Category: theatre

The Playwright Of ‘Sweat’ And ‘Ruined’ Would Like To Remind You That She’s Very Good At Comedy

Lynn Nottage: “I’ve become so known for my tragedies, these very heavy, social realist plays, and I think people forget that I’m a satirist as well and that I can be very, very funny. I thought in this particular moment that we need some humor, and I thought, I don’t want to sit in rehearsal and feel like I’m being punched in the stomach.” – Slate

Salvaging Alan Jay Lerner’s Biggest Flop, A Musical ‘Lolita’

Think that’s a ghastly idea for a Broadway show? So did audiences in 1971, when try-out audiences in Philadelphia and Boston hated Lolita, My Love so much that the Broadway run was called off. But the producers of an upcoming staged reading in New York, with a revised book and a new framing device, aim to find out if audiences are finally ready for the show (with the changes, at least). – The New York Times

What Comedy Tells Us About Ourselves — And How We’re Changing

Scholar of comedy Matthew McMahan: “Just as Michel Foucault encourages historians to look to moments of rupture and discontinuity when trying to decipher how a culture thinks and acts, I suggest students of comedy look to the moments when a successful joke simply stops landing with its audience. The moment when a loud guffaw quickly shifts to an appalled gasp can tell us a lot about how a culture is changing.” – HowlRound

Getting Fully Naked (And Getting It On) Onstage

The actors are OK with all of this: “The nudity has struck some theatergoers as so extreme and the sex so prolonged that the actors can hear members of the audience gasp when it begins. Occasionally someone will say, ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no! Cora Vander Broek says of the moment the stage lights rise on her character, Jules, straddling Wheeler (played by Ian Barford) in bed.” – Los Angeles Times

Rethinking The Purpose Of British Arts Institutions

Take a look at Battersea Arts Centre, which “no longer focuses on creating the ‘future of theatre’—a laudable purpose, but not one of much interest to the many who doubt theatre is for them. Instead, it concentrates on inspiring and supporting people to take creative risks to shape their own and their communities’ future, whether those people define themselves as artists or not.” – HowlRound

Why Do Audiences Love Comedy, But Not Comedies?

That’s a bit of an exaggeration – audiences still enjoy seeing comedies at the theatre. But stand-up specials are eating theatre’s lunch. “TV was long seen as the enemy of theatre. … But TV was always fundamentally different than theatre. Comedy, on the other hand, shares a lot. It is a live art form, and the same romantic defenses you often hear of theatre you can also hear from comics—the beauty of its ephemerality, the present-tense nature of the form in a time when everyone is on screens.” – American Theatre

Playback Theatre As Therapy For Traumatized Syrian War Refugees

“The [program] was organized by Fighters for Peace, which was founded in 2014 by former Lebanese militia members who took part in their country’s destructive 1975-90 civil war and are now peace activists. They have been using playback theater for years as part of their campaign to promote peace and try to prevent another breakout of war in Lebanon.” – Yahoo! (AP)