I think there are still hundreds and hundreds of white plays and comparatively fewer plays by women and comparatively even fewer plays by women of color. And men of color write plays, too. So, yes, there’s work to do. There’s always going to be work to be done. While I’m happy about my experience with Stick Fly and happy for Katori and Suzan, I don’t want to let this moment set a self-congratulatory tone that lets us rest on our laurels.
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I began my career in the regional theater at a very young age, working in various capacities including actor, playwright, literary manager, director of new play development, and other roles, artistic and executive. Since seeing a regional production of Amlin Gray’s, How I Got That Story, in the early 1980s
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This is the first contribution to HowlRound’s City Series. Over the next few months we will explore the theater scene in cities from around the country. We’ve asked members of our editorial board to kick the series off, and they’ve asked artists from their cities to contribute articles and blog
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The Summer Play Festival of 2005 was a watershed career moment for me. I landed my first agent, my first professional production, and got to share my production week with such remarkably talented and accomplished playwrights it makes me blush to recall their names and think I was included among
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Thus, our entire discussion about community-specific theater boiled down to one point: sometimes it is possible for an outsider to accurately depict a community to which he/she does not belong and sometimes it is not. In particular, one’s sex is not a barrier to understanding but one’s race is.
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Cathedrals are places for statuary and memorials and homage. But they are less likely to be hotbeds for innovation, risk taking, and cultural transformation.
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1. I’ve got a game. Ready? You pick three people, or objects, or places, or concepts, and place each of them in the following categories— 1. Chuck: You get rid of immediately. 2. Fuck: You have a short period of wild passion and never to meet again. 3. Marry: You
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Over the past few months we’ve been in discussions about the possibility of moving the programs to Emerson College, which is a place that specializes in arts and media. And of course, colleges are always about research. I believe in the necessity and the potential of these programs and have come to believe they will be better served under the umbrella of an academic setting instead of a producing theater.
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But the “dark side” of the internship has taught me not to speak up or make independent decisions, and demanded my gratitude for the privilege of having my intelligence and labor exploited. I’ve learned to accept whatever breadcrumbs I’m given. I’ve learned to apologize incessantly or, even better, shut my trap. I’ve become accustomed to working outside of the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act, and gotten used to sucking up sexism. Internships have been responsible for eroding my sense of my own value.
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we must be less precious about our theaters and much more visionary about the role that theater can play in making places that can change people’s lives.
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Steven: Yeah. You need to know what you’re writing about. I think you need to connect with the community on a personal level. If it ends up in the show, cool. But do it for yourself. I think there’s a certain amount of blessing you need to receive. You’ve got to get the elders’ blessings.
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I’m a musical theater composer. It’s with considerable pain that I write that statement; for while I love music, and I love theater, I am acutely aware of the stigma of the term “musical theater,” of all it has come to connote and the kneejerk reactions the genre tends to
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But maybe art should hurt. It should certainly provoke. (If a work of art provokes nothing, can we even call it art?) The question is: what will galvanize audiences to believe that provocation is intentional and exhilarating and valuable?
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Preventative care for theater practitioners starts with believing that creativity and imagination have to be rooted in all of the activities that surround that rehearsal room—a series of concentric circles where we learn artistic practice through emphasizing skills that can happen in all sorts of places, not just a rehearsal room.
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Are you familiar with any of these plays? Stand-Up Tragedy. Daytrips. Romance Language. A Place With The Pigs. From The Mississippi Delta. Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad. Pill Hill. Messiah. In Perpetuity Throughout The Universe. A few? None? Don’t feel bad, because to my knowledge, none of them have received
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Through acts of imagination and expressive action, civic theater builds bridges. It synthesizes complex issues and ideas, it builds relationships, and it leverages the specific people in a room as assets in shared, creative problem-solving.
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I hear more and more stories focused on ways of partnering, of aligning resources and competencies. I think we are going to hear more stories about community connections and ways in which new work is relating to the world. I think we’re going to start hearing more stories about how old barriers are falling—things like the changes taking place in the way we can use technology to connect and promote our work, or collaborations that right now seem impossible between different organizations and aesthetics. I think we’re actually going to start seeing stories about successes…—David Dower
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Mid-career is that moment most playwrights find themselves at the edge of an abyss. The moment can last years, during which the excitable support our field bestows on emerging and early-career writers dries up and playwrights who have finally developed the chops to write their mature works often leave the theater for the rewards and empowerment of TV or the stability of teaching.
