Theatre is too valuable to be wasted on the few. I want more Americans to see more theatre. Lots more. Enough more, that it calls for a ridiculous goal. Here goes. Triple playgoing in America by 2020. I’m convinced we could do it by following three radical strategic prongs: 1....
Biodiversity is the practice of cultivating and sustaining a broad array of species in a given ecosystem. The opposite is monoculture. Monoculture is the practice of limiting species in a given ecosystem. Agriculturalists and eco-warriors promote biodiversity because they have found (and history has proven, see: Potato famine) the prevalence...
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. ...
“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...
I promise, this is not another premature eulogy for Steve Jobs. I saw this on Google+ this morning. This is an old video of Steve Jobs responding to a critic at the World Wide Developers Conference in 1997, shortly after Jobs returned to Apple. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE[/youtube] One thing immediately jumped out...
John Lahr, New Yorker theater critic, wrote a piece on Julie Taymor’s frustration with the process of creating a new theatrical work in the era of instant feedback, Twitter, and focus groups. It’s a great piece, full of historical perspective on the role of audience (that is to say, amateur)...
I’m not sure who coined the expression “boob tube” but its implication has always been clear to me: people who watch TV are boobs, simpletons, and lack common sense. Even as a kid, I never really understood this characterization of TV viewers because it was with TV that I first...
While following the New Play Convening at Arena Stage in January, I was struck by a comment made about directors in relation to the supply/demand debate. The comment went something like this: directors have lacked opportunities to hone their craft and so have started companies in order to remedy this,...