Monthly Archives: July 2011

The Bill of Rights for Dramaturgs

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Julie Felise Dubiner
Currently I’m working on American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—a ten-year program during which we are commissioning thirty-seven projects concerning moments of great change in United States history—and I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy and government and the people’s role, responsibilities, and power in
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Riding the Hype Cycle

Posted on July 27, 2011 by coconnor
The cliché goes that one must suffer for their art and, try as one might to bracket this observation as stereotype, it seems the creative process is fraught with emotional pain. As artists, we experience an idea that dominates our imagination and we are moved to make something with this
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Social Skills and the Theater

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Polly Carl
I have a theory about the social geekiness of theater artists. I think we act like working in the not-for-profit theater is simply an extension of the rehearsal room. We go to work like we’re on our way to produce a play; we have four weeks to get it all done and we need to be ready for opening night and we have to do whatever it takes.
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Interview with Steve Epp

Posted on July 20, 2011 by chinkle
The theater needs to take you some place and give you an experience, an emotional experience that hopefully is also not mind numbing, but mind stimulating. It doesn’t mean it has to be intellectual or academic. Hopefully, it isn’t. You know, you’re laughing at stuff that’s genuinely funny and surprising and you’re visually struck and stimulated and you fall in love with these people onstage and you find yourself incredibly moved. To me, without sounding hokey about it, that’s the bottom line.
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The Zen of Llamaturgy

Posted on July 17, 2011 by lengelman
About five years ago at an LMDA conference held in the Twin Cities, each conference member was, in a sentence, tasked to throw out into the room their “hot button” issue about the field-at-large. Before I’d really had time to self-turg, I heard myself ask, “Why (except for Lee Devin), are theatre people so pale?!”
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Grad School Admissions: Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda?

Posted on July 13, 2011 by mocks
Why is it that we who wish to write this next wave of American theatrical masterpieces, are so desperate to get into grad school that we’ll cough up hundreds of dollars in application fees, probably spend even more to run off hard copies of our scripts at Staples, pay a little bit more still to get official college transcripts, and—in some cases—actually take the GREs if the folks whose work we most seek to emulate never did any of those things?
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Interview with Jason Loewith

Posted on July 7, 2011 by mmelcon
Margot: This might be a provocative question, but tell me why the American theater is still so New York-centric? Jason: Yes, that does provoke me, because I think it’s a pointless question. I’m more interested in this question: is your community supporting artists and artistry? If it is, then the
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