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...
Peter Marks (Washington Post) hosted a conversation with DC area artistic directors about representation of women and people of color on our stages. Participants: Paul Tetreault, Molly Smith, Eric Schaeffer, @ryanrilette, and Patta Tsikurishvili. (Details: http://goo.gl/d)
…Then ish got real.
Every time someone asks me to explain what I do I get flummoxed. Though I could probably avoid the word, I feel obligated to inform them that I am a dramaturg. The desire for avoidance and obligation are somewhat related. I know that mentioning the word “dramaturg” will lead to...
In January 2012, multi-disciplinary theatre collective Waterwell collaborated with the glam-punk band Bambï to create GOODBAR, a rock concert based on the book Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which played in Under the Radar at the Public Theater. I had the pleasure of personally rocking out with the show, and after, I...
An exuberant conversation, hosted by Peter Marks and Howard Sherman, broke out on Twitter yesterday about Shakespeare; many good ideas were debated and discussed. I am writing this post to delve more deeply into one of the fundamental questions about Shakespeare in performance, which is, after all, his native habitat. ...
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...
Previously in this column: The members of Bright Alchemy Theatre, a very young devised theatre company based in Washington, DC, have spent the last nine months working on its new project which began with the question: Why do we as a species feel the need to tell stories about our...