According to playwright Selina Fillinger, in order to explore the ways in which women can internalize misogyny in our culture, POTUS puts smart women at the center of a very silly narrative. It’s a delightful opportunity to laugh in the midst of the political cycle, which can be intense and heated. It is rude. I…
Much more than the sum of its jealous, sexually threatened, angry, paranoid, violently sundering, new beginning, innocent, open, reconciliatory, and magical parts, The Winter’s Tale is to do with searching for redemption or reconciliation after something absolutely horrific has taken place. I wanted to direct this play in Buffalo in 2024 because I could think…
I know every organization with which you have ever brushed shoulders (remember brushing shoulders?) wants you to know that they are ‘with you’; we’re thinking about you and, of course, we are thinking about the men behind the walls at the Moose Lake Correctional Facility. It’s an incredibly unsettling time. Moose Lake has the largest…
Travis and I drove up to the prison on Sunday evening to meet up with the men for a last work session on their pieces, in the multipurpose room where they were set to perform. This room is part library, part lecture hall; the Wiccans, the Catholics, and the Nation of Islam all share harmoniously…
Years ago, when I had made it through the early rounds of elimination for a Fulbright, I was scheduled to have a telephone interview with the Director of the UK Fulbright Commission. I remember receiving very stern written instructions that I was not, under any circumstances, to prepare a statement of any kind; the Director…
Last week, in our Redeeming Time weekly update, I opined at length on the myriad joys of the prison’s multipurpose room, where I delivered an introductory workshop in August before being exiled to a room with a squat column smack in the center of the space for the fall classes. Well, lo and behold, on…
When I arrived in the Twin Cities, I discerned that there were two fallow fields in this utterly verdant theatrical ecosystem where I judged that I could make an impact: I could start a classical theatre company or I could start a new prison performing arts program. But I didn’t think that I had the…
“I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.” ― Edward Albee 100 or so years ago, when I was a little baby director freshly arrived in NYC, I decided to direct Waiting for Godot. I cast the play entirely with women, because I observed that…
“I am the one thing in life I can control. I am inimitable, I am an original. Life doesn’t discriminate Between the sinners and the saints It takes and it takes and it takes And we keep living anyway We rise and we fall and we break And we make our mistakes.” I work with…
Some Essential Women Playwrights of the 20th & 21st Centuries In June, the Kilroys released their fantastic and important list of most recommended new plays by women. In July, partly in preparation to teach a course entitled Women in Theatre, partly because many of them have been on my ‘to do’ list for a long time and partly because I apparently abhor…
Last week’s Ira Hates Shakespeare furor illuminated one of the dingier corners within the house of social media: lots of heated, inflated, reductivist and binary declaiming. “Shakespeare’s amazing! “Shakespeare sucks!” This strikes me as particularly unhelpful and more than a little overwrought; can an art form really be undone by one ‘off the cuff’, late…
In January, I was a participant in the month-long intensive at Shakespeare & Company. Tina Packer, Dennis Krausnick, Kevin Coleman and their colleagues have been teaching the intensive for more than 30 years, and intensive is categorically one of the operative descriptors: the hours are long and the work is profound (should one choose to…
I just directed Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison. (If you’ve visited this site before, followed me on Twitter or possibly stumbled across my path on the subway, no doubt you already know this.) Even though the play was selected by their peers, several of the men in…
You can’t take an intermission at Sing Sing, and you cannot have a blackout. Well, this year, a blackout was not available to us because the lights never go out in the room where we presented the play and because the circuits in that space couldn’t handle the wattage of stage lighting. Also, there are…
I recently found myself lying on the prison floor, talking to George Gibbs about grief. [If you are new to my blog, you need to know that I am directing Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.] Thornton Wilder’s stage direction reads, “George sinks to his knees then falls full length at Emily’s feet.” My…
The individuals on the play selection committee all said that they wanted a comedy, or at least a story with some lighter moments in it. Over the course of several months, my colleagues and I made almost three dozen suggestions that fit the committee’s criteria, which include having a dozen or more roles for men…
No curtain. No scenery. Wilder wrote that he was trying to restore significance to the small details of life by stripping away the scenery, “Theatre longs to represent the symbols of things, not the things themselves.” Elsewhere, he observed, “Moliere said that for the theatre all he needed was a platform and a passion or…
First we want a little more information about the town There seems to be a nearly universal anxiety about the potential for the play to become mawkish in production, coupled with a rehearsal room realization that it is anything but maudlin. “Lots of directors go to it without a sense of why they’re doing it,”…
Once upon a time in October 1937, Thornton Wilder wrote to his dear friend, Gertrude Stein, “I can no longer conceal from you that I’m writing the most beautiful little play you can imagine… It’s a little play with all the big subjects in it; and it’s a big play with all the little…
