Category: theatre

“Personally I read reviews because I’m interested by them, but they don’t have utility for me. The very act of writing is so enclosed that nothing else, including critics, impinges on the experience. Everything else is shut out except for the line you’re writing. If I have a central belief, it’s that writing has to be a purely subjective experience; you can’t keep a weather eye open for what people are saying, trying to please some ghostly presence looking over your shoulder.”

“A really hot theater town – which Boston wants to be so badly and may be someday but really isn’t yet, if I may say so – in a really hot theater town, a good actor can earn his living doing theater. And when [celebrated local actor] Nancy Carroll has to work a day job, that’s just wrong.”

“Cardenio was performed only twice during Shakespeare’s lifetime but never printed. Little is known about the play beyond its title. An 18th-century version, produced at London’s Drury Lane Theater, was said to be based on Shakespeare’s text, but the theater and its records – including, perhaps, the original – burned in the early 19th century.”

“Income last year was up 12 per cent from the year before, and the present season’s advance sales of £2m is higher than that of 2007. Fundraising for a new education centre, library, and indoor theatre is marching ahead. All this has been accomplished without government aid, whose absence Dromgoole does not regret.’It’s a huge advantage, actually. I find it intellectually liberating’.”

New York University wants to demolish the historic Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village as part of its expansion. Community leaders and scholars “say the building, where Eugene O’Neill’s plays were first produced, is an important site in American theater history.”

“The news that Shakespeare is being translated into yoofspeak (“Dere was somefing minging in de state of Denmark,” et cetera), while revolting, of course, struck me as not exactly news. Hasn’t this been done before? Or is it from the output of some fifth-rate Radio 4 comedy sketch show?”

At California’s South Coast Rep. “The storytelling, which dips and dissolves in plot points too numerous and odd to synopsize, has an inventiveness that recalls the uncategorizable literary exploits of Jane Bowles. Greenberg’s play isn’t simply forging a nontraditional dramatic path but eddying in its own delightful contrivances.”

“One of the appealing ways of working, for me … is making something that’s almost algebraic – something highly formal with sharply etched incongruities. But in this play, I just decided to sprawl. I wanted it to go off in all directions. I didn’t want the factor of formal elegance to creep in.”

“For a country where a particularly austere version of the Reformation deliberately squeezed theatre out of public life for more than 300 years, a country with no theatrical heritage to speak of – certainly no Shakespeare or Molière, Chekhov or Synge – this is all heady stuff. Theatre people in the boho quarters of Glasgow and Edinburgh have a spring in their step.”

“The main questions appear to be: Do musicals overshadow more serious theatre? Could the BBC do more to promote theatre? What more could the BBC do to encourage theatre-going?”