Category: theatre

“Mr. Tierney flashed a thumbs-up sign, then pantomimed as if he was going to topple off the platform. A few people groaned; others laughed.”

“My children are now immersed in a world of iPads and text messages — and city kids are known for a been-there-done-that jadedness — but I was pleased that my teenage son and preteen daughter could nevertheless be charmed.”

Ben Brantley: “Mr. Kushner is a writer of rare intellectual scope and reading in both art and politics. But these assets would mean very little without the extraordinary, active empathy that pervades every one of his plays, extended even to those who would not appear to be his allies.”

“Chay Yew, the playwright and stage director who headed Center Theatre Group’s Asian Theatre Workshop from 1995 to 2005, was named Tuesday as the next artistic director of Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, making him the first Asian American to head a major regional theater.”

“The theatre, in my opinion, has been hijacked a bit by literary departments of academia. It’s a live, aural tradition, much like rock ‘n’ roll is an aural tradition. One day rock ‘n’ roll will be hijacked by music departments of academia, and it will be like ‘this is the authentic version of ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ that has to be sung every time’.”

“‘I don’t call it cynicism. I call it objectivity.’ He goes quiet. ‘I don’t begin with a thesis and pull in characters to fill that thesis, no. I write them to find out why I’m writing them.’ Another pause. ‘To reveal to yourself decisions you’ve already made’.”

Theatre Royal Stratford East’s Open Stage project “has now gone online to offer web users the opportunity to suggest and vote which plays, musicals and pantos they’d like to see. The winning play (picked through a distinctly no-AV voting system) will then be performed on stage with the audience able to interact, blog and from 10th June, tweet from the upper circle.”

“‘It is easy to forget that sometimes Ibsen could be incredibly funny,’ says director Giles Croft. ‘Though the play was very popular in his lifetime, The League of Youth has been overlooked because people now find it hard to reconcile the lighter elements of romantic comedy with Ibsen’s deeper moral concerns’.”

All of those in contention.

“You collaborate with people for so long, you struggle with plays that work and that don’t work and when you finally have one that you think succeeds — and then get some recognition for it — well, it’s pretty [expletive] special.”