Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. — Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing Over at Arts Journal, they’re hosting a discussion & debate this week called Lead Or Follow? In their words, “Increasingly, audiences have more visibility for their opinions about the culture they consume. Cultural institutions know more and more about their audiences and their [...]
I’m 22 years old, a student at NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program. I’m sitting in a coffee shop, surrounded by friends. The topic of conversation is how a teacher admitted that he couldn’t name a female playwright he liked. I don’t know if this story is true. I don’t care since I don’t have a class [...]
Sometimes its not the information you consume, it’s how you use it: Fertile Ground Festival Project Lear’s Follies did a clever thing recently. They snagged a link that was much shared around #2amt circles (the Marie Claire article about theatre being behind only sex and exercise for creating happiness)and turned it into an irrefutable, ingenious [...]
I have spent the past couple days trying to get back into the real world. There is always this time period when you have taken a vacation and now need to get back to work and the world you put off for a week or so. While on vacation I pushed hard to try and [...]
Soon after I wrote this Forum Theatre post on the Bechdel Test, the question arose: what might be a similar test for LGBT characters? Being both gay and up for the challenge, I gave it a try. Here it is: The Test – Does the movie have? 1. An identifiable LGBT character 2. Who has [...]
A few weeks ago, during the TCG Fall Forum, I saw an interesting Twitter conversation and felt compelled to wade in. Kristoffer Diaz had written: Disappointed at the lack of response to question about non-financial contributions of potential board members. #tcgff My response was that every board member should give, though the amount might vary. [...]
I am a tremendous admirer of the verses of Robert Frost. I’ve been studying his work for as long as I’ve been studying poetry, which is (at happens) more than a couple of decades now, and it continues to yield new discoveries for me. He was a prosodic genius—a fact that I fear goes largely [...]
Early in 2011 the national and international theatrical community rallied together behind the Belarus Free Theatre as they struggled to find a way to not only continue their powerful work in the theatre, but bring awareness to the truth of the situation in their country of Belarus. Human rights infringements, horrors of torture, disappearances, and [...]
What can we learn from the birth of the regional theatre movement? Which arts administrator has reached a mass-critical critical mass? Where did Verdi and Shakespeare work to support their writing habits? How many theatres are we going to have to occupy? Why do we call it play? These are the stories we’ve been following [...]
a #neverbedark approach to making more art Three years ago, at Sycamore Rouge, we built six acting cubes, and it not only changed the way we rehearsed- it changed the way we opened the doors to artmaking. Like many theatres, we produce a five-show mainstage theatre season. We have a commitment to new works, but [...]
Thanks to Travis Bedard, I don’t need to say anything about Michael Kaiser’s latest post. And if that weren’t enough, you could read more from Jeremy Barker and Isaac Butler in reaction. I will say this. The irony of complaining about citizen bloggers in a post at the Huffington Post is a beautiful thing. This [...]
…and what it means for our future. I was a lucky audience member for the Oct 26th SDC Zelda Fichandler Award presentation at Arena Stage (which was given, this year, to Blanka Zizka of Wilma Theater). I wanted to attend, in part, because I had just joined the stage directors and choreographers union a few [...]