatise. But two new plays that opened at the Bush in May proved them wrong.

Steve Waters talks to Robert Butler about ‘The Contingency Plan’, his double-bill of plays about climate change, and how they were inspired by James Lovelock, the 1953 floods, and the Transition Town Handbook.

http://www.ashdendirectory.org.uk/featuresView.asp?pageIdentifier=2009122_59406680&view=

To coincide with the UN Conference in Copenhagen, Radio 3 also broadcasts a version of ‘The Contingency Plan’ (this Sunday, 8pm) and two readings of the play, with the original cast, will be produced at the Bush on 15 and 18 December.