1000th Post: Call for Plays

I have been asked to help initiate a dinner theatre project at a new venue here in Nashville called BRICKHOUSE. I would love to hear about any scripts which might be right for us. Right now we're looking for comedies with smaller casts (6 maximum) and minimal production requirements. Also & especially one person shows that are on the lighter side. You can email me here.

Jaz

Re our 1000th post. It all began over 3 years ago on April 30, 2007 with this post: Art is in the DNA of Species Memory. In that time, AAPEX has chronicled for better or worse the state of African-American theatre on a national level. Our roster of African-American playwrights and playwrights of the African-American experience is arguably the best if not the only one of its kind on the Net. Today we list 228 playwrights, 183 with direct Internet links of some sort. We also list 88 African-American theatre companies with Internet links and a list of African-American cultural and theatrical resources. One click will take you there and to them.

We regularly post any news on any kind of African-American theatre productions, readings, and call for plays. We especially champion those playwrights/producers who are pro-active in their careers who aren't waiting on the sidelines for somebody to stage their work by posting our AAPEX Interviews. Without any funding or financial support, AAPEX has also mounted numerous readings across the U.S. with many occurring in the heart of this country's biggest theatre city: New York.

And we do this for our playwrights without asking for any financial compensation. Why? So your voices can be heard. And because you and your genre will always suffer the slings and arrows of a bad economy long before it reaches white theatre companies and the white patrons that support them. Because most American theatre companies are white, your plays full of African American characters must look elsewhere. With your options decidedly smaller, you're left with a limited number of African-American theatres with shoe string budgets and profit margins so narrow that new works are rarely given a chance to succeed or fail since failure in AA theatre is, in most instances, a fine way to go bankrupt.

Unfortunately, even for us, lack of financial support is putting the kabosh on what we've been trying to do. This may well be the last post. The people behind AAPEX need to start focusing on getting jobs for ourselves. To that end, posting may very well come to an end with this one.

Still, you can follow this exciting period in African-American theatre by beginning with our Blog Archive at the bottom and following it backwards. Although this may be the last post until we can find a sponsor or funding, the AAPEX blog will continue to exist in cyberspace as a record of three years of African-American theatre and as a tool for producers to find playwrights. With the number of playwrights and AA theatre companies we found over the last three years this is, in our mind despite the economy and because of the abundance of great writing-- even if it never gets produced-- the Golden Age of African-American theatre.