So, here we are. Week two and hip-deep in the initial group dramaturgy of Bright Alchemy’s devising process, which started with the question “Why do we as a species feel compelled to tell stories of our own destruction?” It’s very early, but I’m already beginning to get that familiar feeling of drowning in images and [...]
Wherein I blog Bright Alchemy’s devising process for its newest project. My living room is full of artists eating baked goods and mainlining coffee. The latter is not surprising, since it’s 10:30 A.M. on a Sunday. What is surprising is that a dozen theatre-makers chose to subject themselves to this sun-drenched world while there was [...]
Tom Robinson (Peter Macon), Atticus Finch (Mark Murphey) and Heck Tate (Peter Frechette) in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Photo: David Cooper. Ashland’s a snowy, somewhat icy town this weekend for the opening weekend of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. First up last night was the Bill Rauch-directed Measure for Measure, which I [...]
“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 [...]
Prepping a Shakespeare text for performance requires careful negotiation from the outset. As a director and voice and text consultant on productions, I work wearing a couple of dramaturgical hats. I’m mindful, firstly, of the practical aspects surrounding the task: proposed running time, budgetary constraints, cast size and casting choices – as well as performance [...]
Your real job is relationships. No new surprise there. You build relationships through shared meaning and narrative. Still, no great revelation. Meaning is through shared language. What are you creating to bring new language to the collective discussion? Dr. Seuss (a master in the use of language) put it best when he wrote the book [...]
I attended an inspiring and provoking event last night, the New York Theatre Experiment’s second “Generations” event, where Michael Mayer, Denis O’Hare, and Annie Baker talked about the future of theater. A lot of juicy topics came up, many of which I think would be fodder for their own panel – one of which was [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Some more pull quotes, this time a quick conversation from Twitter between playwright Kristoffer Diaz and Tony Adams, artistic director of Halcyon Theatre in Chicago, maybe spinning off a little from comments on yesterday’s post about scripts and AD’s…
“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; [...]
So many live, perishable experiences hang on the decision to leave the house, the decision to take the trouble to go to the venue before the event no longer exists. I remember weighing the $20 cab fare it would cost me to make it to Mandel Hall at the University of Chicago in time to [...]