The news that Chicago is losing the American Theater Company–here’s the Chicago Tribune story–is stunning. Artistic Director Will Davis was let go, and the board has decided to fold the company. It’s the last paragraph that’s distressing. Under Davis, the theater took a more experimental turn, far from the pathway...
Another Giving Tuesday, another day spent deleting emails unread and maybe unsubscribing from the places that send more than two in a day. And I work in the arts. But every year, it’s the same thing. An avalanche of emails, often from theatres and organizations I haven’t heard from most...
I often feel alone. My life experiences and the demands of my day-to-day are so specific to my life producing and performing in small budget theatre that it often feels that outside of rehearsal I can go for days without running into (a non-wife) someone who truly understands what I’m...
There is good conversation and bad conversation. We’ve all been party to both. We’ve all had those talks that go late into the night and feel like you’re solving the world. Additive conversations where active listening provides the fuel for synthesis of new ideas better than the preconceived notions of...
This past weekend on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Scott Simon talked with David Marcus, a senior contributor to The Federalist and the artistic director of a theater company in New York City, about defunding the National Endowment for the Arts. Go ahead and listen. I’ll wait. And if you’re angry by...
About six and a half years ago, we started the #2amt hashtag on Twitter. If you’re on this site, you know it’s a conversation about theatre–performance, production, promotional ideas, outreach, what have you. It’s been a wonderful conversation and community–and continuously active on the hashtag–from day one. This week, it’s...
The Chicago Reader published as careful and deliberate a piece of investigative journalism covering the arts as I can ever remember reading. In the piece Aimee Levitt and Chris Piatt laid out a history of mental and physical abuse and cultish insularity at Chicago’s Profiles Theatre that mirrors much of that...
Effort. Webster’s defines effort as “work done by the mind or body: energy used to do something.” I spend more time than you can imagine thinking about, analyzing, and trying to minimize effort required by a body to achieve anything – including the effort required to do nothing. My senses...
Although I was raised in the Catholic Church, I am not a practicing Catholic. The few times I have been in a house of worship in the past two decades involved either a wedding, a christening, or my mother’s funeral in 1995. Therefore, no one was more surprised than me...
I spent all day absorbing what people said about New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players’s now cancelled performance of The Mikado at NYU’s Skirball Center. I read blog posts, groaned at comment threads, and rolled my eyes when the Artistic Director of NYGASP posted that defensive statement on the organization’s...