By Isaac Butler The Whale, which will appear at Playwrights Horizons next season, is currently running at Denver Theater Center. This has lead a few outlets (including the Denver Post) to ma…
By Isaac Butler Claudia La Rocco has a new blog post up pushing the ball a little bit further forward in talking about politics, representation and art, specifically w/r/t Seminar on Broadwa…
... Is pretty damn good.
By Isaac Butler I suggest you point your browsers this-a-way to read playwright Cory Hinkle's take on the positives and negatives of the Minneapolis theater scene. Hinkle is much kinder abou…
Whew! Big chunk to talk about today, in a less summary fashion below: The wheels start turning and characters start reappearing in this chunk of The Pale King and we keep returning to the sa…
From The Pale King: I had an idea I'd try and write a play... It would be a totally real, true-to-life play. It would be unperformable, that was part of the point.
This Michael Feingold review of Close Up Space has been making the rounds as he uses the show as an opportunity to pontificate on what's bothering him about The Kids These Days With Their Wh…
Claudia La Rocco has a fantastic piece in the Times today talking about how gender stereotypes are playing out on Broadway, given how many female playwrights are represented on the boards th…
An intrepid reader alerted me to the fact that the Times has, in fact, covered the issues of creeping commercialism in nonprofit theater before with a great deal more nuance and old-school j…
Other than being black, Lydia Diamond and Tyler Perry have nothing in common.
A wonderful mini-essay from Rob Weinert-Kendt on our desire to see "important" plays and what that means: [Shame about entertainment] has a lot to do with what we mean when we say we're ente…
This blog has (mostly) stayed out of the contretemps surrounding Arena Stage's play submission policy (short version: they've stopped taking new play submissions, sort-of, for the long versi…
Two awesome things that are even more awesome together!
I have a feeling this week is going to see me defending Arena Stage quite a bit. Peter Marks pens a piece alledging some kind of shadowy wrongdoing on Arena Stage's part for closing their la…
By Isaac Butler The ultimate purpose of art-- particularly writing-- is not self-expression. Self-expression is, in general, what art is made out of, it's base materials. But like how a wood…
By Isaac Butler Back in July, David Dower wrote a post for HowlRound attemptin to answer a question Hal Brooks asked him at a panel they served on. The question was "how"-- given t…
By Isaac Butler Both The New York Times and Time Out New York reviews mention that the reivews are written in accordance to a strict "No Spoliers" policy instituted by the producer…
Clearly something in that Isherwood column struck a nerve with a lot of people other than me. Now in addition to a pseudonymous letter writer, we have a Tumblr dedicated to the idea of Isher…
First off, let me just tip the ole hat to Rob Weinert-Kendt, who has a good two-parter on Isherwood's blog post from yesterday. In part one, he wraps up some of the response to Isherwood and…
By Isaac Butler I want you to imagine for a moment that you are a theater reviewer tasked with regularly reviewing an artist whose work you don't respond to. Worse, you actually pretty much …
By Isaac Butler There are few people more steeped in Stevejobsiana and less in the tank for him than Mike Daisey. It's not that Daisey's a hater, no, it's just that Mike wants to evaluate Jo…
By Isaac Butler Stuart Jeffries writes about abandoning the new UK revivial of Top Girls at intermission for the Guardian. It's a fun piece, and it's bracing (although not particularly rewar…
The inimitable Polly Carl has penned a paean to the Power of Yes today for her journal HowlRound and twitter and the theatroverse are positively stoked: Yes feels like too big a risk. If we …
By Isaac Butler Of the top ten most produced shows on TCG member theater stages, only one wasn't seen on Broadway within the last five years. This, to me, shows once again how conservatizing…
By Isaac Butler The Lanford Wilson Issue: I introduce the Issue here. Jannie Wolff discusses beauty, empathy, Lanford's work and knowing him as an intern at Circle Rep here. Carl Forsman and…