My mother came to NYC for the first time when I got married in 1998. She was a country woman, not unsophisticated but certainly no urbanite. She’d lived in small towns most of her life. It took her less than an afternoon of our wandering around NYC to figure out its essence. As we walked…
I direct a lot of new plays, many of them by fledgling writers, and often various aspects of character development have remained in the head of the writer, and are not yet on the page. Or sometimes the character is on the page, but not yet sufficiently specific. When this happens, I use improvisation to answer questions like the…
Sitting here drinking coffee in a lovely, quiet NYC morning, I am reading two articles in the Times about Broadway Productions, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/theater/rules-for-investing-in-a-broadway-production.html?emc=eta1 and http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/theater/on-broadway-today-a-name-above-the-title-isnt-that-hard.html?emc=eta1. Here’s the main gist of those articles – In the world of Broadway productions, 75% lose their entire investment, 25% make a profit, and the main job of a producer is…
In August of 2015, I will put all my belongings in storage in Staten Island, and buy a car and begin a one-year artistic journey I am calling “Caesura: An Art Tinker’s Journey.” I’ll stay with friends and collaborate with them on art projects. I’ll be a muse, a dramaturge, an editor, a coach –…
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/mar/21/features11.g2 Don’t be so boring Anthony Neilson Anthony Neilson The Guardian, Tuesday 20 March 2007 Theatre is irrelevant to most of the population; audiences have been drifting away for decades. What is to be done? Playwright Anthony Neilson has a suggestion … I was part of a theatrical movement once. As with most movements, no…
From an article in HowlRound – How Television is Influencing Theatre – ““How good TV has become at doing a certain kind of character-driven long-form storytelling really throws down a gauntlet for playwrights,” Itamar Moses says, “and challenges them to answer the question, with their work: What can only theater do? What can’t we get…
http://www.pdc1.org/viewthisarticle.php?article=8 Several years ago, I made a profound discovery that has enabled me to weather the storm of criticism, rejection and inevitable, transient depression that is the lot of so many playwrights. What I discovered was how to make rejection work for me. Since playwrights spend far more time dealing with rejection than watching their…
I just read Theresa Rebeck’s article “Broadway in Review” in the recent special issue of The Dramatist. It’s concise, clear and to the point – and one of the fine points she makes is that women are grossly under-represented on Broadway – on the page and on the stage. Yet I am currently curating the…
I am a strict grammarian. I cannot abide bad grammar, poor syntax, misspellings, for God’s sake! I’ve been reading my way through a pile of scripts – a pile of 29, all to be read and assessed by the end of this week. I read them in batches – three or four in a row,…
I recently watched a program on TV – “POV’s High Tech, Low Life”, in which a blogger named Zola made this statement, “Readers with short attention spans like me just want to know six things about an incident – time, place, character, cause, development and conclusion. I let readers figure out the meaning for themselves.”…
Page to Stage 