Link Roundup! – 3/25/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff

The Boston Globe ran a story about local playwright and actor Melinda Lopez, who was mentioned in President Obama’s speech about Cuba earlier this week:

The president told of how, when Lopez traveled to Cuba and searched for her family’s old home, she had a chance encounter with an elderly woman who had been a neighbor of Lopez’s mother. The woman “recognized her as her mother’s daughter and began to cry” — later producing a baby photo that Lopez’s mother had taken of her infant daughter.

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The Chicago Tribune has a piece about the subscriber model in the arts and how it mirrors the newspaper business:

In this dilemma, nonprofit arts organizations are not unlike newspapers, such as this one, which are also striving to reinvent themselves for the digital age as their print subscription bases decline. As with the arts organizations, the media executives are trying to go where they think the puck is going, which means embracing the habits of millennials who consume individual stories (the newspaper’s equivalent of individual shows) from many different publications shared on social media. At the same time, the publications remain reliant on the revenue that comes from those still-colossal subscription bases.

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The cast of “A Chorus Line” performs at the Tony Awards in 2007.

The Atlantic has a feature about theatre historians trying to figure out ways to archive computerized design:

That’s been a question tugging at lighting designers and theater historians for some time now. Machine-programmed lighting isn’t documented the way the lighting schemes from earlier theater productions are sketched or otherwise described in stage records. “How can we make sure that all of that information is preserved in the same way as the lighting design for something like Oklahoma on Broadway [in 1943] or even something like The Black Crook in 1866?” said Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library.

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Workhaus Collective wrote an essay for HowlRound as part of their announcement that they will be closing up shop:

Since we began our journey in 2006 there are far more examples of playwright-driven theatre companies across the nation, such as the Welders in Washington, DC, Orbiter 3 in Philadelphia, and Boston Public Works, to name a few, with each company seeming to learn from each other, and form their own rules. Some companies are forming with a built-in termination date: an agreement to run for a few years together, then pass the baton. Workhaus Collective never had much of a formal definition. In many ways, we agreed each season to still exist, based on our own needs, our passion for what we could contribute to theatre as a whole, and our capacity. As I wrote in HowlRound two years ago, we have always made our decisions organically, together.