Category: theatre

PowerPoint has long been employed onstage by established comedians like Eugene Mirman and long-running shows like Drunk Education in New York (which Refinery29 explored, among other PowerPoint performance trends, earlier this year), but how did it become the preferred medium for so many young comics at the outset of their careers?

Christopher Swetala, the fact-checker for This American Life:”I just never have dealt with a writer so outlandish as the one played by Bobby Cannavale. … I don’t know any serious long-form literary editor who would tolerate a writer like this, even with the fancy professor of creative writing pedigree. … It drove me nuts that the audience was going to leave the theater believing [that character’s] existential grandstanding about numbers was worth sincere thought.”

Rob Melrose, who begins his tenure early next year, “is the founder of the Cutting Ball Theater, an experimental, avant-garde theater based in San Francisco. His hire comes at the end of a six-month search for a leader for Houston’s largest theater company. [Gregory] Boyd, who had led the Alley for 28 years, retired abruptly in January as the Houston Chronicle began investigating allegations that he had fostered an abusive working environment and had singled out female actors for harassment.”

“The Public Theater has decided to address the decaying areas behind and below this iconic amphitheater in Central Park, which hasn’t had a major overhaul since it was built in 1962. On Wednesday, the Public announced a $110 million upgrade, designed by the architect Bjarke Ingels, to begin in 2020 and to be completed by 2022.”

“Playwright Rasha Abdel Monem describes the climate that has developed in recent years as ‘cold and fearful,’ given the censorship barriers and lack of funding. You’re either with the regime, she says, or you’re against it. As an artist, you’re afraid to be labeled as a ‘threat to the state,’ the same umbrella term applied to terrorists. Yet the repression has led to a competitive spirit among those artists still trying to produce work … [and] crafty theatre people are finding ways to work around the limitations of censorship.”

Playwright Patrick Gabridge is artist-in-residence at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. “[His] mandate is to bring theatre to the graveyard in a way that avoids the clichés about ghosts and ghouls, and instead focuses on the beauty of the space’s environment and the significance of its history.”

“I’m collaborative perhaps to a fault, both in artistic leadership and in the rehearsal room. I think I’ve become a theatre artist and a theatre leader—an arts leader—because I can’t do things on my own. I have to be in dialogue with people who are smarter than me, who know more about any number of things, who will question how I’m living my values with any given decision in ways that it would not have dawned on me to question.”

“Lighting is in many ways the last creative act of the totally collaborative process that we call theatre,” says Peter Mumford (The Ferryman, King King). Says Les Dickert (Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet), “Light is a visual element that can ‘whisper’ into the eyes of the audience. It can shout as well, but it’s the whispering that I fell in love with.”

“Providing evidence to counteract the idea that such work presents a risk in terms of audiences, ticket revenue or artistic quality, [the report] concludes that ‘it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the reasoning behind risk-averse programming, when risk is all too often closely associated with race’.”

The closest thing to a black theater company that is able to survive and sustain itself is the St. Louis Black Rep. And theater companies — let’s just take Los Angeles, for example — the Los Angeles Music Center downtown and Mark Taper Forum and all the people that run those companies are getting the grants from the foundations I couldn’t get because they did one black play in their season. The black theater producers, the people who are in the community need the grants, and they can’t get them because the established theaters downtown are taking advantage of those grants.