Category: theatre

From Sophocles through Roman spectacles and the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol to Sarah Kane, a look at the means – decorous, horrifying, inventive – playwrights, directors and stage managers have used to depict characters’ ends.

“His often-abrasive theater pieces won’t let you look away – whether it’s an elderly man struggling to control his bodily functions beneath a benevolent painting of Christ (On the Concept of the Face) or a klatch of Amish women cutting off one another’s tongues (The Four Seasons Restaurant).”

“How mortifying would it be to page through the creative writing you did as a teenager? And then, years or even decades later, actually see it in print? That’s what we recently asked a set of notable playwrights” – among them Lynn Nottage, Neil LaBute, Tina Howe, Nicky Silver, and Marcus Gardley – “to do.”

“Life is both ever-various and surprising, and, at the same time, one long uninterrupted (and, admit it, sometimes awfully boring) conversation with ourselves.”

Jack Reuler has worked in theatre in Minnesota and says critics have been an important part of the the community there. “Like with any body of people, some are wonderful and some are assholes and many are in between. Similarly, the real test of a critic is not how well or how often they rave or how viciously they eviscerate, but how they write about the 90 percent of the shows that fall between those extremes.”

Helen Shaw has spent the last 12 years as a theatre critic in New York. She says the state of the field is mixed. “As recently as 2007, critic Robert Brustein could say on a panel that we had 35 ‘really fine’ playwrights; even the hardest-to-please observer would say now that the number has more than quadrupled. Some theatre lovers don’t like to categorize the flood because of the canon’s long history of exclusion.”

Leaving aside Shakespeare and Christmas plays (which you sort of have to do), the leading character on American stages this season is a foul-mouthed sock puppet.

“American Theatre started counting the Top 20 playwrights in 2014 and so far, 2016-17 is the most diverse season yet, with 8 playwrights of color and 6 women represented, an increase from last year (with 3 and 5, respectively).”

Writes the playwright of August, Osage County and Killer Joe, also the actor who won a Tony for playing George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, “His plays not only altered the trajectory of world theatre; their impact is felt beyond the scope of arts and letters. He affected attitudes about race, sex, class, marriage, family, addiction, illness, death. He helped shape the postwar American character. He partly defined the postwar American sense of humor.”