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...
the process
Here in DC, it’s season roll-out time. The major theatres are sending out press releases listing the plays they’ll be tackling in their 2012-13 season, making each seem like a precious gem that audiences would be fools to miss. Recently, after two major theatres went public with their season and...
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...
Over the past week or so I have been near the center of exchanges about theatre and social media that feel alternately like discussions, vent sessions, and policy ponderings. Social media and theatre and the mix of both — discuss. And when you add in questions of the directionality of...
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...
Over the weekend, @NewPlayTV streamed three interesting, presumably unrelated talks. The first was from Steppenwolf’s First Look Festival, titled How to engage 21st Century Audiences for New Plays, followed an hour later by one from the PlayFest at Orlando Shakespeare Theater on How to Make a Living as a Playwright?...
Other people’s money is not just the name of a play by Jerry Sterner. It is the temptation put before an “agent” when working on behalf of a “principal” that gives rise to “moral hazard.” Other people’s money is also what nonprofit organizations – like theatre companies – use to...
When Jim Leonard was an English major at Hanover College in the late seventies, where I was running a one man theatre department, he responded to a request I issued for “extras” to swell a scene in a play I was staging. He had one line and seemed to be...
“There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments, but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.” ― Anton Chekhov Over nearly twenty years...
“…being a playwright is hard. One of my profs once said to me you have to work hard at it for at least 10 years before you start to see any movement.” —Advice For Playwrights Starting Out by Adam Szymkowicz I read that bit of insight when I was starting...