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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

The coming of “hybrid theater”

July 2, 2021 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review webcasts of two new filmed plays by Reginald Edmund and Alan Ayckbourn. Here’s an excerpt.

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Now that live theatrical performances in the U.S. are resuming, what will happen to webcast theater? At first it was purely a stopgap for onstage productions, but several regional companies have started to stream technically sophisticated shows filmed not in empty theaters but on location…

Might it be that we are seeing the coming of a new genre—one for which the phrase “hybrid theater” has started to be used—that will become a standard part of production alongside conventionally staged shows? Michael Halberstam, the artistic director of Glencoe’s Writers Theatre, America’s foremost regional company, thinks so, arguing that hybrid shows “presage a shift in content, form and delivery.” As if to make his point, Writers Theatre is now streaming Reginald Edmund’s “Ride Share,” a premiere produced in collaboration with Black Lives, Black Words International Project….

Marcus (Kamal Angelo Bolden) is a Chicago executive who has been laid off from his “cush job” with “a joke of a severance package” and no immediate prospects for doing better. To make ends meet, he becomes a ride-share driver who works punishing hours (four to ten a.m., then seven p.m. to two a.m.) and sees “the best and the worst” in the people he drives all over the city….

Alan Ayckbourn’s plays are usually written for his own Stephen Joseph Theatre, a 404-seat theater-in-the-round auditorium in Yorkshire. They rarely reach New York—it’s been nine years since his last Broadway production—and the loss is ours, for he is a kind of English Chekhov who is also an incomparably fine director of his own serious comedies of middle-class melancholy. Hence I’m thrilled to report that a live performance of his staging of “The Girl Next Door,” his 85th and latest play, was filmed earlier this month at the Stephen Joseph Theatre and can be viewed online through Sunday. Ayckbourn buffs will naturally jump at the chance to view it, but “The Girl Next Door” is also an ideal introduction to the playwright and his work….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for “Ride Share”:

The trailer for “The Girl Next Door”:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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