At least twice a rehearsal, a potential audience member wanders in and asks what we’re doing. They ask what play this is, if they can watch us rehearse, when we’re performing, whether we need more performers, and if we ever hold open mic nights. These are people from the neighborhood...
Quick: how many theatre pieces have you seen with the word Project in the title? Quite a few, right? Maybe you’ve been involved in one. I have. And almost everyone knows about The Laramie Project. The word Project is often an indicator of devised work–pieces created by an ensemble rather...
In the fairly recent past, an active subject of conversation that kept resurfacing was the content of current shows in the commercial sector. Namely, the fact that a majority of new productions on Broadway are based on pre-extant Intellectual Property. Of course many artists aren’t too thrilled about this when...
What are we looking at this week at 2amt? The Chicago Fringe Festival is on, kidz. Philanthropy may be for the old, but surprisingly, so is social media. Rocco Landesman visited the Twin Cities. Anne Bogart connects science and performance. And somebody sprang the Mousetrap… We might be a little...
From the Chicago Theatre (anti) Conference held at the Theater Wit complex in Chicago, here’s the 2amt session, featuring Nick Keenan and myself as recorded by Kyle Hamman… 2amtheatre Talk at Chicago Theatre (anti) Conference from KBH Media on Vimeo. It’s a fun talk (as I recall) and should whet...
Collation line. Apparatus. Strip of terror. Whatever you call it, it’s that somewhat inscrutable line or two of apparently Enigma code between the text and the annotations, particularly in a modern edition of, say, Shakespeare. It might seem irrelevant or irretrievably geeky, but there are all kinds of important, dramatically...
Before we get to the post, a joke. The joke. Man goes on vacation, leaves his cat with his parents. A week later, he comes home, goes to pick up the cat. And his dad says, “Sorry, son, the cat’s dead.” “Jesus, Dad, you couldn’t have broken it to me...
At the American Shakespeare Center, we are getting ready to expand our social media footprint. Internally, this plan has met with a rich combination of excitement and concern. What happens when we let our ASC family loose on Twitter, YouTube, and blogs? How can we make sure that we are...
Some more pull quotes, this time a quick conversation from Twitter between playwright Kristoffer Diaz and Tony Adams, artistic director of Halcyon Theatre in Chicago, maybe spinning off a little from comments on yesterday’s post about scripts and AD’s…
“Theatre inspires me.” “Theatre teaches me about myself, and helps me to understand why other people do what they do.” “Theatre relaxes me.” “Theatre teaches me empathy.” “Everyone in my life was a backstabber or a deceiver. I never knew what trust was until I started making theatre.” I didn’t...