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I feel like we have to just bust down some serious walls. For so many grant applications there is a box—a dance box, a theater box—for so many conversations those boxes totally exist. Rather than saying I’m not doing dance and I’m not doing theater, I kind of feel like yes, I’m doing theater and dance and yes, I’m doing installation art and yes yes yes!
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Theatre should stop serving the function of making money, for which it has never been and never will be suited, and start serving the revelation and shaping of the process of living, for which it is uniquely suited, for which it, indeed, exists.
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Seven playwrights, five directors, and four producers walk into a room… It’s not so much the set-up for a joke as it is the beginning of a fifteen-month collaboration that will ultimately manifest itself through an Off-Broadway production featuring the creative machinations of sixteen New York artists (including yours truly),
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If the spirit moves add rhythm, add music, add your piece This speech is a collaboration with the future of American theater.
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I am constantly inviting folks to come see work I’ve directed by other playwrights, but I found myself being secretive about my own creations. I realized that I was worried that if the word really got out in New York that I was interested in roles besides directing, it would somehow diminish my momentum as a director.
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And in what feels like an unbridgeable divide, all Haves seem smug and all Have Nots seem whiny. But the question we have to ask ourselves is are we planning to fight each other to the death? Or perhaps because we are living inside of a democracy, (albeit barely functioning) the Egypt analogy isn’t quite apt, and we need to consider a solution other than a complete overthrow of existing institutions. We need a solution that acknowledges the interdependent nature of artists and institutions.
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I am a director. I am a playwright. It has taken me many years of hard work to come to appreciate what each of those professions require and to experience them both independently and combined.
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Aaron: I saw Sad and Sweet and I was really taken by its urgency. It often seems like something happens and four years later there’s a play about it. I thought it would be really interesting to talk to you about how you write the Apple family plays. So, I
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The men and women who feel compelled to write for our form, do not aspire to have their words reach millions of people, or make tons of money, as their film and television cohorts do. For some reason what is vital to them is a tactile and quite treacherous experience that happens in real time, and it is genuinely from their valor that I garner my energy and hope.
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Who cares what people like or don’t like? What do they understand and feel? That’s the question worth grappling with.
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Jon: That’s interesting. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think I do have that in common with him and it’s a little harder to do that now. If we’re not changing things while we’re here, I do not need to be on this planet. If we’re not here to get things done, they’re going to be done for us or to us. I would rather be one of the people who can act, than is acted upon.
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Sometime during the throes of mid-life I started feeling the need to scare myself into doing something different. Not to simply feel something new, but to feel something deeper. A handful of artistic questions and a smaller handful of personal traumas forced me to seek some solitude: not in a monastery but in my everyday life. I wasn’t looking for a religious practice but a new imaginative exercise. I was tired of myself, tired of my voice, and I wanted to see if I could unearth a different mode of expression. I wanted to be with myself in a new way.
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So, to start: what exactly is a collective? In the course of nurturing and producing over a dozen plays, Workhaus has become a true community of artists, but somehow just focusing on that seemed incomplete. Part and parcel of Workhaus’ mission is bringing new work to our audiences straight from the playwright—no administrative infrastructure chooses the plays or plans the seasons. The idea is to create a more direct and immediate conversation between the writer and audience. So any discussion of Workhaus is actually a discussion of two communities: the playwrights who make up the collective, and the audience that actually comes to see our plays.
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What I have realized, working with so many expansive thinkers over the years, is that my own sense of no is often a failure of imagination. In a dark theater or nose in a book, no one can get in the way of my imagination. When reentering the real world so much feels in the way of what I hope to become. What I hope the world will become.
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Dan: So we were talking about weirdness in Southern writing. Beth: Well there’s a lot of alcohol in the South also. It’s very much of a drinking culture, particularly when I was growing up. I mean it still is, but not like it used to be, like, “I’ll get you a to-go cup for the road! So you can get from the house to the party!” Never a moment of sobriety! And I also think there’s something interesting about the notion that the South was defeated, and in the face of defeat, humor is often the best defense for humiliation.
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I have become one of those people. After years of telling people that I was the luckiest former actor I knew, that I loved going to work every day, that I was living my childhood dream, that I had the most amazing partnership in the business, that I couldn’t imagine
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If a playwright or producer is looking for a director, they do their research. They see the director’s work, seek out references, and/or sit down and have tea with a number of directors to find one their vision can commingle with. They do not ask the director to direct two minutes of the play to prove she knows what she’s doing. Nor should they. They respect and, better yet, trust the director. The same cannot be said for the actor.
