American Theatre Magazine's Annual
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Performance Measurement Report
THEATER SUBDISTRICT COUNCIL, LDC Performance Measurement Report I. How efficiently or effectively has TSC been in making grants which serve to enhance the long- term viability of Broadway through the production of plays and small musicals? The TSC awards grants, among other purposes, to facilitate the production of plays and musicals. The current round, awarding over $2.16 million in grants for programs, which have or are expected to result in the production of plays or musicals, have been awarded to the following organizations: • Classical Theatre of Harlem $100,000 (2009) Evaluation: A TSC grant enabled the Classical Theatre of Harlem to produce Archbishop Supreme Tartuffe at the Harold Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row in Summer 2009. This critically acclaimed reworking of Moliere’s Tartuffe directed by Alfred Preisser and featuring Andre DeShields was an audience success. The play was part of the theater’s Project Classics initiative, designed to bring theater to an underserved and under-represented segment of the community. Marketing efforts successfully targeted audiences from north of 116th Street through deep discounts and other ticket offers. • Fractured Atlas $200,000 (2010) Evaluation: Fractured Atlas used TSC support for a three-part program to improve the efficiency of rehearsal and performance space options, gather useful workspace data, and increase the availability of affordable workspace for performing arts groups in the five boroughs. Software designers created a space reservation calendar and rental engine; software for an enhanced data-reporting template was written, and strategies to increase the use of nontraditional spaces for rehearsal and performance were developed. • Lark Play Development Center $160,000 (2010) Evaluation: Lark selected four New York playwrights from diverse backgrounds to participate in a new fellowship program: Joshua Allen, Thomas Bradshaw, Bekah Brunstetter, and Andrea Thome. -
Resume to Upload to Resume Page
MARTIN DAMIEN WILKINS [email protected] DIRECTOR/PRODUCER www.martindwilkins.com SUMMARY OF ACHIEVEMENTS: • An accomplished, freelance theater director and artistic producer with more than a decade of experience directing, producing and developing work for the stage nationally, including prominent theater institutions in New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Sacramento and Charlotte. • Collaborations with emerging and award-winning playwrights on workshops and readings of their work have yielded productions throughout the country and in London. They include Katori Hall’s Olivier Award-winning play, The Mountaintop, and Idris Goodwin’s How We Got On. • Honors include being selected from a pool of more than 350 applicants as one of five members of the inaugural class of National Directors Fellows, a five-year initiative to provide professional development to 25 early career directors and advance new play development and production around the country. DIRECTING: PRODUCTIONS Angels in America: Parts 1 & 2 Tony Kushner Actor’s Express (Upcoming 2018) Co-Directed with Freddie Ashley Father Comes Home from the Wars Suzan-Lori Parks Actor’s Express (2017) (Parts 1, 2 & 3) Bootycandy Robert O’Hara Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte (2017) Fetch Clay, Make Man Will Power Hattiloo Theatre (2017) Satchmo at the Waldorf Terry Teachout B Street Theatre (2016) Coming at You from the Cockpit Edith Freni Actor’s Express Intern Showcase (2016) Stick Fly Lydia R. Diamond Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte (2015) African Americans Jocelyn Bioh Howard University -
Play Guide for the Great Society
Written by Robert Schenkkan Directed by Ron Pel us o O cto ber 6 —2 8 , 2 0 1 8 P L AY G UI D E THE PLAY It is 1965 and President Lyndon Baines Johnson is at a critical point in his presidency. He is launching The Great Society, an ambitious set of social programs that would increase funds for health care, education and poverty. He also wants to pass the Voting Rights Act, an act that would secure voting rights for minority communities across the country. At each step, Johnson faces resistance. Conservatives like Senator Everett Dirksen are pushing for budget cuts on his social welfare programs. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, is losing patience at the lack of progress on voting rights. With rising discrimination against black communities in America, King takes matters into his own hands, organizing a civil rights protest in Selma, Alabama. Outside the U.S., the crisis in Vietnam is escalating. When the Viet Cong attacks a Marine support base, Johnson is faced with a difficult decision: should he deploy more American troops to fight overseas or should he focus on fighting the war on poverty within the U.S.? Time is ticking and the next presidential election is around the corner. In an America divided by civil rights protests and the anguish of Vietnam War, can Johnson pave the way for a great society? Page 2 MEET THE PLAYWIRGHT — ROBERT SCHENKKAN Robert Schenkkan was born in North Carolina and raised in Texas. He studied theater and discovered his passion for creating original worlds through playwrighting. -
