Category: theatre

Even light-skinned African Americans were asked to “cork up” for roles in the 19th century (and on into early movies), because the history of minstrelsy, in which white men clowned in blackface as their interpretation of Southern Blacks, established what “Black” meant in the U.S. But it’s unsettling to watch this history in 2018.

It’s not easy to take a theatre from a 50-seater, renting space, to a 100-seat home. That requires money and luck – and persistence, and maybe a church congregation moving out of its old home.

Robert Hooks, founder of the Negro Ensemble Company of New York and the DC Black Repertory Company, has some thoughts: “All the people that run [non-Black-specific] 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.”

Or at least, this year, the first Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma!, has had three different – and all radically new and different from each other, all offering new interpretations of where the United States is now (and where it was when the musical was written).

“In entreating my drama students to do their part in rescuing our faltering democracy, I was simultaneously asking them to redeem an idea of theater as something more than sound and fury. The stage, in its highest form, is a contemplative space, where dissenting voices are free to speak, where intellect and emotion can become better acquainted and hidden truths are allowed to emerge.”

Last month, a group of Welsh playwrights wrote an open letter strongly criticizing NTW for, as the letter put it, “taking pride in ridding itself of a theatrical identity and even its nationality.” Tom Payne writes that the signer of the letter, for all their good intentions, should consider just what they’re demanding: “If we apply [the letter’s] demands retrospectively, a significant number of NTW’s thirteen inaugural productions (2010/11) might never have taken place.”

As an example of Anna Deavere Smith- and Moisés Kaufman-style plays, assembled from eyewitness and participant testimony, as oral history documents, Richard Watts analyzes The Campaign, about the arrests at the Salamanca Markets in Hobart — Tasmania’s (approximate) equivalent of the Stonewall Rebellion.

It wasn’t long ago that “we were sending these kids off on their own devices with no foundation for how to approach this stuff,” recalls acting teacher Adam Noble, who created Extreme Stage Physicality, one of the earliest formalized frameworks for actors and directors to use in intimate situations on stage. Carey Purcell talks to him and several others who have developed such methods.

“Though critics and audiences might often agree when naming their top performers, it can be difficult to define what characterises the very best actors. Leading theatre figures tell Lyn Gardner what it takes to reach the top and how today’s leading lights compare to past greats.”