Process

Author and playwright Catherine Barry reflects on her transition from writing novels to plays and gives advice for emerging author-playwrights.

Stephen Nunns shares his approach (or lack thereof) to pedagogy, which is often dynamic and performative.

The Lamplighter Productions collective describes their process for founding their company, and shares the lessons they’ve learned.

Laura Brueckner interviews playwright Idris Goodwin on 5 weeks 5 plays.

Lindsay Harris-Friel works through the process of creating a science fiction serial audio drama and highlights a few of the challenges that come when jumping into new media.

In the first of a series of posts exploring positive practices and principles for theatremakers, Phil Weaver-Stoesz writes about the value of listening in the process of creation.

Sound designer Toy Deiorio discusses the complicated, multi-faceted artistic process of sound design.

Liane Tomasetti explores what timing can mean for site-specific theatre, and how helpful a pilot performance was for her team to tackle some big issues.

Julie Rada digs into what we really mean when we talk about “safety” in a creative environment, and shares a list of agreements she has compiled to ensure it.

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

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.

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

Chris Kaminstein of the New Orleans-based ensemble Goat in the Road explains how they made Numb, an original piece about the origins of nitrous oxide and anesthesiology.

Director Will Davis shares his experience navigating theatre spaces as a queer person.

Martha Steketee writes about the logistics and process of the OOB Festival, including quotes from an interview with the team behind it.

All theater is local. That is what is inspiring and instructive about the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, as opposed to the notion of a "national tour.” In the case of "Yankee Tavern", this is a very political play (hidden inside a thriller structure) and so the politics of each city/community were engaged in differing ways. I was most strongly involved in the productions at Florida Stage and Curious Theatre Company—but followed the feedback in the other theaters as well. All of this info was crucial to me when I then directed a subsequent production at ACT Theatre in Seattle.

He fought two guys; beat the crap out of them. And I looked around, and everybody had just stopped training.. And I thought: oh, my god, this is the show. There’s that magnetic presence of the ring.

P. Carl interviews playwright Sarah Ruhl on her collection of short essays titled "100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater." 

Martha Steketee writes about Daniel Talbott and Samantha Soule looking at the work and companies they've created in New York's off-Broadway scene since meeting at Juilliard in 1998.

I had become exhausted from fighting the trafficking fights... The result has been policies that do more harm than good, and wide scale media misrepresentations of the problem. Those of us doing the actual on the ground fieldwork—talking to survivors, working with people who have experienced the harrowing challenges of exploitation—have been writing against the wave.

I was young, knew nothing and was impressionable. I remember being fond of Yuriko’s direction. She would say things like, “go forward from here” while pointing to her heart. No one had ever given me direction like that before. That first play was the beginning of my romance with Noh (performed in Japan since the thirteenth-century, it’s the world’s oldest, continually performed, masked lyric drama) and I fell hard.