Opinions

New Media as Performance by Emily Ball Cicchini

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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Process

The City by the Bay by Deborah Cullinan

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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Opinions

On Theater and Religion; or, Disappointing Mother by Catherine Trieschmann

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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Opinions

Why Am I Afraid to Write African American Characters? by Marshall Botvinick

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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Opinions

A Virtual Theater Movement by Polly Carl

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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Process

A Perverted Guide to Watching Under the Radar by Meiyin Wang

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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Opinions

The Valley To Those Who Will Water It by Molly Smith

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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Opinions

Confessions of a Serial Intern by Annah Feinberg

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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Ideas

Turning Our Eyes Forward by Deborah Cullinan

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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Interviews

Interview with Steven Sapp

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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Process

A Slushy in the Face: Musical Theater Music and the Uncool

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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Ideas

Make It Hurt So Good

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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Opinions

A Creative Room of One’s Own

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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Opinions

When New Plays Get Old

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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Ideas

Civic Theater: Part 2

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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Process

A HowlRound Thanksgiving Retrospective Roundup

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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Opinions

A Lover’s Guide to American Playwrights

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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Interviews

Interview with Erika Chong Shuch

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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Opinions

Address to the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society in Celebration of the Third Annual Zelda Fichandler Award

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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Process

Confessions of a Creative Producer Stephanie Ybarra

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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Opinions

WE Are the National Aesthetic

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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Opinions

Specialization and Its Discontents

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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Opinions

Artists, Institutions, and the Decline of Public Discourse

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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Process

Hybrid

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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Interviews

Interview with Richard Nelson

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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Opinions

What a “Renegade” New Play Fanatic Can Bring to the Leadership of the TCG Board

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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Opinions

Eat, Drink, and Talk Seriously about the Theater

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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Interviews

Interview with Jonathan Moscone

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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Opinions

Out Now! Confessions of a Reluctant Writer

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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Process

Theater as a Collective Experience

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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Ideas

A Theater of YES!

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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Interviews

An Interview with Beth Henley

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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Process

One of Those People

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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Opinions

A Culture of Trust

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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Opinions

Parenting and Playwriting

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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Process

Adventures in Cyberturgy

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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Process

It Must Have Been Easier for Joe Papp

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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Interviews

Interview with Sean Daniels

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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Process

But What’s The Audience For?

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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Opinions

Opt In

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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Opinions

The Horton Lens

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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Opinions

How Going Local Can Revitalize American Theater

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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Opinions

On Theatricality

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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Opinions

#excellent2awesome (in 140 characters or less)

How can those of us in the theater move beyond “excellence” and make a commitment to “awesomeness.”
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Process

What I Mean When I Talk About Collaboration

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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Process

Losing My Insomnia

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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Opinions

A Lover’s Guide to American Playwrights

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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Opinions

The Gaming Challenge to Theater for Young Audiences

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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Opinions

The Bill of Rights for Dramaturgs

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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Process

Riding the Hype Cycle

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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Opinions

Social Skills and the Theater

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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Interviews

Interview with Steve Epp

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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Opinions

The Zen of Llamaturgy

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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Opinions

Grad School Admissions: Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda?

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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Opinions

Prayer for a Bad Performance

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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Interviews

Interview with Jason Loewith

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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Opinions

A Different Kind of Professional

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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Ideas

The Black Box

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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Opinions

Getting Over Ourselves

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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Opinions

A Manifesto

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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Opinions

Theater Geek

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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Opinions

Towards an Anxious Theater

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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Interviews

Interview with Michael Ritchie

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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Interviews

Interview with Annie Baker

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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Opinions

My Body, My Words

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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Opinions

The Peaceful Warrior: What’s Fabulous Got to Do with It

New work is like new love—it makes me feel…optimistic.
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Opinions

Civic Theater

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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Opinions

I, Dramaturg

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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Opinions

Was I Born This Way?

I am going to consciously make a creative room for myself in the American theater. Right here. Right now.
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Process

Writing for the Moon (and other adventures in object theater)

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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Opinions

A Lover’s Guide to American Playwrights

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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Interviews

Interview with Marissa Chibas

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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Opinions

Bad Influences

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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Interviews

Interview with Hal Brooks

…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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Ideas

Zombies Limping in Circles, or An Argument for a Taxonomy of NPD Technique

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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Process

Casting Myself

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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Opinions

Theater, Twitter, and Revolution

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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Interviews

Interview with Kent Thompson

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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Process

The Value of the Slow

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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Process

The New Black Fest

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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Opinions

Notes on Generosity in the Theater

As theater makers what are the threshold gifts we can give? How can we avoid becoming the “done-for dead?”
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Process

Translating Laughter: A Cabaret from the Terezín Ghetto

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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Process

The Tuedelband Plays On

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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Process

Playwrights: Collaborators or Contractors?

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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Opinions

Peace and Trauma, Part II

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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Process

Asking Everyone To Act by Aaron Landsman