Producing

Emily Daly writes about being a Hyphenate—someone with multiple artistic identities.

Fran Kumin interviews Chay Yew, Aristic Director of Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago about season planning.

Producer Jack Eidson writes about the challenges he’s faced casting  The Lilliput Troupe  with little person actors.

ArtsEmerson Artistic Director David Dower shares the process behind programming the company’s 2015/2016 season.

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

Jonathan Mandell talks with Producer Tom Kirdahy about celebrating a marriage three times and how theatre can make a difference.

Indie theatre producer Sergei Burbank outlines his experience producing Stephen Belber’s McReele, and discusses the danger in assuming that a play with cultural relevance will guarantee a sold-out run.

Meghan Healey breaks down what designers do.

Playwright and co-founder of Boston Public Works Theater Company John Greiner-Ferris discusses the rewards and challenges that have come with self-producing.

Seth Lepore talks about gaining the skills to self-produce and theatre artists as entrepreneurs.

Director Lavina Jadhwani ask three questions, addressing how color-conscious casting impacts the story being told.

Responding to a lack of queer performance nights, Kolmel WithLove started The News, which led to a gathering of curators of queer performance to discuss the best practices.

Yet after reading about staged readings and their role in play development, I hit a roadblock. I couldn’t come up with a definition that addressed every possible scenario. More vexingly, I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate concrete meanings for words like “minimal” and “basic” that are often used when discussing staged reading elements. Despite the many points of agreement found when looking at various discussions, there are too many differences in definition to develop a clear picture of what exactly a staged reading is or how it should look.

Zak Berkman offers insight into implementing diversity and inclusion as the Producing Director at People's Light.

I feel fairly confident that if some sort of census was to be taken from the last decade of American theatermaking, counting up the total number of productions by playwrights who are dead versus playwrights who are alive, The Zombies would outnumber those of us with pulses by a large margin. Which sincerely begs to question: Do artistic directors have a bias against playwrights who are alive? Are they “Life-ist?” “Pulse-Phobic?” Do they hate my heartbeat?

The book as a whole is a deeply moving, authentic, and relatable piece of writing. It begins by relating "The Panza Monologues" authors’ personal and social history, and then shifts gears into practical application, even including a DIY (do it yourself) production manual. "The Panza Monologues" illustrate the inherent value of theater and performance of and from a specific community and culture.

Miranda Wright doesn’t want to be pegged – not yet. The theatrical environment that she’s creating is both local and global—theater for a world that is simultaneously more connected and isolated, more expansive, more community-oriented, more lonely. More than anything, she’s concerned with the present moment.

The Welders is a new DC-based playwrights’ collective whose mission is to establish an evolving, alternative platform for play development and production. Over the course of three years, the collective will produce one play by each of the group’s five member playwrights and then give the entire organization—website, checkbook, and audience—to a new generation of artists. In a periodic series of articles, members of The Welders are going to be reporting on the collective’s experience in an attempt to share knowledge with (and learn from) the broader theatrical community.

And although I’m proud of the production and of the nearly-all Latina/o creative team that gave Mariela en el Desierto an authentic voice, an issue arose as the last weekend of performances approached: No critics from the periodicals in the Atlanta area had attended or reviewed the show.

I grew up entranced by Jim Henson’s Muppets. Performing with wry but gentle humor, they pulled back the curtain to snicker at backstage life and deftly expressed all the joy, camaraderie, and frustration of working as an ensemble. Though televised, it embraced the dynamic liveness integral to puppetry, variety, and vaudeville as art forms. So now, looking back at the films as a young arts manager, I’m shocked to realize that Kermit the Frog—whom I love very, very much—is a pretty bad producer.

Boston’s neighborhoods, some of whose origins can be traced to the 1630s, have been home to myriad political and cultural shifts over the centuries—a concept that blew my California-raised mind. It was somewhat intimidating to move to a city with such a wonderful and complex past and getting charged with the task of creating spaces for conversation across the various communities.

The question from TEDxBroadway 2014: How do you make the magic of theatre?

Holly L. Derr argues against the traditional idea of a "pipeline" of plays flowing from New York to other places in the country.