One of the ideas I had for starting this blog was having a place to provide updates about my work. As it often happens there’s a long lull of not much to report followed by a burst of new developments. Burst number one — the long-awaited one-act version of Radium Girls is now […]
Sometimes you hear The Call and are compelled to your destiny. And sometimes you hear The Call and hang up on it —because the message sounds garbled and the Voice of Destiny bears a strange resemblance to Phyllis Diller the morning after she went through all the cheap champagne alone. That’s pretty much […]
Theatre J hosted a town hall meeting for playwrights on Tuesday night (June 25) and the room was bursting with amazing stories of a D.C. theatre scene that is about to break out as a worthy rival to Chicago, Minneapolis and even—yes, they said it—New York. Among the most interesting reports from the field […]
Caridad Svich invited me to participate in the Artistic Innovation blog salon that she is curating for the 2013 TCG National Conference: Learn Do Teach in Dallas). The post below is cross-posted from the salon and can be found at the TCG Circle here. Playwright Caridad Svich asks how a path can be made for innovative theatre artists. That’s a […]
On Saturday Feb. 23 I crossed something off my bucket list–and was a keynote speaker at the 2013 Theatre in Our Schools Mini-Conference in Richmond, a project of the Virginia membership of the American Alliance for Theatre & Education. Organizer Steven Barker invited me to speak on the topic of incorporating the arts into other […]
I confess to a panic attack the other day when I realized that not only am I behind on the promised scene, I cannot tamp down my anxiety to write it. The excuses are piling up—production, yadda, hurricane, yadda, production, yadda, nostalgia tour, yadda, yadda, yadda—and now the latest: a nasty flu, which I soothed […]
Having seen the second production of Salvation Road—third if you count the original one-act at the Philly Fringe in 2009—I have now received the kind of vindication every playwright craves: I know my script stands up. With two different casts in two radically different incarnations—David Montgomery’s production at New York University featured original […]
Salvation Road opens tonight with a cast of thousands …. It has been a long process developing this play, a comic drama about a boy searching for a sister who has disappeared into a fundamentalist cult. Originally a one-act for three actors (hated that version) the play underwent a massive rewrite in the […]
One of the pleasures of stealing away to a theatre conference such as the American Alliance for Theatre in Education’s (AATE) gathering in Lexington, Ky., last week is meeting theatre artists with a distinctly different view of process. Such an artist is Steven Barker, who currently teaches at Camp LeJeune High School in North […]
Working on a new play is always a challenge in isolation. After successive drafts, you reach a point where you lose the path forward—or worse, where the path splits into a dozen different trails and there is no clear indication which one is the right one to follow. That is the point, for me, when […]