Environmental History, Ecocriticism and the Kentucky Cycle Theresa J
Fall 1999 159 Frontiers: Environmental History, Ecocriticism and The Kentucky Cycle Theresa J- May We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect... That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten. Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 19491 In a 1994 issue of Theater, editor Erika Munk laments that, "our play• wrights' silence on the environment as a political issue and our critics' neglect o1 the ecological implications of theatrical form are rather astonishing." She urges theater practice and theater studies toward a new "ecological" frontier: "[cjritics and scholars who want to investigate the way ecologies—physical, perceptual, imagined—shape dramatic forms stand at the edge of a vast, open field." Ecocriticism presents itself, she says, "like the days of contemporary feminism: everything cries out for reinterpretation."2 Robert Schenkkan's The Kentucky Cycle takes up Erika Munk's challenge to put the implications of the environmental crisis and the philosophical reaches of ecological theory on the regional and Broad• way stage. While critical response to The Kentucky Cycle yields a cultural harvest almost as rich as the one Schenkkan reaped from the history of the Cumberland plateau, none of that criticism, ironically, has addressed the play's "ecological" project. Robert Schenkkan hoped The Kentucky Cycle would expose an "Ameri• can mythos" that ravages both landscape and human life.3 In California, The Ken• tucky Cycle appeared to have struck gold. -
Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} the Great Society by Robert Schenkkan the Great Society
Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Great Society by Robert Schenkkan The Great Society. Playwright Robert Schenkkan returns to the Great White Way with this second play, celebrating LBJ's presidential legacy. This new work accompanies Schenkkan’s Tony Award-winning All The Way , which saw Bryan Cranston win his first Tony for "Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play" back in 2014 for his performance as the 1960s American president. All The Way played the Neil Simon Theatre from February 10 through June 29, 2014, taking home the Tony Award for “Best Play.” This production actually marks Schenkkan’s third Broadway outing as a playwright. In the fall of 1993, he made his Broadway debut as a writer with The Kentucky Cycle , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 and led to his first Tony Award nomination for “Best Play” in 1994. Taking the reins from Bryan Cranston and carrying the LBJ baton into The Great Society , Brian Cox is also no stranger to the Great White Way, of course. Having made his Broadway debut back in February 1985 in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude , he has gone on to make waves in the theatre with his performances in Yasmina Reza’s Art in 1998, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll in 2007, and Jason Miller’s That Championship Season in 2011. A native of Dundee, Scotland, he also boasts a formidable résumé, when it comes to the UK stage. A two-time Olivier Award winner in his own right, he has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, alongside other esteemed establishments around the UK. -
At Play 2017 FINAL.Indd
ISSUE 18 SPRING www.dramatists.com 2017 From Clifford Odets to Tennessee Williams to Stephen Karam, Lillian Hellman to Paula Vogel to Katori Hall, Kaufman & Hart and Edna Ferber to Wendy Wasserstein to Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, DPS has been the proud first publisher of plays by writers who went on to define, and redefine, the American theater. ounded as essentially a cooperative Though their subjects range from slaughterhouse Fbetween the Dramatists Guild and playwriting employees to the titans of global finance to families agents, the Play Service's commitment to nurturing in the not-so-distant future, each of these plays new talent is foregrounded in the company's challenges readers and audiences to consider mission. While we are ever proud to represent what theater, that most humanist of mediums, can plays honored by Tony Awards® (including all four be. And, in an embarrassment of riches, the 15 of the 2017 Best Play Tony nominees) and Pulitzer writers featured herein are only a fraction of the Prizes, we are equally proud to count among our individuals whose first plays or early-stage career writers every year the fresh faces whose work efforts DPS publishes. may not yet be nationally known but whose talent n the back of this newsletter you'll find an is immense. The plays highlighted by these 15 Ooverview of new partnerships between emerging writers published in 2016-2017 are DPS and play development organizations, who do astonishing, invigorating explorations of identity, the critical daily work of providing resources for history, consciousness, politics, and language. -
