Theatre

Or rather, she took her mother’s story and melded it into a new play. Playwright Jaclyn Backhaus on why her new play includes pirates: “It’s a pirate attitude that got my mom to where she is. … t’s a pirate attitude that lot of people with dreams face when they’re trying to attain them.”

“Certainly American culture is different from European culture. So I had expected the life of a theatre artist in Paris or London to be more refined, somehow easier, and at the same time more gratifying on a creative level than mine here in the States. But it turns out that their struggles, passions, fiscal concerns, their training, their identity issues, and the sexism they face—in other words, much of their life experience, seems very similar to my own.”

Speaking at the Theatres Trust Conference 2018 in London, Emma Stenning said: “We can’t be subsidy-reliant charities any longer. We have to look at our buildings as our principle assets. We have to keep saying how can it carry on giving back to the business.” She explained that the Bristol Old Vic previously made a £60,000 profit on its catering business, which is expected to increase to about £300,000 over the next 18 months, following the theatre’s refurbishment.

Lyn Gardner: “While everyone may in theory have the right to failure in theatre, I believe we need to look much harder at who gets the opportunity to fail upwards. We’ve talked a great deal in recent years about who gets the opportunity to make work. But we also need to talk about who, once an opportunity has been secured, is allowed to fail and who isn’t.”

The total amount of investment needed in theatre buildings, according to the survey, is likely to be closer to £1 billion. This takes into account planned major works outside of the theatres that responded. However, 50% of respondents were confident or very confident they could raise the money needed.

Alexis Soloski talks to the playwright and director Jack O’Brien about the challenges of his latest script, The Hard Problem.

Says Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, the first in Britain to completely revamp its policies for handling harassment allegations, “What we’ve uncovered is absolutely monumental and I feel we’re further away than we’ve ever been from getting to a place of truth or change. It’s really distressing.” On the other hand, four out of five theatres in the UK have overhauled their policies, and some actors say they feel a real change in the audition and rehearsal rooms.

“The industry is experimenting with so-called immersive technologies including: virtual reality, where participants put on a headset to enter a computer-generated world; motion capture, which enables an actor to control a digital avatar through their own movement in real time; and projection mapping, where scenery is projected on to a physical environment and can be changed in the blink of an eye.”

What it’s like to go to the theatre and see a play about the Constitution right now: “The play’s concerns could hardly have felt more viscerally urgent. In the row behind me, a woman wept deep, grieving tears — a kind of crying so suffused with pain that we’re not used to hearing it in public, even in a darkened theater. But this is not an ordinary time.”

Cynthia Rider, who has been with the festival since 2013, says the board just offered to renew her contract, and she declined, “adding that the near-simultaneous departure with Rauch will give the festival ‘new eyes, with lots of momentum’ for upcoming challenges, especially around financial loss from wildfire smoke.”

The book is designed to avoid stereotypes – and give actors a better chance at roles outside of the terrorist, gang member, or other confining (or lazily cast) roles. “This project is special, as we are often encouraged to pick a character close to ourself for audition. But it is hard to find pieces, so we’re always having to play something that isn’t true to us.”

Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre cleaned up at the awards, which – though they’re held in London – celebrate achievement in regional theatre.

Has anything changed for Asians and other people of color in the theatre and movie world? Aasif Mandvi: “When you tell a story in Hollywood about brown people or black people or any people of color, it’s got to an extraordinary story. It’s got to be the worst thing or the best thing. It’s got to be like, [film trailer voice] “He was born a free man and then he was sold into slavery, and then he got onto a game show and won a million dollars. It’s 12 Years a Slumdog Millionaire!” It’s got to be Crazy Rich Asians, it can’t just be Asians, you know?”

Mary John was part of the nascent regional theatre movement, which was led in large part by women: Margo Jones opened Theatre ’47 in Dallas in 1947, Nina Vance opened Houston’s Alley Theatre that same year. And in Washington, D.C., Zelda Fichandler co-founded Arena Stage in 1950. Pat Brown, who would later become the Alley’s second artistic director and a founder of Theatre Communications Group, started the now defunct Magnolia Theatre in Long Beach, Calif., in 1954. For the next 15 years many women like them would work to bring to life a new vision of regional theatre in a country that still mostly looked to New York City,

The company announced Thursday that acclaimed Canadian director Weyni Mengesha will become its artistic director, starting in January. Paired with the hiring of UK-based arts administrator Emma Stenning as Soulpepper’s new executive director in August, Toronto’s largest not-for-profit theatre company will now be led by two women after a year rocked by legal and internal discord.

“… And so I like to think of myself as an independent producer as opposed to a commercial producer,” says Sonia Friedman, who was spoiled by her time working “in the subsidised sector” (at the National Theatre).

For a New Yorker, the real surprise was to be found in the far-flung spaces — like the Den — that make up Chicago’s “storefront” theater movement. Especially in the northern part of the city, these theaters have colonized churches and renovated restaurants and turned showrooms into show rooms. Some house an audience of hundreds, some just a handful.

“It was just last season when theater lovers were wringing their collective hands as big brand musicals descended on Times Square … No more. In a turnabout no one on Broadway expected, this season is rich with drama — ambitious, challenging, risky work, most of it new and most of it American.” Says one producer, “It’s no accident that all these plays are happening now. It’s how artists react to what’s happening in the culture.”

“How often is it the case that a show made and performed in a theatre genuinely has an impact on the building and the way it operates?” Lyn Gardner remembers one very notable case, when the Battersea Arts Centre hosted Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death a decade ago. “If this happened more often, would the culture of the building change? … It’s a question that is particularly pertinent when considering work made by, and with, the community.”

“The whole idea that you have a medium that is based on rapid response, and yet has lack of nuance built into its form, is very difficult, and is leading to a very binary culture, which I think makes it difficult to be truthful in art. I think that for a writer, you have to be constantly aware of how unbinary and complex every issue is, so the loss of nuance generally I think is quite dangerous.”

If you think about it, the doctor- or surgeon-patient encounter is like improv, requiring two characters, in role, to build a scene together. Improvisers must think creatively and adapt in the moment. In the same way, health professionals must learn to respond creatively and with mental agility in rapidly changing circumstances, under time pressure, sometimes in life-and-death situations — while maintaining their professional composure.

After years of money troubles and more than one near-collapse, the city’s flagship non-profit stage company recruited a new producing artistic director and then took 16 months off, presenting only a few imported events. Now that new boss, Paige Price, has gotten the outstanding $1 million in debt paid off and rearranged operations, and next week PTC returns to main-stage productions with Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. Will the audience return? And what comes afterward?