Source Festival’s Rites of Passage theme involves “moments that define who we are.” These pivotal moments help define our character and provide a solid basis for a number of different playwriting choices.
Archives for June 2012
Goldilocks
What really happened when a young blond interloper entered the cottage of three bears living in the woods? Give Christopher Piper a new slant on an old idea, step aside and let him go at it.
Theater 2.0 – audiences move from passive to active participation
It’s that time of year again—when roughly 1,000 theater makers from around the world converge on a city for the annual Theatre Communications Group National Conference. This year, I was honored to receive an invitation from Clayton Lord, Theatre Bay Area’s Director of Communications and Audience Development, to participate on a panel entitled “Maximizing Impact: […]
Sleuth
British playwright Anthony Shaffer’s ingenious, hairpin-turn stage thriller about a competitive game of one-upmanship, humiliation and revenge, is scored like a tennis game.
Slowgirl
The Lincoln Center 3 series has been offering new writers an introduction via a series of productions at its Laura Pels Theatre underground at the Lincoln Center Theatre complex. But the long awaited Claire Tow Theatre atop the Beaumont has now been completed, and its first entry is a complete success.
Treemonisha
Read any good CD’s lately? The two discs of this complete recording of Treemonisha, Scott Joplin’s 1911 opera, come inserted between the covers of a 112 page small-print book that is almost as fascinating as the sounds on the discs. What a package!
Actor, director and Irish playwright on Keegan’s striking world premiere Cuchullain
Cuchullain is inspired by Irish legend and “Cuckoo’s Nest”, its author explains Rosemary Jenkinson’s brand new one-man, one-act play Cuchullain, currently in rep with Keegan Theatre’s musical Spring Awakening, reminds us of the mad Anglo-Irish down-and-outers whose lives she charted in her earlier comic tragedy Johnny Meister and the Stitch. This latter play was mounted by Solas Nua […]
The Normal Heart
Audiences for playwright Larry Kramer’s landmark 1985 agitprop drama The Normal Heart, will undoubtedly include those old enough to have been aware of and remember the baffling and fearful years when a strange new disease that would become known as AIDS first cropped up in gay communities. They recall the excruciatingly slow movement to address […]
Memphis
The traveling road show edition of Memphis, winner of the 2010 Tony Award for Broadway’s Best Musical, arrived at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House this weekend past. DC is the first stop, launching its national tour. It’s a show that regales its audiences with a hot, evocative score, some smashing song and dance numbers, plenty […]
The Magic behind the Magic of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast
Until now, from my limited vantage, I would have charged that stagehands make up a group distinguished primarily by their prodigious consumption of doughnuts and coffee and their nocturnal habits. So when I got a call to do a “load in” story about Disney’s Beauty & the Beast at the National, I thought, “What’s up […]
Source: The Pressure Cooker
It’s taco night in the Source rehearsal studio. As three strangers sit down to dinner, their similar anxieties bring them into a shared space that starts to feel like home. With its rich details, The Pressure Cooker is like a magic painting, inviting audience members to step inside and contemplate a single, shared moment.
Shadow-Matter: Exam Log X
Over a series of experiments, a scientist is drawn ever closer to his subject in this elegant, gymnastic dance of opposites. One of the Source Festival’s three Artistic Blind Dates, this hypnotic collaboration between a filmmaker (Dannie Snyder), a puppeteer (Lisi Stoessel), and an object manipulation specialist (Drex) is greater than the sum of its […]