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For what is writing if not the chronicling of accumulated experience run through the imagination and senses? It might follow, therefore, that having children, which is one gigantic act of accumulated experience, if nothing else, should expand one’s imagination and senses enough to make one a better writer, in the way that any life-altering experience might make one a better writer. I, for one, am still waiting.
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My own playwriting life is peripatetic. I moved to New York City after grad school, relocated to Minneapolis for a fellowship, landed in Los Angeles for a decade of writing and teaching and am now based in South Bend, Indiana where I write and teach at the University of Notre Dame. When Dakota emailed me about joining LoNyLa last fall, I immediately accepted her offer and agreed to submit my play, Paloma, in consideration for their inaugural writers lab. Over the years, I’ve learned to be open to the unexpected ways in which new play development can occur so this seemed like a promising prospect, especially since I’d just moved to a new city and had yet to connect with a community of theater artists.
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But when my role is producer I think I don’t actually know where to stand. And I’ve been doing this for years! Where and how does the producer come into the creative process? When should I sit out? Is the “freedom to fail” of higher value than pulling out all stops for success? What part of a failure is on me as the producer in a new play process?
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Sean Daniels dishes on the role of the associate artistic director, legendary poker player Marc Masterson, and being the sheriff / Interim Artistic Director of Actors Theatre Louisville.
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I could go on, but my point is that, while these pieces were elegantly made, filled with strong images, crisp performances, and precise detailing, none of them were using their design or their language to tell me what it was I was supposed to be discussing or thinking when I left the theater. They instead excited my senses, and engaged my brain in the moment of the performance. By not delivering a package that answered all questions, they engaged me as an audience member. These pieces required something of me to complete themselves.
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My observation of how opting out manifests in a lot of theaters results in what I would call the new culture wars. The young and savvy know how to send out the message of the organization. An army of interns is behind the Twitter feed and the Facebook status updates. They are choosing what articles and video your theater links to, they determine the question of the day to pose to your audience, while those higher up the food chain do the “important stuff”—make theater.
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I first started looking at theater through the lens of Horton Hears A Who! at the 2006 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. I was sitting on stage moderating a discussion of Go Home Now by Judy Anderson. The setting and concern of the play was a town very much like the one I was in: McCall, Idaho. Like many communities, it was struggling with the loss of a large employer, a cross-generational identity crisis, and war vets who were increasingly coming home to a town they hardly recognized.
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Twenty-five hundred years ago in ancient Athens, theater shaped the body politic. It was a sacred space where commoners and leaders sat side by side and watched their most pressing national questions dramatized and choreographed. In America, however, neither our leaders nor our citizens flock to the theater, and our
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A few years back I was invited to take part in the launching of a new play development program and was paired with a fresh, young director. I was quite surprised as we talked about my play to find him urging me to pepper the text with highly theatrical stage
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How can those of us in the theater move beyond “excellence” and make a commitment to “awesomeness.”
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It is a truism that all theater is collaborative; the community aspect is a huge reason why so many of us do it. But I often find myself facing the reality that a large segment of the institutional American theater is set up in ways that limit, constrict, or otherwise
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My typical night of insomnia begins, perhaps paradoxically, in sleep. I lie down at what feels like an appropriate time and drift off easily, but for some reason that no manner of science or self-investigation has managed to unearth, I fail to make the hoped-for graceful turn from light slumber
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Sometimes even the American theater gets it right—as it did with August Wilson. Sometimes our community, our industry, overcomes its cowardice, its aversion to the new and unknown, its love affair with the one-shot, and—as it did once upon a time with August Wilson—invests in an artist over the long haul, invests in a body of work.
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Can playwrights and producers of theater for young audiences (TYA) learn anything from video games? Video games began reaching wide audiences in the mid 1980s, first as arcade entertainments, such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders. In the 1990s, computer geeks took over (you needed a state-of-the-art desktop system to play
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Make it quick. Please. Let’s skip the intermission tonight. Shorten this performance if only by a single, dropped line. Let something unexpected happpen. Enter a character to remind me of someone I slept with, someone I loved too briefly, someone for whom I’m still longing, someone I still look for
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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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If so much about theater in the U.S.—including institutional missions and the processes by which we generate work—is antithetical to capitalism, why do so many theater artists and administrators still rely on its assumptions when defining theater professional?
