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Online Shop and E-Bookstore We have the following TNC items available for purchase: |
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THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY T-SHIRTS Available in Adult L and XL only
TNC T-shirts are both comfortable and stylish, and are a great way to show your support for the Off-Off Broadway Theater community. Price:
$20.00 per shirt |
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THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY We are pleased to introduce the THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY E-Bookstore. We will now be selling E-Book versions of play scripts that have been produced here at TNC. All TNC E-Books will be e-mailed to you in .pdf format, accessible with Adobe Reader, and compatible with the Sony E-Book Reader and easily converted to the Amazon Kindle Format. |
SKETCHING UTOPIA Written by Laurel Hessing From a review by Jessica Bagdorf and Neil Genzlinger in the NY Times of February 18, 2001, ''Sketching Utopia,'' a drama by Laurel Hessing, tells the true story of Helicon Hall, a short-lived commune in Englewood Cliffs that was founded by the writer Upton Sinclair which came to a fiery end one night in 1907. According to Mr. Genzlinger, Laurel Hessing's play tells of city dwellers who dream of a better kind of life and look to the countryside to try to find it. It focuses on a group of Greenwich Village radicals in the days before World War I who seek to put the progressive ideas sweeping through the artistic world into practical effect. They form a community called “The Straight Edge” in Greenwich Village, and then Sinclair leads some of them to Englewood Cliffs, where he has founded the Helicon Hall commune. Upton Sinclair had recently published ''The Jungle,'' his powerful exposé of the meat packing industry, and Ms. Hessing, by quoting liberally from his writings, recreates what a shock the book was to the American public. It made Sinclair plenty of enemies, and he was in the process of making more by researching the steel industry when the commune burned, a fire portrayed as arson in the play. A group from Helicon Hall follow lawyer, writer, philosopher Bolton Hall to Berkeley Heights in Union County, New Jersey, where they establish a single-tax community called Free Acres. That community has today evolved into a group of 85 socially and environmentally conscious families, and one of its residents is Ms. Hessing. Her sister, Crystal Field, who directed ''Sketching Utopia,'' was also raised there, amid the stories of the old idealistic days and the people who lived them, like Ernest and Undena deGuilbert Eberlein, the couple whose story forms the heart of the play. ''We grew up between the ghosts,'' Ms. Hessing said. ''We never met them because they died long before we came along, but you're living history here in Free Acres.'' The stories took a more tangible form when a neighbor who was razing a house asked Ms. Hessing and a friend, Sylvia Heerens, if they would take custody of a large cache of old papers. What they found was a wealth of letters and diaries and more, dating to 1879, detailing the lives of the Eberleins and others. ''We had the legends,'' Ms. Hessing said, ''but we didn't really have the nitty-gritty. The nitty-gritty was contained in those cartons and boxes.'' The play that Ms. Hessing fashioned from those documents tracks the Eberleins from their courtship to Helicon to the founding of Free Acres, with an assortment of songs along the way. Arthur Abrams set Ms. Hessing's lyrics to music. Ms. Hessing said the story, especially Sinclair's fearless skepticism, has relevance today, with the likes of Superfund sites and genetic engineering in the news. ''You have to be vigilant,'' she said. ''We have more of the unknown coming, and fast. There is no Upton Sinclair today.'' Available in E-Book Format, 107 pages
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THE GOLDEN BEAR Written by Laurel Hessing THE GOLDEN BEAR, a play based upon Michael Gold’s autobiographical novel, JEWS WITHOUT MONEY. Irwin Granich & Michael Gold were one man; a writer who had started writing one act plays of tenement life performed on McDougal St. by the Provincetown players at the time when the early work of Eugene O’Neil was also being staged. He wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York World and the socialist daily New York Call. This Jewish writer’s great friend was Dorothy Day, founder of The Catholic Worker. People from many nations poured into the lower east side fleeing the poverty and despair of the old countries from which they came. Jews fled more than poverty; the specter of the pogroms and butchery of their people stared back at them from their bloody past. Chrystie Street was a warren of vermin infested tenement sweat shops in 1900. When Michael Gold found his balance as a writer and journalist his strength grew as he spoke of what he had learned as a child and as a young man; from living in a basement sweatshop, from defeating starvation by working as errand boy in the garment center, shipping clerk, printer’s assistant, night porter, driver’s helper for the Adams Express Company, filing clerk for the Southern Pacific Railroad. These were his classrooms and fellow workers and his bosses were his teachers. He learned how babies were made on the streets where the whores plied their trade among the teamsters. He learned about vermin as his mother defied bedbugs in the tenement night after night. Yet while the specter of poverty stalked like an angel of death among his people, story tellers and poets did not lose their art. Music flourished, and the golden bear would not die. Available in E-Book Format, 92 Pages |
HOW TO WRITE AND DIRECT A STREET THEATER PLAY Written by TNC Executive Director and author of over 30 Street Theater plays, Crystal Field. A wonderful little Book on How to create Theater for any occasion from Birthdays to Revolution --- It succinctly tells all and its precepts can be followed by writers/producers of any age and degree of education. Charmingly written, it contains one whole Street Theater play/musical, complete as an example of the art of "Playwriting for the people." Can be used by schools, clubs, little Theaters and just plain folks. Available in E-Book Format, 46 Pages |
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Interested in purchasing an item from the TNC Online shop? please do the following: We now accept online payments through OvationTix.
Orders will be filled in the order they are received. Please allow 4 weeks for shipping if you are ordering a TNC T-Shirt. E-Books will be e-mailed to you within two weeks of purchase. For questions, please e-mail info@theaterforthenewcity.net |
