Tag Archives: playwrights

Link Roundup! – 8/5/16

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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The Huffington Post has a story about the recent casting controversy surrounding a Chicago production of In The Heights:

The casting decision raises important questions about diversity and representation on the stage. When there already exist so few roles for Latinx performers, what does it say when the few roles that do exist go to white actors? In a musical that deals explicitly with the issue of gentrification as a theme, the casting seems especially mishandled.

In an interview with American Theatre, playwright and composer Quiara Alegría Hudes, who wrote the book for “In the Heights,” expressed her disappointment, describing how one of the main motivations behind the musical was to create complex, dynamic roles for Latinx actors when hardly any exist. “For decades, the vast majority of Latino roles were maids, gangbangers, etc,” she said. “It’s demoralizing, obnoxious, and reductive of an entire people. It’s a lie about who we are, how complicated our dreams and individuality are.”

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Oregon Shakespeare Festival has announced a new round of American Revolutions commissions:

The commissioned artists are the 1491s, Aditi Kapil, Basil Kreimendahl, Mona Mansour, Carlos Murillo, Susan Nussbaum, Robert O’Hara and Jiehae Park. Two of the commissions are in partnership with other theatres: the 1491s with New Native Theater in Minneapolis and Kreimendahl with Actors Theatre of Louisville.

“In this extremely important election year, we are so proud to welcome these extraordinary artists,” said American Revolutions Director Alison Carey. “We have a responsibility to history to tell it and a responsibility to the future to listen to history’s lessons.”

American Revolutions is a multi-decade program of commissioning and developing 37 new plays about moments of change in United States history. Launched in 2008, the last five plays will be commissioned in 2017, with the writing and development of the plays expected to last at least through 2027.

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Link Roundup! – 7/22/16

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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Jones and DeGroat: “What’s RACE got to do with it?” Photo: Peter Irby

Oregon Artswatch reports on a conversation about race and the arts held at Imago Theatre earlier this month:

The event was a conversation called “What’s RACE Got To Do With It?,” produced by the group The Color of NOW and hosted by Third Rail Repertory Theatre, which shares the Imago space. Part performance, part talk show and part back-and-forth with the audience, it included a monologue to an unborn child – a child who, given the state of the world and its racial volatility, would remain unborn, an idea derailed – by actor Joseph Gibson, and a little music from Ben Graves, and a long conversation about the nitty gritty of race in America and Oregon in particular with the actor, director, and activist Kevin Jones, artistic director of the August Wilson Red Door Project, an organization whose ambitious goal is to “change the racial ecology of Portland through the arts.” It’s a tall order, given the ratcheting of racial tensions across the nation and much of the rest of the world in recent times.

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Boston Globe has a feature about the city’s redevelopment efforts and how the arts are included in those plans:

First came Boston Creates, now comes Futurecity Massachusetts, a joint project of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Foundation that seeks to place arts and culture at the heart of redevelopment and revitalization efforts in the state’s three largest cities. The partnership, which is working with consultant Mark Davy’s London-based Futurecity, will focus on real estate projects in Boston’s Fenway Cultural District, the Springfield Central Cultural District, and Worcester’s Salisbury Cultural District. As these cultural districts undergo transformation, it’s essential to understand the various stages of real estate transactions. One important term you might encounter is ‘active under contract.’ Knowing what does active under contract mean can help you navigate the real estate market more effectively. This status indicates that a property is under contract with a buyer, but the seller is still accepting backup offers. Understanding such terms ensures you stay informed and prepared during your real estate ventures.

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Link Roundup! – 4/29/16

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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Photo: Lucasfilm, Marvel, Paramount Pictures

Vulture has a piece exploring why so many of Hollywood’s best black actors are relegated to voice work or are physically altered by makeup and visual effects:

You don’t see Leonardo DiCaprio, Sandra Bullock, and Tom Cruise painting their faces to win roles, but this color-changing gambit has practically become required of black dramatic actors who want to appear in big-budget movies. Of our A-list movie stars, the only white one regularly tinting her skin is Jennifer Lawrence, who signed a three-film contract to play Mystique in the X-Men films well before she was an Oscar-winning superstar, and whose latest go-round in the role is her least blue yet. Fox was savvy to put Lawrence’s famous white face front and center for X-Men: Apocalypse, since they now know it’s a face that sells movie tickets and magazines. So, too, could Lupita Nyong’o’s, yet since her Oscar win, no white director has cast her in a live-action role that lets her live in her own black skin.

