Roll On, Strange Little Plays. Roll On. I will start off saying this: rolling world premieres should be the ONLY way plays premiere. With consecutive and distinct productions a new play gets the essential time and community to mature rapidly, thoroughly, and cradled by friendly forces. Awww. A play becomes...
“In the universe – just like in music, or architecture, or relationships – the absence, the space between, is just as important as the observable, tangible things.” — Dear Galileo by Claire Willett One of the questions I continually run up against when I’m writing a play is this: “Who...
Here in San Francisco we are one week away from the kick off of the 2011 Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF). I’m a big fan of this festival because it’s how I started down the playwriting path. Back in 2005 my first play was selected for the festival and since...
Tonight, more than 70 theatre companies across Canada are presenting staged readings of the play Homegrown by Catharine Frid. Why? Read J. Kelly Nestruck’s piece about the SummerWorks Festival and how the Department of Cultural Heritage has seriously–and at the last minute–cut funding to the festival. Then read playwright Michael...
It’s been a month since the first Dramatists Guild National Conference. In that month, three things have stayed with me: Mame Hunt’s declaration to playwrights to stop writing realism, Julia Jordan’s keynote speech on gender parity, and Marsha Norman’s comment that we need to hear everyone’s stories at the gender...
In case you’ve been in a coma for the last year, there’s this Broadway musical, it’s called Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and it’s made some headlines. There were accidents and script problems and fights with critics and the official opening kept being pushed further back and back and back...
John Lahr, New Yorker theater critic, wrote a piece on Julie Taymor’s frustration with the process of creating a new theatrical work in the era of instant feedback, Twitter, and focus groups. It’s a great piece, full of historical perspective on the role of audience (that is to say, amateur)...
This afternoon, Florida Stage announced that it was filling for chapter 7 bankruptcy and closing its doors forever. Florida Stage was the largest theatre company producing only new work in the United States. They were also the largest theatre company in the South Florida Theatre Region. Unfortunately, they had 1.5...
Previously in this column: Bright Alchemy Theatre, a very young company devoted to the creation of devised work, decides to begin work on a narrative and thematic sequel to A Cre@tion Story for Naomi, which explored the world’s creation myths. We began this new process with a question: Why do...
