“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…
In collaboration with Executive Director Anne Bertram at Theatre Unbound, I curated an evening of short plays to be in conversation with Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, for its’ 100th anniversary; I directed all four pieces. We commissioned Minnesota playwrights Rhiana Yazzie and Maxie Rockymore to write new pieces that picked up Glaspell’s themes, and we capped…
Paula Vogel’s Desdemona cannot outrun Shakespeare’s Othello. She cannot escape her death. Nor, at least as much to Vogel’s point, can any woman escape the restrictions and restraints placed upon her by the men who define her existence. Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief is one kind of feminist retelling of Shakespeare’s story. Vogel locates…
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…
In the first half of 2014, I directed Death of a Salesman at Fishkill Correctional Facility, under the auspices of Rehabilitation Through the Arts. With my incarcerated assistant director, Johnny Hincapie, I wrote the following for the playbill: Willy Loman says, of his sons, “I got a couple of fearless characters,” to which his neighbor,…
I directed Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the men, with their female civilian counterparts, performed the play twice for the population of the facility and once for an invited civilian audience of ~225. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town opened on Broadway on February 4, 1938 — this year, we celebrate the Pulitzer…
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…
Reviews Peter Filichia, TheaterWeek: “When you go theatregoing, take in at least one off-off-Broadway show, for “The Small Stem” has its many charms, too… no theatre does it better than the Westside Repertory — For a while, it appeared that I’d have to stand. And, based on what I saw of their The Voice of…