In Acting II at Sing Sing this summer, we’ve been working on developing points of concentration, physical awareness and sense memory, discovering the dramatic action and building a character. In this regard, our class is much like Acting 201 just about anywhere. But we’re also looking for life skills, for mindful ways to interact with…
In Sunday’s Washington Post, Peter Marks opines the demise of men in tights and the ascent of the high concept. He writes, “It is the fashion in these meddling times — now perhaps more than ever — to put the doublets in mothballs and tie up Shakespeare in the threads of ponderous context. Only cursory…
Last night, we had the first session of an Intro to Acting workshop at Sing Sing. It was supposed to be for the men new to our program, but in the event, we had a nice mix of veterans and newbies, 15 men in total. I was leading a Patsy Rodenburg physical warm-up; at one…
Last night, we put Claudius on trial. Miching mallecho If you’ve been reading my blog or following me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m teaching a Shakespeare workshop at Sing Sing Correctional Facility this autumn, that the men were curious but deeply skeptical about Shakespeare when we began. A few weeks into the workshop,…
I’m sitting in a run-down classroom as the sun slowly sets on the other side of the Hudson River. The windows are threaded with metal, and there are metal grates on the outside of the glass. Every so often, a corrections officer walks past the door. Twelve men sit with me in a circle. We’ve…
Bit by bit “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” — Knute Rockne How many hours each week are you working on your dream? I don’t ask how many hours you temp or wait tables; I am not asking…
I just finished an exhilarating, thrilling, grueling and very fun rehearsal process, directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the American Shakespeare Center. There was no opening night. At least, not yet. My production comprises one-third of the 2011-2012 Almost Blasphemy Tour, and the day after our second dress rehearsal for MND, the actors set to…
Once upon a time, when I was a little baby director, an artistic director asked me to name five playwrights whose work I particularly admired. Because I wasn’t prepared, and probably also because I was a little baby director, my mind went blanker than Peter Brook’s empty space and I stammered, “Uhhhh …. well …….
I used to imagine that incarcerated actors would have no schedule conflicts. That they would be available to rehearse at any time. That they don’t have anything else to do. I was as wrong as I could be. I marvel at how busy the men who participate in Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) are: they…
You probably think this post is about you, don’t you? Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Last Thursday and Friday, I was casting a show that I’ll direct in June. The artistic director of the theatre and I were working with two capable, consummately professional casting directors. At the initial casting session,…
Two weeks ago, I started a fight at Sing Sing. If you don’t know Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, there is a sprawling, protracted, chock-full-o-storytelling unarmed fight between two characters late in the second act. I was apprehensive about staging the fight because, in the playwright’s stage direction, “It goes through phases,” and while I have…
I have tasked my assistant director on Superior Donuts at Sing Sing with keeping a rehearsal journal; if we were working at a theatre outside the prison’s walls, he might be writing blog posts for the company’s website regarding the progress of rehearsals. He has started to find a nifty balance between a documentary voice…
I was surprised, schooled and humbled by casting Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, which I am directing under the auspices of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. It was not unlike casting a grad school production in the sense that it wasn’t about casting the best man for each role, per se,…
“There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.” – Ansel Adams “”The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.” – Edward Steichen They’re your calling card, actors. They are your ticket through the door. Very often, they are the difference between being seen and…
[This post originally appeared on www.2amtheatre.com, which is a very cool place to appear.] Collation line. Apparatus. Strip of terror. Whatever you call it, it’s that somewhat inscrutable line or two of apparently Enigma code between the text and the annotations, particularly in a modern edition of, say, Shakespeare. It might seem irrelevant or irretrievably…
[This post originally appeared on www.2amtheatre.com, which is a very cool place to appear.] “Theatre inspires me.” “Theatre teaches me about myself, and helps me to understand why other people do what they do.” “Theatre relaxes me.” “Theatre teaches me empathy.” “Everyone in my life was a backstabber or a deceiver. I never knew what…
[This post originally appeared on www.2amtheatre.com, which is a very cool place to appear.] Last week, I coached an actor who had a big audition this past weekend. It was of the ‘bring two contrasting pieces’ variety. She came to me a little later in her process than I would have liked: I didn’t get…
[I wrote this essay as part of my graduate work at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.] “Surely we’re trying to find out at the beginning what we mean by ‘shrew’. Supposing we said ‘shrew’ equals ‘noisy one’. Along comes a man to tame the noisy one. And for almost five acts we never hear from…
[I wrote this essay as part of my graduate work at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.] Harley Granville-Barker’s dramaturgical criticism has transformed our collective perception of Shakespeare’s plays. Full stop. Once he had completed his work as a director and as an analyst, it would no longer be defensible to consider Shakespeare’s plays as literary…