Biodiversity is the practice of cultivating and sustaining a broad array of species in a given ecosystem. The opposite is monoculture. Monoculture is the practice of limiting species in a given ecosystem. Agriculturalists and eco-warriors promote biodiversity because they have found (and history has proven, see: Potato famine) the prevalence...
new plays
The Denver Center Theatre Company solidified its growing place as a major player in the development of new works for the American theater with last weekend’s well-received 7th annual Colorado New Play Summit, which featured works by Lisa Loomer, Samuel D. Hunter, Richard Dresser, Michael Mitnick and Lauren Feldman. It’s...
On my own blog some time ago I wrote about smaller and regional theatres being considered “minor league” in the pejorative sense and the broken ideas around that vocabulary in a post called “Is this Heaven, No It’s Iowa”. The happy upbeat ending for those of you too good to...
As the founder and now social media manager for Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival, I have recently had the delightful and curious experience of being able to dip my finger daily into the stream of material our 100 plus world premiere projects have created to promote their shows. I asked myself,...
Orion as a cop on the mean streets of 1970s San Francisco. Hera as the lady of a country estate in Victorian England. Chronus as an Arizona Republican politician debating whether to align himself with the Tea Party. These are some of the dozens of creative reinterpretations of Greek mythology...
THEATER IN BUFFALO IS NOT A CONTRADICTION. On Allen Street in Buffalo, New York, there is an establishment called Rust Belt Books. While the name certainly pays ironic tribute to an outsider’s image of the city, the back room of this iconic haunt imparts a truer, and more progressive, vision....
Previously in this column: The members of Bright Alchemy Theatre, a very young devised theatre company based in Washington, DC, have spent the last nine months working on its new project which began with the question: Why do we as a species feel the need to tell stories about our...
Alright, I’ve had it and I’m not keeping it to myself anymore. It seems that not a day goes by that a news item appears one place or another announcing that someone famous is considering/acquiring rights/contemplating/dreaming about creating a Broadway show or being on Broadway. Yesterday it was Kara DioGuardi...
More and more, I remind myself to look out the window of the theater and see if the people on the sidewalk have any relationship to the people or the story on the stage. I moved away from Chicago in June. Saying goodbye to the rough winters was easy. Bidding...
Every March, tens of thousands of people obsessed with technology, music, and film gather in Austin, Texas for 10 days of learning, hand-shaking, business-making, art-creating, and of course, debauchery. Some call it Nerd Spring Break. Others, South-by. But one thing is clear: The Interactive Conference at South by Southwest (SXSWi)...