On the last day of the new play convening held at Arena Stage this past January, participants (and livestream satellite observers) were asked to come up with goals for the coming year. What could we do to further the state of new play development in our town/city/shire? One of my...
March 2011
This past week I began a new director-to-director interview series on 2AMt. Here is the first profile (Meet Michael Leeds), just in case you missed it. The objective of this series is twofold: (1) to create more dialogue among directors (2) to provide more insight into current directing practices. Profiles...
It is a discouraging time to be a liberal in the United States. About every other day, I’m calling my representatives to ask them to stand up for the programming that I feel is vital to our quality of life — the National Endowment for the Arts, public broadcasting, women’s...
No doubt you’ve heard other variations of this question. What makes a play an XXX play? You fill in the “XXX.” But I was asked specifically, “What makes a play a Latino play?” Who asked? It was a playwriting student. Her class on Latino theatre had just finished reading my...
While following the New Play Convening at Arena Stage in January, I was struck by a comment made about directors in relation to the supply/demand debate. The comment went something like this: directors have lacked opportunities to hone their craft and so have started companies in order to remedy this,...
Week 3. Is it just me, or are destruction stories a lot less interesting—or at least less fantastical—than creation stories? And there are a lot fewer variations on how things end than on how things begin. Maybe because with creation you have to work for it. We can’t imagine how...
I’ve been inspired by one of the emerging voices of the American theatre to take a good hard look at my generation. Over on HowlRound, Mat Smart has some biting and indicting words for his fellow emerging playwrights, as well as for artistic directors and literary managers the world over...
Ed Schmidt lied to me. At least, I think he did. To be perfectly honest, I can’t really say what was fact and what was fiction in his subversive little performance, My Last Play, which I saw last Friday. A little background, for those who may not have heard of...
So I have to start out by saying I am not used to blogging and the rules for it confound me. Along with that I have an education where I never learned Grammar or Syntax so if there are glaring errors, I blame Dasher Green Elementary School as well as...
You get lured in with a promise of queso and get stuck with a podcast… New York One Minute Play Festival Artistic Director Dominic D’Andrea thought he was taking a quiet trip to Austin and got caught got caught in my web. I sat down with the Johnny Appleseed of...