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Here’s a good round up of advice from the Nonprofit with Balls blog with do’s and don’ts when applying for a job:

Do research the organization you’re applying to: You will be asked how your skills and experience are a good fit. You will sound a lot more impressive if you can say things like “I saw in your last blog post that you have a challenge with blah blah. I have experience working with blah blah, etc.”

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Link Roundup! – 4/15/16

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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Olivia D’Ambrosio, producing artistic director of Bridge Repertory Theater, reaches for a play among a pile of books in her home office. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

The ARTery examines gender parity in theatre, nationally and locally, with some shout-out’s to C1:

Anecdotal observations are backed up by some stark statistics. A study released by the League of Professional Theatre Women in October, focusing on New York City theaters, found that divisions of labor at theater companies appear to be highly gendered. In the past five years, women accounted for 72 percent of the stage managers and assistant stage managers tallied; just 33 percent of directors were female.

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HowlRound posted the text of Todd London’s keynote address from the Association of Performing Arts Service Organizations earlier this month:

The etymology of the word service points in two directions. In Old English, service means religious devotion; in the Old French and Latin it denotes slavery. It’s a big word, service, calling to mind food and kindness, military duty, patriotic honor, and sex. I want to stay with the two-headed root, though: dedication to a life of spirit this way; indenture that. To the right, we have the arts service community’s saint-like fanaticism. To the left, its feelings of unappreciated servitude. Sometimes we serve glorious missions; sometimes we serve the self-serving. “You have given your life to a beautiful cause,” the angel on one shoulder whispers. The devil on the other laughs, “Nobody sees or knows what you do. It’s not worth it. Fuck it. Go make some money.”

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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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Link Roundup! – 3/4/16

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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Mayor Marty Walsh has an Opinion piece is the Boston Globe this week:

If Boston is going to be a thriving, healthy, and innovative city, we need our artists to flourish. Artists can help solve big problems and heal old wounds. Artists embody the creativity that fuels innovation, and innovation is part of the fabric of Boston. Their work expresses our histories and our values. It communicates our fears, hopes, and dreams. Art brings people together. We see this in the crowds that gathered around the Echelman sculpture on the Greenway last summer, in Illuminus at Fenway, where percussionists “played” the Green Monster, and in our neighborhood festivals and parades. From the beginning of this administration, we identified the arts as a top priority. And we recognized that supporting the arts begins with supporting artists’ work. Without our artists, we aren’t Boston.

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American Theatre has a feature about the Write With Us program at Soho Rep, which allows the public to come in for writing workshops led by Soho Rep playwrights:

Martin and Benson invited the participating writers—which also included Annie Baker, Greg Moss, and Daniel Alexander Jones—to format their three-hour workshop however they wanted. César Alvarez had attendees write lyrics, to which he would compose a melody and start to craft a song, while Anne Washburn conducted her entire workshop in the dark and had students bring flashlights. “It was this very sort of sonic experience,” says Benson, who attended all of the writer’s workshops.

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C1 PlayLab: What We’re Reading – Vol. 1

We recently kicked off the newest iteration of C1 PlayLab, and in the coming months, we’ll be using some of our time during our PlayLab Master Classes to discuss big ideas and current issues that are relevant to working playwrights. This month we are exploring the themes of Character and Identity — here are a few pieces of writing that will serve as a springboard for our conversation during this month’s PlayLab session.

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My Parents Were Tiger People: christopher oscar peña chats about writing race with A. Rey Pamatmat via HowlRound

A. Rey Pamatmat is our PlayLab guest this month, and this conversation is a great one to get us thinking about how one’s personal identity and experience can impact a play, as well as what it means to craft characters from a variety of backgrounds:

People need to be okay with labels evolving and redefining themselves. I also wish plays were experienced on their own. The context of the writer’s identity is totally exciting…afterward. Let that add to the conversation, not be it.

