24 stories by "Polly Carl"
As we're beginning to shape the language and vision for the new Center for Theater Commons at Emerson College, we're thinking a lot about what we do and how we deliver it. Every platform we'…
I've started to worry that we are making too much theater without attending to the notion that it's a collaborative art form. For anyone who knows me, they know I talk a lot about Lynette, m…
Exactly a year ago I launched a new journal, HowlRound. This was a dream of mine, one I shared with David Dower in June of 2010 at the TCG Conference in Chicago. I was eating sea bass …
Exactly a year ago I launched a new journal, HowlRound. This was a dream of mine, one I shared with David Dower in June of 2010 at the TCG Conference in Chicago. I was eating sea bass if I r…
But the "dark side" of the internship has taught me not to speak up or make independent decisions, and demanded my gratitude for the privilege of having my intelligence and labor exploited. …
we must be less precious about our theaters and much more visionary about the role that theater can play in making places that can change people's lives.
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But when my role is producer I think I don't actually know where to stand. And I've been doing this for years! Where and how does the producer come into the creative process? When should I s…
Sean Daniels dishes on the role of the associate artistic director, legendary poker player Marc Masterson, and being the sheriff / Interim Artistic Director of Actors Theatre Louisville.
cl…
I could go on, but my point is that, while these pieces were elegantly made, filled with strong images, crisp performances, and precise detailing, none of them were using their design or the…
My observation of how opting out manifests in a lot of theaters results in what I would call the new culture wars. The young and savvy know how to send out the message of the organization. A…
I first started looking at theater through the lens of Horton Hears A Who! at the 2006 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. I was sitting on stage moderating a discussion of Go Home Now by J…
Twenty-five hundred years ago in ancient Athens, theater shaped the body politic. It was a sacred space where commoners and leaders sat side by side and watched their most pressing national …
A few years back I was invited to take part in the launching of a new play development program and was paired with a fresh, young director. I was quite surprised as we talked about my play t…
How can those of us in the theater move beyond "excellence" and make a commitment to "awesomeness."
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It is a truism that all theater is collaborative; the community aspect is a huge reason why so many of us do it. But I often find myself facing the reality that a large segment of the instit…
Sometimes even the American theater gets it right"as it did with August Wilson. Sometimes our community, our industry, overcomes its cowardice, its aversion to the new and unknown, its love …
The cliché goes that one must suffer for their art and, try as one might to bracket this observation as stereotype, it seems the creative process is fraught with emotional pain. As artists,…
I have a theory about the social geekiness of theater artists. I think we act like working in the not-for-profit theater is simply an extension of the rehearsal room. We go to work like we'r…
The theater needs to take you some place and give you an experience, an emotional experience that hopefully is also not mind numbing, but mind stimulating. It doesn't mean it has to be intel…
About five years ago at an LMDA conference held in the Twin Cities, each conference member was, in a sentence, tasked to throw out into the room their "hot button" issue about the field-at-l…
Why is it that we who wish to write this next wave of American theatrical masterpieces, are so desperate to get into grad school that we'll cough up hundreds of dollars in application fees, …
Make it quick. Please. Let's skip the intermission tonight. Shorten this performance if only by a single, dropped line. Let something unexpected happpen. Enter a character to remind me of so…
Jason Loewith Bio Page Margot: This might be a provocative question, but tell me why the American theater is still so New York-centric? Jason: Yes, that does provoke me, because I thi…
If so much about theater in the U.S."including institutional missions and the processes by which we generate work"is antithetical to capitalism, why do so many theater artists and administra…