In Kindergarten with the Author of WIT
re p resenting the american theatre DRAMATISTS by publishing and licensing the works PLAY SERVICE, INC. of new and established playwrights. atpIssuel 4,aFall 1999 y In Kindergarten with the Author of WIT aggie Edson — the celebrated playwright who is so far Off- Broadway, she’s below the Mason-Dixon line — is performing a Mdaily ritual known as Wiggle Down. " Tapping my toe, just tapping my toe" she sings, to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain," before a crowd of kindergarteners at a downtown elementary school in Atlanta. "What a glorious feeling, I'm — nodding my head!" The kids gleefully tap their toes and nod themselves silly as they sing along. "Give yourselves a standing O!" Ms. Edson cries, when the song ends. Her charges scramble to their feet and clap their hands, sending their arms arcing overhead in a giant "O." This willowy 37-year-old woman with tousled brown hair and a big grin couldn't seem more different from Dr. Vivian Bearing, the brilliant, emotionally remote English professor who is the heroine of her play WIT — which has won such unanimous critical acclaim in its small Off- Broadway production. Vivian is a 50-year-old scholar who has devoted her life to the study of John Donne's "Holy Sonnets." When we meet her, she is dying of very placement of a comma crystallizing mysteries of life and death for ovarian cancer. Bald from chemotherapy, she makes her entrance clad Vivian and her audience. For this feat, one critic demanded that Ms. Edson in a hospital gown, dragging an IV pole. -
History of Arena Stage: Where American Theater Lives the Mead Center for American Theater
History oF arena Stage: Where American Theater Lives The Mead Center for American Theater Arena Stage was founded August 16, 1950 in Washington, D.C. by Zelda Fichandler, Tom Fichandler and Edward Mangum. Over 65 years later, Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, under the leadership of Artistic Director Molly Smith and Executive Director Edgar Dobie, is a national center dedicated to American voices and artists. Arena Stage produces plays of all that is passionate, profound, deep and dangerous in the American spirit, and presents diverse and ground- breaking work from some of the best artists around the country. Arena Stage is committed to commissioning and developing new plays and impacts the lives of over 10,000 students annually through its work in community engagement. Now in its seventh decade, Arena Stage serves a diverse annual audience of more than 300,000. When Zelda and Tom Fichandler and a handful of friends started Arena Stage, there was no regional theater movement in the United States or resources to support a theater committed to providing quality work for its community. It took time for the idea of regional theater to take root, but the Fichandlers, together with the people of the nation’s capital, worked patiently to build the fledgling theater into a diverse, multifaceted, internationally renowned institution. Likewise, there were no professional theaters operating in Washington, D.C. in 1950. Actors’ Equity rules did not permit its members to perform in segregated houses, and neither The National nor Ford’s Theatre was integrated. From its inception, Arena opened its doors to anyone who wished to buy a ticket, becoming the first integrated theater in this city. -
<I>Twenty-First Century American Playwrights</I>
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) https://jadt.commons.gc.cuny.edu Twenty-First Century American Playwrights Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. In 1982, Christopher Bigsby penned A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. What was originally planned as a single volume expanded to three, with volume 2 being released in 1984 and Volume 3 in 1985. Although Bigsby, a literary analyst and novelist with more than 50 books to his credit, hails from Britain, he is drawn to American playwrights because of their “stylistic inventiveness…sexual directness…[and] characters ranged across the social spectrum in a way that for long, and for the most part, had not been true of the English theatre” (1). This admiration brought Bigsby’s research across the millennium line to give us his latest offering Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. What Bigsby provides is an in-depth survey of nine writers who entered the American theatre landscape during the past twenty years, including chapters on Annie Baker, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Katori Hall, Amy Herzog, Tracy Letts, David Lindsay-Abaire, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, and Naomi Wallace. While these playwrights vary in the manner they work and styles of creative output, what places them together in this volume “is the sense that theatre has a unique ability to engage with audiences in search of some insight into the way we live…to witness how words become manifest, how artifice can, at its best, be the midwife of truth” (5). This explanation, however vague, does little to provide a concrete rubric for why these dramatists were included over others. -
