Tweets, blogs and other manners of Internet posting have been aflame since this morning, when Charles Isherwood of The New York Times declared online that he wished to forego having to review any further plays by Adam Rapp. In the ensuing hours, Isherwood has been chastised for the tone of...
It’s always nice to be on the same page as Polly Carl. If you haven’t read her latest HowlRound post, A Theater of YES!, go check it out. One reason I appreciate her train of thought is because it dovetails with my TEDxMichiganAve talk from this past May: [youtube width=”560″...
“Everyone,” I wrote in a tweet to promote my previous blog post, “enjoys a good blurbing now and again.” Although I didn’t mind if someone read some perverse double entendre into “blurbing,” it was neither euphemism nor metaphor. I was referring to the time-honored and oft-criticized practice of skillfully extracting...
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...
“…being a playwright is hard. One of my profs once said to me you have to work hard at it for at least 10 years before you start to see any movement.” —Advice For Playwrights Starting Out by Adam Szymkowicz I read that bit of insight when I was starting...
Dear @Resident Theatre Company or @Individual Show: You know I love you and so I’m sorry to do this impersonally. But we have to talk. I know it’s hard to hear those words, because they always lead to the same thing. And to be perfectly honest, this time, it’s not...
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...
Alright, I’ve had it and I’m not keeping it to myself anymore. It seems that not a day goes by that a news item appears one place or another announcing that someone famous is considering/acquiring rights/contemplating/dreaming about creating a Broadway show or being on Broadway. Yesterday it was Kara DioGuardi...
Halcyon Theatre and Caffeine Theatre present Return to the Upright Position, a reading of an online text collaboration which conceived and edited by Caridad Svich. Written during the six months after 9/11/01 by Cusi Cram, Mitchell Gossett, Julie Hebert, Llysa Holland, Julie Jensen, Jennifer Maisel. Julia Pearlstein, Brad Rothbart, Gregory...