by August Schulenburg One of the moments I love in Dog Act is when Vera, pretending (or is she?) to be the deity Wendy, explains to her new Scavenger followers why the Vaudevillian has a protected status in the world of the play: “You are treading on the hem of a great mystery. I will…
In a recent game of chess, I felt the pull of the weird intuitive current that I usually only feel when writing plays. It was mid-game, and all of a sudden I knew which direction my pieces needed to move without actually knowing the exact moves I needed to make. It felt very much like…
In February, I posted about about the dimensions of character in an oh-so-accessible post entitled A String Theory of Character. Simply put, that post explored the idea that richness of character is determined by the directions in which the meaning of a single action can resonate. When a one-dimensional character acts, the meaning of that…
Whose Audience Is It, Anyway? This question is the title of the 5th chapter of Outrageous Fortune, TDF’s new book profiling the the life and times on the new American play. As part of Isaac’s blogging group, I’m writing about Chapters 1, 5, and 6. My thoughts on Chapter 1 are here. I share my…
If the audience is as important as the actors in making a play work, why don’t we spend as much time casting an audience as we do casting a play? A backdrop for that question: This weekend, I was lucky enough to observe the American Voices New Play Insitute at Arena Stage’s convening on black…
Here are my 12 wishes for theatre in the new year: 1. An Online Audience/Artist Community: This is #1 because it makes almost every aspect of #2-12 more possible.Whether it is the Audience Engagement Platform or something out of Project Audience, the goal is to connect audience, artist and institution in a robust arts-centric online…
In this blog post we’re going to fly from quantum mechanics to Darwin to theatre as quickly as possible, using only links and the single engine plane of my mind, so hold on. Ready? One of essential differences between classical and quantum physics is probability. At the incredibly small Planck level, particles are neither here…
Exhibit A: Your partner walks into your bedroom to find you watching porn on your computer. Your partner’s reaction may be pissed off or turned on, or merely indifferent. Exhibit B: Your partner walks into your bedroom to find you watching several people having sex on your bed. In this scenario, indifference seems less likely…
Rereading Harold Bloom’s book on Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, I was struck anew by this passage on page 56 regarding the uniqueness of his characters, excerpted here: “Instead of fitting the role to the play, the post-Marlovian Shakespeare creates personalities who never could be accommodated by their roles: excess marks them not as…
Three interesting things regarding the brain and how we tell stories: The Transcendental Social: A Denmark study that found that praying to God activated regions of the brain associated with talking to a friend, reinforcing a theory linking religious faith to theory of mind, the idea that our capacity to imagine the intentions and thoughts…
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