Category: theatre

Journalist Sasha Weiss watches as Sam Gold – who won a Tony for Fun Home and set Othello inside a big plywood box – radically strips down Tennessee Williams’s setting and uses casting to upend everything we think we know about the characters.

“My small town was in what I call a new play desert. If you were a playwright, the closest market for your new play was a few workshop opportunities forty-five minutes away in the next city. There was a regional theatre, a theatre department at the local university, and a community theatre, but none of them were very open to producing or even reading new plays. After taking two playwriting classes at my alma mater, I found myself surrounded by ten or so students that had caught the writing bug with no outlet left to develop their plays once the semester was over. So I took it upon myself to provide that outlet for them and myself. I stepped out of the theatre “dojo” to provide an oasis in the middle of this desert.”

A great space isn’t enough; the plays have to match setting and theme, as in this Orpheus and Eurydice under a bridge: “We pass into a damp, dark space, press a coin into the palm of Charon and bend almost double to walk four steps and emerge into a chamber under the Clifton suspension bridge. The walls are mottled with mould. Fronds grow from the roof. Water drips. It’s as cold as hell, and that’s exactly where we are supposed to be.”

“Conducted with coresearcher (and Collaboraction intern) Mariah Schultz, the study is a look at female representation in various theater-industry job categories at theaters nominated for Jeff Awards for the 2015-2016 season. The data, which does not include musicals, covers 52 theaters and 250 plays. The results are sobering but not surprising.”

Dominic Cavendish on the current trend in London of prominent actresses playing the male leads in great classic plays: “Redress the balance? Fine. Let in some fresh air? Great. But the entrenchment of this tendency may also be stifling and oppressive.” It’s also, argues Cavendish, lazy: “Why bother finding new-minted female correlatives to Willy Loman or Jimmy Porter when you can just boot out the bloke, stick a woman in his place and defy anyone to raise an eyebrow?”

“A new project is aiming to rediscover some of the forgotten masterpieces and lost theatres that laid the groundwork for the Bard of Avon’s work.” Here’s a talk with theatre history scholar Andy Kesson, founder of Before Shakespeare. (audio)

It all started when a Georgia Tech arts exec (yes, they have one!) saw how uncomfortable undergrads at a career fair looked in business suits – and invited a Brooklyn drag king to help them walk the walk.