About six and a half years ago, we started the #2amt hashtag on Twitter. If you’re on this site, you know it’s a conversation about theatre–performance, production, promotional ideas, outreach, what have you. It’s been a wonderful conversation and community–and continuously active on the hashtag–from day one. This week, it’s...
alternatives
The Chicago Reader published as careful and deliberate a piece of investigative journalism covering the arts as I can ever remember reading. In the piece Aimee Levitt and Chris Piatt laid out a history of mental and physical abuse and cultish insularity at Chicago’s Profiles Theatre that mirrors much of that...
Effort. Webster’s defines effort as “work done by the mind or body: energy used to do something.” I spend more time than you can imagine thinking about, analyzing, and trying to minimize effort required by a body to achieve anything – including the effort required to do nothing. My senses...
We’ve Named the Problem. Now what? Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last week (in which case, I hope it’s been warm!), if you’re in the theatermaking world, you are likely aware of the fallout from an event Twitter dubbed #thesummit. For the uninitiated, Brett Steven Abelman posted a...
Fringe Festivals are a time for experimentation in theater. I look forward to seeing the mix of sights and sounds at the Capital Fringe Festival every year. There’s one thing I don’t understand: Why do so many people decide to produce Shakespeare? I will never produce a Shakespeare play for...
About a month ago, I approached a local theatre company with a project: “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” Mike Daisey had released the script into the world a few weeks before. I read it. I loved it. I really wanted to do it. And it seemed like...
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...
I haven’t been an actor in a long time. I had spent most of nearly three decades (I was a very, very young child actor…) working on one show or another before finding myself torn between those age-old female choices of nurturing myself or nurturing my offspring. Luckily, my first-born...
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’...