On January 21st of this year, my producing partners and I began previews of the first of its kind, interactive live streamed play. This was a full length production of Joey Brenneman’s Better Left Unsaid, cast with professional New York actors, staged in a small off-off broadway house in front...
Currently the South Florida Theatre League is participating in a program called Capacity Building Miami. My board president, myself, and the board presidents, artistic directors and managing directors of about fifty Miami based arts organizations have signed on for a two year mentorship program with the Kennedy Center. I’ve been gushing...
Prepping a Shakespeare text for performance requires careful negotiation from the outset. As a director and voice and text consultant on productions, I work wearing a couple of dramaturgical hats. I’m mindful, firstly, of the practical aspects surrounding the task: proposed running time, budgetary constraints, cast size and casting choices...
Indulge me in a little rhetorical drama, I have, on occasion, so indulged many of you. The USA needs theatre. We are a potentially free and democratic people, but when the citizens become disenchanted and politically disengaged, we disenfranchise ourselves and cede leadership to those who can tolerate swimming in...
And there are those times that we treat it, the theatre, the thing that we all love so much that we sacrifice sleep and money and relationships with other human beings for it; there are times we treat it like a patient with an illness we cannot identify but we...
In a thread arising from a post about whether or not arts organizations should ask artists for donations; I commented that, for an arts service organization, the artist may be the only person with whom the ASO can develop the necessary relationship. Travis Bedard responded with an observation that “ASOs...
Your real job is relationships. No new surprise there. You build relationships through shared meaning and narrative. Still, no great revelation. Meaning is through shared language. What are you creating to bring new language to the collective discussion? Dr. Seuss (a master in the use of language) put it best...
Looks like everyone’s wrestling this week, whether it’s playwrights & critics, casts & audiences, critics & artistic directors, journalists & editors… We’ve also been thinking, arguing and questioning what we do and why we do it. We even get a little political, but only a little. And there’s no intermission....
