Category: theatre

Visiting isolated villages where many people have never seen a play before, the Nepali troupe called Shilpee does forum theatre, where a script is performed twice; the second time, audience members can stop the action and suggest or act out a different solution to the situation onstage. Says director Ghimire Yubaraj, “It would be easy to be judgmental and disregard the audience members as poor or uneducated, but their ideas can be brilliant.” – The Guardian

“Inclusion is not a final destination – it is something that enables greater creativity and brings greater value. I think it allows us to have different conversations around what that value is and where you might find it.” – The Stage

“Some theater professionals say Equity’s lockdown could effectively kill off the entire industry — an industry that generated about $17 billion in ticket sales in 2017, according to a March study from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts.” – Fort Myers News-Press

“Among the wide staff and course cuts prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple theatre and performance degrees” — among them the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne, considered by many to be the best in the country — “have been closed or suspended indefinitely in recent months. … The peak body of arts educators has warned that this could wipe out future generations of Australian entertainers and disproportionately affect regional students.” – The Guardian

“COVID-19 is the great disruptor, forcing long overdue introspection and reinvention. … Theatres with lovely large venues, lots of seats, and the wherewithal to attract large numbers of people to pay large amounts of money to view virtuosic work may now be at the bottom of the theatrical food chain. Meanwhile, nimble, itinerant companies that don’t rely on ticket sales for viability may surface as the new sages.” – HowlRound

“[Larry] Kramer’s portrait of what a generation of gay men suffered renders America akin to a warzone, where the corpses of victims are refused death certificates and left to collect dust in oversized refuse bags, and funerals become so frequent as to be social events. … The Normal Heart is a primal howl from the frontline, with all of its mud and viscera, expressive of the fact that when your friends are dying all around you, you have no choice but to act urgently.” – BBC

For now, if we can’t be inside the theatre, at least we can be all about it in our reading and our thinking. – Aisle Say

Anne Washburn thought Shipwreck, which she wrote in 2017, wouldn’t be relevant for long. Sadly, that hasn’t been the case; the themes of the Trump administration have been shockingly consistent. But she’s ready never to have to think about the play again. “If Trump is not president in January, I think we won’t want to think about him again for a long time.” – The New York Times

Schreck met Lear backstage at an oratory contest when she was 15, and he had just given a speech called “The Constitution and Me.” Lear, who’s 98: “It’s hard to believe, as we talk now, that people aren’t gathering to go to the theater. That we’re living in a time where all of that is out of our lives for the time being. It hurts me.” – Los Angeles Times