For five years now, Tivoli’s Tangent Theatre Company, along with its partner across the Atlantic, AboutFACE Ireland, has sponsored a blind-submission competition for recent original stageworks, called the NEWvember New Plays Festival. It’s back this week, and among the six plays chosen this year on the basis of “originality, range, production potential, narrative quality and emotional resonance” from among nearly 500 submitted is one by a Hudson Valley playwright, Steven Haworth of Garrison.
Haworth’s entry, The Other Genius, will be presented on Saturday, November 7 at 8 p.m.
Described as “a razor-sharp comedy of love triangles, master criminals, art deals, family secrets, murder plots, Oedipal rivalry and Serbian ninjas,” the play involves a college student in love with one of his professors who may or may not have had an affair with the student’s father back when she was his babysitter, possibly prompting his mother’s suicide.
The other 2015 NEWvember plays include The Third Rail by Jacob Perkins of Brooklyn, to be performed at 8 p.m. on Thursday, November 5; The Mongoose by Will Arbery of Evanston, Illinois, 8 p.m., Friday, November 6; Last Flight of the Mercenary by Karen Howes of Los Angeles and Madison, New Jersey, 2 p.m., Saturday, November 7; The Orange Garden by Joanna Garner of Austin, Texas, 2 p.m., Sunday, November 8; and Love, Love: Last Stand at Helm’s Deep by Peter Papadopoulos of San Francisco, 6 p.m., Sunday, November 8.
All NEWvember Festival performances are live readings and will be held at the Carpenter Shop Theater, Tangent’s 50-seat performance space at 60 Broadway in the center of Tivoli. Tickets cost $15 per play; a festival pass providing admission to all six shows goes for $60. To order or for more details, call (845) 230-7020 or visit www.tangent-arts.org or https://newvemberfestival.com.
