I want to write a little about how the scale of the way we remember and forget is changing in our culture, and what that might mean for theatre. A few things recently caught my eye: the discovery and subsequently rapid spread of Vivian Maier’s photography. Unknown as a photographer in her lifetime, John Maloof…
Two recent breakthroughs in neuroscience seemed worth reporting in the context of our work in theatre: 1. The over expression of a single gene, NR2B, caused a rat to remember things three times longer than her kin.2. Individuals with a greater expression of a gene that regulates oxytocin score 22.7 higher on tasks that measure…
Adina Levin has a fascinating post building on a theory of Dave Weinberger’s called The End of Information, The Return of Conversation. In it, Adina persuasively argues that Information – who has it, who doesn’t, and how it is distributed – is no longer the primary mover of our culture. Now it is Conversation, through…
We’re in tech and two weeks have past since my last rehearsal report. Here’s what I’ve learned and been thinking about: -The Golden Thread: I’ve always liked this phrase from Steppenwolf, though I’m repurposing it considerably here. The continuity of the audience’s attention, that golden thread, is never unbroken even in the best play; but…
I will try to talk about decoherence, a quantum process, without falling into incoherence, because I think that this process is connected to how our play The Lesser Seductions of History works. (Two caveats: posts like this are hindsight peaks under the hood of a process that is mysterious to me as it instinctually happens;…
Readers of this blog will know I am an avid amateur of science, and unfortunately prone to drawing metaphorical conclusions from theoretical progress. This post will be no exception. Listening to VS Ramachandran’s 2007 TED lecture on what 3 unique kinds of brain damage reveal about the mind, I was especially struck by his work…
Take a second to recover from that pretentious post title, and then take a few more seconds to consider that search engines and social media both represent shifts in how we acquire knowledge, and as such, create new models for how we experience story. Still there? The reason I’ve been thinking about this is because…
(Photo: Deborah Alexander) “The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those around him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, almost indecorous incident…and this was done by that very decorum which he had served his whole life long.” –from The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolostoy “Since you’re…
I had meant to post a link to Arlene Goldbard’s talk at the NET Summit in San Francisco some time ago, but time keeps on slipping, slipping. However, now is still as good a time as any, maybe more so after posting Ellen McLaughlin’s commencement address on the twin births of theatre and democracy. Both…
Recently, my friend (and amazing playwright/actor) Ellen McLaughlin sent me the commencement address she’d written for the students at A.R.T. This address came out of their collaboration on Ajax In Iraq, a harrowing play about the trauma of the Iraq war mirrored through the story of Ajax. The address itself looks at the twin births…
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