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Artistic Authority Series – Part One and Part Two via Jacqueline Lawton’s blog.

In these two posts, playwrights Kia Corthron, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Kristoffer Diaz, Marcus Gardley, and several others all offer their thoughts on the ethics of writing characters from a different racial or ethnic identity than one’s self.

Are we ethically entitled to write outside of our own ethnicity (however we define any of those loaded terms)? If we do, are there any ground rules? Are we obligated to educate ourselves (even minimally) about a culture before assuming the authority to give voice to characters of that culture? Or is any such suggestion a hindrance to the creative process, at worst tantamount to censorship?

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Link Roundup! – 1/29/16

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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The 2011 edition of Boston’s annual Santa Speedo Run. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)

Boston has plans to make the city more fun via the Late Night Task Force, as reported by The Atlantic’s CityLab:

Good times are good for good’s sake, but there’s a powerful economic argument behind the mayor’s push, too. An example: a report from the San Francisco Office of the Controller found that nightlife generated $4.2 billion in spending in 2010. Though most of the people who enjoy that city’s restaurants, bars, and music venues are local, more than half of that $4.2 billion comes from visitors’ wallets. A 2004 report commissioned by the New York Nightlife Association found that clubs and bars alone generate $9.7 billion annually for the city. The research data firm IBISWorld estimates that American bars and nightclubs took in $26 billion in 2015. Good times are also big business.

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American Theatre has a story about playwrights working for TV and film:

For the bulk of my life, “TV writer” has been a gentle euphemism for “failed playwright.” A serious theatre person would barely admit to having a television, much less watching one. Those days are long gone. Now if you tell people that you haven’t seen “Breaking Bad” or “Mad Men,” it’s a kind of moral failing, an indication of poor character. Not watching the right television has become the mark of the philistine. And TV has largely claimed the center of popular culture, supplanting even film. If you go out on the street right now and ask people what movie they think should win the Oscar, you’re likely to get shrugs and vacant stares. Ask them what happened to Jon Snow on “Game of Thrones” or what the ending of “Mad Men” meant, and you’ll get a discourse on Internet conspiracy theories, spoilers, and deceptive camera angles. Ask them what will win the Tony and—well, they’ll probably say Hamilton. It’s the only Broadway show everyone knows about.

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Link Roundup! – 1/22/16

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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Mayor Marty Walsh during last year’s State of the City address.

Mayor Walsh has unveiled a new plan to increase arts funding and support:

As outlined in Tuesday night’s State of the City address at Symphony Hall, the programs will provide direct grants to individual artists, expand the city’s fledgling artist-in-residence program, and establish an artist resource desk at City Hall, which officials said would act as a central information hub for artists working in the city.

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The Boston Globe has a report on the state of Boston arts funding compared to arts funding around the country:

Boston places near the top of 11 major cities across the United States in the number of nonprofit cultural organizations in the city and the revenue they earn. But the city’s wealth of arts organizations receive comparatively meager foundation and corporate support, are overburdened with facilities costs, and place dead last in per-capita government funding for the arts.

“The good news is that this confirms that we’re punching way above our weight in terms of the health, vitality, and size of the cultural sector in this city,” said Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation. “The bad news is, compared to other cities, certain kinds of financial support that other cities have put in place are not in place here, and that’s a particularly difficult thing for the small- and medium-size organizations.”

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Link Roundup! – 1/16/16

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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Violet Newman is one of five young girls who make up the cast of Employee of the Year, one of the plays being featured at this year’s Under the Radar Festival. Maria Baranova/Courtesy of the Public Theater

NPR has a story about the Under The Radar festival and how the co-artistic directors of the festival approach their programming:

Meiyin Wang and Mark Russell, co-artistic directors of Under the Radar, crisscross the globe every year trying to answer a single question. “In this day,” Russell says, “when there’s all sorts of great ways of telling stories and everyone’s got a camera … we’re looking at: Why do theater now?”

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The LA Times interviewed the creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag after the Academy Award nominations were announced this past week:

Thursday morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for this year’s coveted golden statue. For the second year in a row, not one nominee in the four major acting categories is a person of color. Furthermore, people of color are virtually absent from all the other categories as well.

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