Tag Archives: new york times

Link Roundup! – 3/11/16

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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Top: Liesl Tommy, Sara Bareilles, Rachel Chavkin and Masi Asare Bottom: Susan Stroman, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Baayork Lee and Lisa Kron

Top: Liesl Tommy, Sara Bareilles, Rachel Chavkin and Masi Asare
Bottom: Susan Stroman, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Baayork Lee and Lisa Kron

In honor of International Women’s Day this week, Playbill polled 14 female directors, writers, and composers about the women in the industry to watch:

“I am particularly watching the writing of Dipika Guha: an incredible, nuanced playwright, someone who is smart, political, theatrical and deeply, fiercely emotional. She has been in the Women’s Project lab, and is now being produced across the country (her new work is right now running at Crowded Fire in San Francisco) I worked with her at both Brown and Yale School of Drama, and the range of her work is extraordinary.” – Paula Vogel

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Vulture lists 28 reasons theatre is thriving right now:

Many trends in the culture had to coalesce to make this happen. To name a familiar one, Glee snuck musical theater back into youth culture, disguised as a tortured-teen soap. But the two most important changes are about the demographics of artists and the taste of audiences. Just as the Jewish play did in the 1940s, and the gay play in the ’80s, stories about race especially — and also gender, class, and other knotty subjects — are emerging as an important engine of even commercial theater. Still, no matter how good, those plays wouldn’t have any effect if audiences resisted their subject matter. Instead, miraculously, they’re embracing it.

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Link Roundup! – 12/4/15

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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From left, John R. Lewis, Catherine Castellanos and Tristan Cunningham during a rehearsal of California Shakespeare Theater’s production of “The Tempest.” Credit Alessandra Mello

From left, John R. Lewis, Catherine Castellanos and Tristan Cunningham during a rehearsal of California Shakespeare Theater’s production of “The Tempest.” Credit Alessandra Mello

The New York Times ran a feature on Ten Thousand Things and their radical approach to programming theatre for people on the margins of society:

“When you say you do theater for people in prisons and homeless shelters,” Ms. Hensley conceded, “people’s first reaction is: ‘That must be really awful theater. It must be skits about staying off drugs.’” It took a while, she said, to convince mainstream audiences, critics and funders that the experiences of those nontraditional audiences “mirror the extremes of the characters in the way that most upper-class audiences just don’t.”

Born in Iowa and educated at Princeton and U.C.L.A., Ms. Hensley, 57, quickly grew disillusioned with the idea of climbing the regional theater ladder. Living in Los Angeles in the 1980s, she observed the chasm between haves and have-nots and concluded that there was an audience hungry for high-quality theater that respected their humanity.

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The Art Works blog has a post about the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s exploration of how integrating the arts can benefit STEM fields:

Many examples exist (some were shared at the workshop) of scientific and technological endeavors that have benefited from artistic practice or pedagogy. “Design thinking” leaps to mind, but so do arts integration with medical training, or artists who help scientists visualize their data, especially to communicate a public health message. Indeed, scientists at the workshop—and at similar events I’ve attended in the past year—readily acknowledge that the infusion of the arts and humanities could awaken in scientists and engineers a capacity for emotional connections, creativity, and complex problem-solving that might lie dormant without such exposure.

My question: if we strive for full integration, then what new “habits of mind” (as one workshop participant called it today) should be cultivated by STEM-related training for arts/humanities students? Or is the relationship not in fact bi-directional?

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Link Roundup! – 9/4/15

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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From left, Carlo Albán, Jack Willis, Kevin Kenerly, Terri McMahon, Kimberly Scott and K. T. Vogt in “Sweat.” Credit Jenny Graham

From left, Carlo Albán, Jack Willis, Kevin Kenerly, Terri McMahon, Kimberly Scott and K. T. Vogt in “Sweat.” Credit Jenny Graham

This New York Times story on Oregon Shakespeare Festival highlights their new work program and diversity initiatives:

As for diversifying the audience and drawing in more minorities, progress has been made, but it’s a slow process. At some shows I have seen, like Ms. Nottage’s “Sweat,” I couldn’t help but notice that the people onstage were far more ethnically diverse than those in the audience.

“I know that the largest diversity comes from our student audiences,” Mr. Rauch said, while admitting that the theater has a ways to go in terms of reaching out to ethnically diverse audiences. To that end, he and other members of the staff created an Audience Development Manifesto in 2010 meant to address the problem. This document noted that at the time minorities — aside from students — represented just 10 percent of the festival’s audiences; since then it has moved up to 16 percent. It was in 2013 that the company made its website bilingual.

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This Guardian post looks at the rise in visibility and training of artists with disabilities in the UK, and ways to continue making theatre accessible:

I want disabled artists to be able to make work that matters to them and connects with an audience, however that audience is defined. I want to see personal stories, work that addresses the experiences of being disabled, and work that’s just anything a disabled artist wants to make. I want to see very divergent points of view – from those who want to celebrate being different and move away from any sense of disability, to those who absolutely identify as disabled.

I would like to suggest a view that draws on the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, where something can appear to be both itself and its opposite. Sometimes disability arts might need to be seen as a single entity – a movement rich in diversity. At other times it might need separating out, for example when delving into the aesthetics of the work of some learning disabled artists, where the discourse might need to develop differently than that which has already evolved around work made by some artists with physical and/or sensory disabilities.

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Link Roundup! – 7/17/15

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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Lisa Kron, left, and Jeanine Tesori accepting a Tony Award for best score, for their collaboration on "Fun Home." Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Lisa Kron, left, and Jeanine Tesori accepting a Tony Award for best score, for their collaboration on “Fun Home.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The New York Times has a story about The Count — a study that tracks the number of female-written productions that are done each year.

Overseen by the playwrights Julia Jordan and Marsha Norman, the study, called “The Count,” is to be updated each year. Until now, besides a handful of older analyses, it had been unclear just how many female playwrights were seeing their work staged, according to Ms. Jordan.

“We wanted to create a baseline,” she said, “and to document the change.”

Judging from the numbers, the picture for women is rosier than a decade ago. A 2002 report from the New York State Council on the Arts found that 17 percent of productions across the country had female playwrights. According to the new report, that figure now sits at 22 percent.

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The ongoing conversation about the way theatre critics handle race in their reviews is continued in this article by Diep Tran for American Theatre, which gives four ways critics can be less racist:

We theatre journalists are a marginalized minority ourselves: overworked, underpaid, and constantly fighting to justify our existence. We’re not all that different from the artists we claim to love. And if we really love theatre, then we need to find a better way to talk about the diverse people who make it. Because right now, we—whose job it is to tell the truth—are failing at it.

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