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• #2amt, arts administration, community, crowdfunding, funding and support, kickstarter

  Layers and Layers of Nonsense: When Crowdfunding Cannot Get to the Crowd

  05.12.13 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Editor’s Note: While recording a podcast interview about this post, approximately two hours after the post went live, Amazon Payments finally came through with their approval. Now, two days later, Kickstarter has come through and the project is open for donations. Please click here to support Our Town at Sing Sing. I have a sad, [...]

• #2amt, actors, audiences, directors, dramaturgy

  Stoopid Shakespeare

  01.20.12 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  An exuberant conversation, hosted by Peter Marks and Howard Sherman, broke out on Twitter yesterday about Shakespeare; many good ideas were debated and discussed.  I am writing this post to delve more deeply into one of the fundamental questions about Shakespeare in performance, which is, after all, his native habitat.  Shakespeare in performance should be, [...]

• advocacy, alternatives, conversation starter, directors, playwrights, theatrical ecosystem

  Can I come out already?

  11.09.11 | Permalink | 11 Comments

  A conversation broke out on Twitter earlier this week, in response to a blog post (is that a squirrel chasing its own tail I see before me?), which led me here, to a small beer of a rant about an excrescence of language.  I speak of the dreaded appellation ‘emerging’ as it gets affixed to [...]

• actors, directors, playwrights, the process

  I know what it’s like to have failed, baby

  09.30.11 | Permalink | 15 Comments

  “There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments, but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.” ― Anton Chekhov Over nearly twenty years of striving, struggling and occasionally [...]

• actors, collaboration, community, directors, education, rabble rousing, the process

  We are Arthur

  04.25.11 | Permalink | 8 Comments

  Even though I am in prison three times a week, I am only just beginning to understand what it feels like to be incarcerated.  What I do know is that the men with whom I work with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at Sing Sing Correctional Facility feel like they have been thrown away.  They [...]

• conversation starter, directors, dramaturgy, playwrights, the process

  Shakespeare’s Text: The Unkindest Cut…

  02.08.11 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  “We cut and carve the body of a play to its peril.” – Harley Granville Barker In my philosophical approach to staging (and cutting) Shakespeare, I am very much a child of Harley Granville Barker. HGB, if you haven’t yet met him, was a director, an actor, a scholar and a redhead; he was a [...]

• conversation starter, directors, ideas, non-profit theatre, theatrical ecosystem

  Don’t need a weatherman to know . . .

  11.09.10 | Permalink | 8 Comments

    In the past twelve months, I have been a candidate in several searches for a new artistic director, and in three cases, I have been one of the last two or three standing. These experiences – these cover letters, interviews, meetings, discussions and also the crushing disappointments of that final phone call or email [...]

• actors, dramaturgy, education, ideas, Uncategorized

  Like an old tale still

  10.11.10 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  Last week, I coached an actor who had a big audition this past weekend.  It was of the ‘bring two contrasting pieces’ variety.  She came to me a little later in her process than I would have liked: I didn’t get a chance to consult with her about what pieces would show her off to [...]

• facts + figures, funding and support, ideas, marketing, producers, theatrical ecosystem

  I wish I knew then…

  08.25.10 | Permalink | 9 Comments

  This past weekend at the Chicago Theatre anti-Conference (#ctac, if you feel like swimming up the Twitter stream), erstwhile arts-administrators-turned-funders Christy Uchida, Boeing Chicago’s Community Investor, and Paul Botts, from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, gave conference attendees the gift of some hard-won insights through a discussion entitled, “If I knew then what I [...]

• actors, audiences, directors, dramaturgy, education, ideas, the process

  The Strip of (Textual) Terror

  08.24.10 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Collation line.  Apparatus.  Strip of terror.  Whatever you call it, it’s that somewhat inscrutable line or two of apparently Enigma code between the text and the annotations, particularly in a modern edition of, say, Shakespeare.  It might seem irrelevant or irretrievably geeky, but there are all kinds of important, dramatically compelling questions lurking amid the [...]

• #2femt, conversation starter, designers, directors, education, ideas, playwrights, rabble rousing, theatrical ecosystem

  Rainy days and glass ceilings always get me down

  08.08.10 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  A conversation broke out during the hockey game that is Twitter last week around the topic of gender equity, or the lack thereof, in the theatre. This eventually led to an offshoot on the nature of inclusion as a whole.  There is a gnarled thicket of issues blossoming fruitfully underneath ‘gender equity’ and ‘inclusion.’ I [...]

• actors, directors, dramaturgy, the process

  Theatre behind the walls

  06.27.10 | Permalink | 9 Comments

  “Theatre inspires me.” “Theatre teaches me about myself, and helps me to understand why other people do what they do.” “Theatre relaxes me.” “Theatre teaches me empathy.” “Everyone in my life was a backstabber or a deceiver.  I never knew what trust was until I started making theatre.” I didn’t say any of these things; [...]