Aesthetics

Paul Zimet, Artistic Director of the Talking Band, speech to the New Center for Advanced Psychotherapy Studies on Repetition.

Rob Onorato on Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of Marie Antoinette by David Adjmi.

Anne Bogart’s address at the 2015 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Erin Mee discusses the emerging genre of smartphone plays.

Illana Stein reports on the perceived and projected possible ramifications of burning the Quran on stage during a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great.

Lee Sachs contemplates the differences between theatre and film, and the corollary between film and theatre when it comes to solo work.

The author reflects on the role of the performing arts in his own remarkable journey from Ugandan child soldier to performer and playwright.

Jennifer Johnson, of The Charlestown Working Theater, who has trained with Double Edge Theatre, interviews Stacy Klein, Founding Artistic Director of Double Edge about the evolution of Double Edge’s training method.

Elizabeth Doud addresses the emergency of climate change and the need for a poetics to shift consciousness.

The author on three musicals that have opened on Broadway this season, all descended from movie musicals that the MGM movie studio made in the Technicolor era. 

Chantal Bilodeau kicks off the series Theatre in the Age of Climate Change with an account of her trip to the Canadian Arctic and how that changed how she wanted to write plays.

Jody Christopherson shares the piece she has been devising about Clove Galilee—what it was like for her to grow up around Mabou Mines, and the legacy of women generating work.

Lighting designer Megan Reilly outlines the process of designing for production with twelve possible iterations.

Emma Weisberg considers the complexities of language and summarizes conversations with fourteen women playwrights discussing the question “How do you define gender parity?”

Cecilia Copeland explores what her play R Culture brought up for her as a playwright, as well as what a play about “rape culture” means for her community at large.

Romanian playwright Peca Ştefan discusses a project to research and engage with residents to tell the stories of towns throughout Romania.

Scholar and theater practitioner Erin Mee, considers how by giving time-space to the sensoria, immersive, and interactive productions are inherently rasic.

There is a sense that this piece somehow transcends theatre even as it embodies it—or, as Hamilton puts it: “This is not a moment, it’s a movement.”

Martha Steketee speaks with playwright Sean Cunningham about Here’s Hoover! The Historic Herbert Hoover 2014 Comeback Special, which recently concluded a brief run in New York City. Herbert Hoover’s return, replete with leather, works like gangbusters.

Dreams on the open sea are part of a larger narrative as Natasha Lee Martin, an actress, director, and teacher, performs in Confessions of a Synesthetic Sailor at TheaterLab in New York City.

Ty Defoe explores what his many identities make him, what it is to be two-spirit, and the kind of art it has inspired him to make.

MJ Kaufman begins a new blog series, exploring questions of gender and parity in the world of performance. In this installment, he looks at how transpeople talk.

David Copelin, self-identified member of the “cottontop demographic,” considers how his privilege might affect his artistic choices and his responsibility to that privilege.