The Women's Voices Theater Festival
STUDY GUIDE In the fall of 2015, more than 50 professional theaters in Washington, D.C. are each producing at least one world premiere play by a female playwright. The Women’s Voices Theater Festival is history’s largest collaboration of theater companies working simultaneously to produce original works by female writers. CONSIDER WHY A WOMEN’S VOICES THEATER FESTIVAL? • Why is it important If someone asked you to quickly name three playwrights, who would they be? for artists of diverse backgrounds to have Shakespeare likely tops your list. Perhaps you remember Arthur Miller, Tennessee their work seen by Williams or August Wilson. Sophocles, Molière, Marlowe, Ibsen, Chekov, Shaw, O’Neill — these are among the most famous Western playwrights. They are central audiences? to the dramatic canon. A “canon” is an authoritative list of important works — think of it as the official “Top 40” of dramatic literature. Their plays are the most likely • What is the impact of to be seen onstage and assigned in schools. seeing a play that you can connect to your own A large group is often missing from the canon, professional stages, traditional experience? reading lists and your education in theater: women playwrights. Plays by women are as important, artistic, rigorous, compelling and producible as • How would you react plays by men. They are also plentiful. Women’s perspectives are also key to more if you knew that you fully understanding our world. and the playwright of According to a recent Washington Post article, surveys say that D.C. audiences a production you were are 61 percent female and Broadway audiences are 68 percent female. -
CATF-Program 2015.Pdf
2015 World Builders by Johnna Adams • Everything You Touch by Sheila Callaghan • On Clover Road by Steven Dietz • WE ARE PUSSY RIOT by Barbara Hammond • The Full Catastrophe by Michael Weller 2014 The Ashes Under Gait City by Christina Anderson • One Night by Charles Fuller • Uncanny Valley by Thomas Gibbons • North of the Boulevard by Bruce Graham • Dead and Breathing by Chisa Hutchinson 2013 A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisbile World by Liz Duffy Adams • Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want to Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them by Jon Kern • H2O by Jane Martin • Heartless by Sam Shepard • Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah by Mark St. Germain 2012 Gidion’s Knot by Johnna Adams • The Exceptionals by Bob Clyman • In a Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil LaBute • Captors by Evan M. Wiener • Barcelona by Bess Wohl 2011 From Prague by Kyle Bradstreet • Race by David Mamet • Ages of the Moon by Sam Shepard • We Are Here by Tracy Thorne • The Insurgents by Lucy Thurber 2010 The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show by Max Baker & Lee Sellars • Lidless by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig • Breadcrumbs by Jennifer Haley • Inana by Michele Lowe • White People by J.T. Rogers 2009 The History of Light by Eisa Davis • Yankee Tavern by Steven Dietz • Dear Sara Jane by Victor Lodato • Fifty Words by Michael Weller • Farragut North by Beau Willimon 2008 Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond • A View of the Harbor by Richard Dresser • Pig Farm by Greg Kotis • WRECKS by Neil LaBute • The Overwhelming by J.T. -
Past TRC Productions
TRINITY REPERTORY COMPANY 201 Washington Street, Providence, RI 02903 PAST PRODUCTIONS Counting seasons: In the official count of seasons (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), it may have been decided in 1970 to not count 1963-64 as the first season. Or a mistake in a brochure may have never been caught until it was much too late. Subscription brochures for the 1969-70 Season and 1970-71 Season both refer to the upcoming season as the 7th Season. Brochures for the 1967-68 and 1968-69 Seasons refer to them respectively as the 5th and 6th Seasons, but a brochure for the 1965-66 Season refers to that as the “second full season.” During the 1963-64 Season, Trinity Players on the Square was not a fully professional company and there were no actual performances in 1963. 1964-65 was the first full season with Adrian Hall as artistic director and Equity contracts. The counting of the seasons proceeded consecutively from the second 7th Season. *World Premiere Production **American Premiere Production ***Pre-Season Productions + Booked-In, Rental, Competition Winner, Special Presentation, or Co-Production 1963-1964 Season • 1st Director Playwright Designers The Hostage Ira Zuckerman Brendan Behan Sets: Sandra Tilles Costumes: Joyce Anderson Lighting: Thomas J. Aubin Sound: Vincent Vessela The House of Bernarda Alba Ira Zuckerman Frederico Garcia Lorca Sets: Morris Nathanson Costumes: Sue Neely Lighting: Thomas J. Aubin and Catie Calvo Sound: Bud Peltier American Dream Adrian Hall Edward Albee Sets: Richard L. Peterson and Carl Ravenal Costumes: Edith Brown Lighting: Thomas J. Aubin and Catie Calvo Sound: Sandra Tilles Orpheus Descending Adrian Hall Tennessee Williams Costumes: Edith Brown Lighting: Thomas J.