Once More into the Trapeze, Dear Friends
Staging technologies can be integrated so as to seem, if not inevitable, at least natural. I think of the 2004 Danish movie Strings, performed by marionettes, as a particularly moving example. Well, last weekend I got to see Henry V (on Trapeze) at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, NC. To say that nothing really prepared […]
Radio, plus audience
The Murphey School Radio Show production went quite well, and I garnered lots of kudos for my “Triangle News Updates” script (read by NPR celeb Frank Stasio and novelist Lee Smith) and sponsor jingles. (I could cheerfully make a living at sponsor jingles, I think.) Here I am with emcee and fellow scribbler Georgeann Eubanks, […]
I’ve Seen a Ghost (writer)
Michael Hollinger’s play Ghost-Writer, receiving its regional premier at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, surely had some great tech behind it last night, including especially Matthew Callahan’s sound design. Everything was a little bit of perfect, deliberate and deliberative, yet finally I left feeling unsatisfied. (more…)
The Dance of Anger
Just finished reading Theresa Rebeck’s Spike Heels, a play that really knocked my socks off for being so funny, satisfying, and irritating at the same time. She rewrote the Pygmalion myth–not Shaw necessarily, nor My Fair Lady, but a thing all her own, and a beautiful one. (I reckon this is what artists do, isn’t […]
Plays God, from Whom All Blessings Flow
Well, if there really is a full-time position for the god of playwrighting, it would have to be a job-share arrangement between Melpomene (for tragedy) and Thalia (for comedy). This odd couple sometimes needs an interlocutor–someone deft enough to sound the depths of the long period yet familiar with the iconoclastic bent. Comedy and tragedy, […]