Thursday, September 3, 2015

Welcome to the Collider Theater Submission Page! (as of February 2016)



Welcome to the Collider Theater Submissions Page!

Collider Theater is a brand new theater community dedicated to telling stories that document the collision of divergent cultures.

We launched our company with the inaugural production of "Love Sex and Death in the Amazon" at The Paradise Factory, @ 64 East 4th Street, NYC, in October of 2015.

As producers of new theater, we'd love to hear from you!  We're deeply interested in finding stories which explore forms of collision between cultures – differences of location, time period, belief systems, language, generational differences, etc.

Unfortunately (we have day jobs too), we don't have the resources to read unsolicited scripts. Our mission statement posted below should give you a better sense of the kind of work we're looking for. If you have a story that you thinks fits within these parameters, please email us the following:

A brief description of your journey as a writer. What playwrights and plays excite you?  Who are your icons?

Ten sample pages of dialogue, from anywhere in the script.  Pick an example that you feel best reflects your writing.

A one-page synopsis of the overall plot.

A character breakdown.

Contact information.

Any other (brief) information that you feel might help us to evaluate your work.

Please put your name and the word "submission" in the email subject. All materials can be emailed to collidertheatersubmissions@gmail.com. No fixed deadline.  We're planning to produce a reading series in the Fall of 2016, with an eye towards full production of a script in 2017.

Thank you, and we look forward to hearing from you!


Sincerely,

Robert Murphy
Jean Randich
Artistic Directors
Collider Theatre Company

Monday, August 31, 2015

Collider Theater - Our Mission Statement

















Collider Theatre – Mission Statement

We live in an absurdly overconnected world.  Internet devices and cell phones give us the ability to connect with anybody and everybody, 24/7, anywhere in the world.  Major catastrophes are fed into the global news feed, transformed into downloadable entertainment for our phones and wireless devices.  Human migration across the globe has reached proportions that our ancestors could not have dreamed of.  But this aggressive intermingling and interconnection seems to have evolved far beyond our basic human abilities to understand each other. 

As New Yorkers, many of us migrate here from all corners of the country and the globe.  For the most part we respect each other’s rights and boundaries, but we don’t begin to understand our neighbors, or what they’ve gone through.  That lack of understanding results with tragic frequency in violence – Americans attacking Sikhs immediately after 9/11, clueless that the victims weren’t remotely Muslim.  The traffic accident in Crown Heights that resulted in weeks of civic unrest, with racial and religious tensions that linger to this day.  The number of Americans who seem completely unable to digest the fact that a biracial man, with an African Muslim father, was elected President of the United States.

As theatre artists, we’re interested in creating a theatre company that explores these collisions and how they influence us as human beings.  The intention is not as much to explore bridges that connect us, but rather to investigate points of collision:  An American gringo forced by his partner’s death to honor African religious ceremonies that he doesn’t comprehend.  Immigrant kids fighting with their parents who speak a language they barely understand.  Hipsters and Orthodox Jews forced into an uneasy coexistence in Williamsburg.   European tourists searching in vain for the old sex-drenched Times Square.

Theatre in contemporary America can sometimes feel like a pointless exercise, for theatre artists and audiences alike.  Sitting on public transit, gazing at a sea of commuters welded to their iPhones, you start to wonder if the need for human interaction is being phased out of our DNA.  Despite all this, I believe that if you have a good story and can make your audience feel something, you’ve won a small battle towards preserving human contact in modern society. 

Robert Murphy
Jean Randich
Co-Artistic Directors, Collider Theatre