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I find that many scientists regard art-making as an unstructured, loosey-goosey sort of work. Sometimes it is. But just as often it’s a driven, deductive sort of work. Similarly, writers usually regard science as mechanical and data-driven; but in practice, science is very creative and messy.
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Getting Over Ourselves TCG Conferences can bring out the “I” in me. I’ve been to many over the years and they never fail to dredge up some deep insecurities: What am I doing here? Should I go talk to him? She has no idea who I am. What sessions should
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Radar L.A. Manifesto Delivered June 17, 2011 at Radar L.A. The future of the theater looks so much like me it pisses us all off.
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My tray is full and I’m standing in the cafeteria. I’m imagining that everyone is looking at me but fearing that I’m invisible. I don’t know where to sit. I find high school dramas of all kinds generally irresistible. Irreconcilable crushes, the discovery of previously latent powers, the unquestioned belief
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As a national community, we’ve stopped questioning ourselves in the hopes of hearing answers from elsewhere. We keep listening to constituencies who are not connected to our work.
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One of the great problems with the subscription model—the institutional model that exists right now—is that because you are generally producing for a specific audience you can begin producing just for those people. Sometimes your taste gets sublimated by their taste.
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Write the kind of plays you want to see. Don’t listen to your parents if they tell you that it’s impossible to become a professional writer.
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On the hottest night in the history of Los Angeles, I am crammed into a small piano bar, sweat dripping down the back of my thigh. Drinks are flowing and the audience’s laughter is rowdy and loud. Singer/songwriter Dorian Wood competes with the noise on an electric keyboard that loses
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New work is like new love—it makes me feel…optimistic.
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What do we talk about when we examine what it means to make new theater today? Craft. Career. Community. These are the substance of many conversations we have when we wrestle with what we make, how we make, and how we make a life while making. I propose that these
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Dramaturgy is a tool for navigating the progress toward perfection. Like a compass is a tool. And it plays out in myriad ways within a project, an organization, a field, a form.
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I am going to consciously make a creative room for myself in the American theater. Right here. Right now.
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Sometimes, and here comes a confession right out of the gate, I write puppet shows. Well, you may say, that’s charming, or so retro, or great for kids! But those aren’t the reasons I love this medium. Puppetry suits me because it’s fundamentally collaborative, and I’m most inspired when authoring
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Julie Taymor We have been told of a great fall, a great failure. Here is an American auteur director, the papers announce, making sense of that old phrase, “the daily bugle,” who has over-reached, plummeted from the sky, taking untold performers and investors with her.
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I see American theatrical institutions holding on to old notions of who their audiences are and what they want. An aesthetically diverse theater would not only embrace the many cultures and stories reflected in their communities, but also include productions outside of the Anglo-European narrative-driven aesthetic.
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I like when artists, and their art, get people’s dander up. …They expand my own storytelling language, and explode my sense of how I might participate in creating theater—or, for that matter, just making a scene.
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…one of the things that makes somebody a really strong director is the ability to admit when they’re wrong or when they don’t know what’s right.
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The difficulty in determining what went wrong in such situations lies in our collective failure to identify, discuss, and disseminate the wide variety of new play development (NPD) techniques. While increased scrutiny is being brought to bear to on how plays are selected for development and production, that inquiry has stopped at the rehearsal room door.
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It wasn’t that I had always or ever longed to write a solo play for myself. It was simply that the thing I was working on had its own demands. I just did what was required.
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Malcolm Gladwell may believe the revolution will not be tweeted, but (with all due respect to a man I otherwise admire who I think missed the mark on that front) Twitter itself seems to be the revolution.
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My experience with new play development is you need to support writers with commissions and you need to have a commitment to producing new plays.
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You pay graduate programs to give you the experience of being a successful playwright. The experience of being a struggling playwright you get for free.
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I believe this is truly one of the most exciting times in theater. Playwrights are actually sitting center stage with decision-makers talking about the relevancy of new play development, and, more important, the future of American theater. I, for one, believe this conversation couldn’t come at a better time. On
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As theater makers what are the threshold gifts we can give? How can we avoid becoming the “done-for dead?”
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In a country where the use of humor in works about the Holocaust has been controversial (the reaction to the film Life Is Beautiful provides just one example), how would audiences react to humor in works from the Holocaust—in a cabaret written by prisoners themselves?
