Category: theatre

Should the audience play dramaturg? “It’s certainly true that theatregoers like the bragging rights that come from seeing artists and shows before they become big” – imagine those who saw Hamilton in its workshop process. But what’s the value in seeing rough plays in process?

“Stephanie Ybarra, director of special artistic projects at New York’s Public Theater, has been named the artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage. Ybarra will succeed Kwame Kwei-Armah, who wound up his seven-year tenure with the company in January and became artistic director of London’s Young Vic Theater.”

Okay, the shows at the Moulin Rouge, the Lido, and the Crazy Horse do include more than just the high-kick dance that dates back to 1889. Even so, writes Laura Cappelle, for all the resources and skill applied to these clubs’ shows (especially the Moulin Rouge’s), “the genre that was once the toast of Paris lost touch with the times in the last decades of the 20th century.”

Recently,  theatremakers in the United States are asking this question in droves, as they try to figure out their roles and responsibilities in today’s current political climate. The answers remain varied, but a common thread can be seen: theatre as activism is one of the only weapons they feel they have to challenge the rising tide of partisanship dividing the nation.

“Across the country, as actors and audiences endure rain, heat, and bugs to present and partake of free professional performances of the Bard’s classics, one group of designers has a special challenge: costume designers, who must conceive innovative ways to protect actors, their clothes, and the integrity of the story. How does the process of working al fresco differ from being in more enclosed venues, and how do costumers think sustainably to preserve their designs night after night?”

“A.L.Ex (which stands for Artificial Language Experiment) has been fed the subtitles from more than 100,000 films, from action movies like Deep Impact to the pornographic film Deep Throat. When someone talks to it, the system uses a tool called a neural network, vaguely modeled on the brain, to analyze similar exchanges in its database and compose its own response. [Creator Piotr] Mirowski made his stage debut with A.L.Ex in July 2016. It did not go to plan.”

“It has done a lot for me,” says theatremaker Kieran Hurley, whose successes at Edinburgh include Beats and Heads Up, and who has Square Go, a collaboration with Gary McNair, at the Roundabout at Summerhall this August. But he is also troubled by the fringe’s dominance in launching careers.

Earlier this summer, Alabama Shakespeare Festival artistic director Rick Dildine packed four Southern playwrights into a minivan and took them on a 12-town, seven-state swing around the region, holding town hall-style meetings where they gathered local folks to talk about what being a Southerner means in 2018.