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The first time I walked into a theater, I knew it was where I wanted to spend my life. But I hadn’t ever had to grapple with the relationship between my legacy and my work as an artist. What would you do if your entire family history fell into your lap? How do you even make sense of that?
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In a theater in which playwrights are full collaborators, it is conceivable that a writer would function more as executive producer of her own work, to use a television model, than as contractor.
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Justice is the defense of nature’s ability to define itself. Human nature is plural. Effect diversity, where we are distinct but in bond, as the portico of the architecture of art and peace. In true diversity, the good isn’t purged from evil. The perfection of hygiene is a fascist too.
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For every piece I make, the starting point is the same: I see something that amazes me or makes me uncomfortable, I can’t explain why and I need to find out. Usually it is some awkward, ungainly moment I can’t take my eyes away from: someone bawling out a shelf of cookies at a deli; a desperate real estate sales pitch; a little gesture between two people.
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We—the “emerging” playwrights—are fucking lazy. This is what we don’t want you to know, Dear Artistic Director. Most of us don’t really know how to keep working on a play. Not what it really takes.
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The truth is, I am a playwright who has always wanted to write for television.
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As a young playwright, there is a crushing demand to develop a brand, a “Barton Fink Feeling”.
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Witness is that place where one is at the far limit of what one may know and the near edge of what one may see. Dramatic language is the language of witness.
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I think part of being an Artistic Director is figuring out what the marriage is between you and the community. It really does come down to that. You form a relationship with the community, but the idea that I’m going to impose my interests and standards over the community doesn’t really work.
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You see a film, having heard wretched reports, and hate it; you read a well-reasoned positive critique, see it again, and find yourself moved. My natural fascination with these expectations have led me to think of them as one medium among many that Mugwumpin plays with in making our pieces.
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Edward Albee is famous for despising being eulogized. So here goes: a salute to the living, breathing, writing Edward Albee.
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It is this simple. Resistance will only make matters more difficult. Any resistance will only make matters worse. By law, I will have to restrain you. His tone suggests that you should try to understand the difficulty in which he finds himself. This is further disorienting. I am fine! Can’t
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This is an interview with Marc Masterson done prior to the announcement last week that he will become the new Artistic Director at South Coast Rep. Congratulations Marc on the new position!
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I just finished my degree and moved to Los Angeles. I’m finally living the dream. My wife and I are expecting our first child in April and it’s all finally hitting me: Did I just finish a degree in a hobby?
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It’s to make work that’s socially relevant. For me. For other people that’s different. Seattle is a politically and socially conscious place. I think Seattle has real questions of civic responsibility—they see themselves as a community together, unlike many other cities in my experience. There’s a commitment to making Seattle work. Audiences here like art that is civic driven.
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This is HowlRound’s final interview from the Arena Stage convening: From Abundance to Scarcity: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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Delivered on the panel: Massive Thoughts from Four Big Thinkers at the convening, From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment of the New Work Sector at Arena Stage, January 26-29, 2011.
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HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
READ MORE…

HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
READ MORE…

HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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HowlRound launches a series of conversations from the recent convening at Arena Stage–From Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, January 26-29, 2011.
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There is no formula, Bruce, and that’s where the filter of my taste probably has a very big influence even though we’ve done plays that I don’t like, but there are maybe some situations where I just think something isn’t a good idea.
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The trick: in general, I would say that “grassroots” and “big institution” theater people STAY ENTRENCHED in one world. Those working with few resources can get burnt out and feel resentful of the theater people with money. Those working in the big institutions can get burnt out and look down on the “storefront experiments” of the smaller companies
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Perhaps, because I am a first time playwright who knows no better, this idea that the playwright is one among many is an incorrect assumption. Perhaps, in my naïveté, I have broken an otherwise flawless art form, where the onus falls on the playwright to make strong choices in a vacuum and provide her director, stage manager, sound and light directors, cast, and crew a clearer path to opening night.
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As a theater practitioner, I’m preoccupied with the fear that I’ll meet beauty head on and overlook it, miss out on the chance to fall in love.
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A show has to be ready to be in production, because when it is a production it is part of the public conversation. If you don’t want to be part of the public conversation, if you want to be protected from that, then you should do a reading in your living room.
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Out of memory, Horton gives us life at its most concentrated and full. But even more than life, his gives us lives.
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What I’m finding lately, however, is that the most rewarding stories—rewarding to me, in their composition, which is all I can control, really—come not from history, at least not from history in a book, and not from the private shadow theatre of my own psychology either, but from the lives of other people.
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