Teaching What Shakespeare DIDN'T Write
A Dramaturg’s Perspective in the English Classroomby William HutchingsUniversity of Alabama at BirminghamINTRODUCTIONby Robert B. YoungbloodWashington and Lee UniversityBeginning in the ’90s—if memory...
View ArticleBullets Over 'Bullets Over Broadway'
by Kirk Woodward[Kirk Woodward, a frequent guest blogger on ROT, has come through with another interesting contribution. Having caught a performance of Woody Allen’s musical stage adaption of his film...
View Article'A Second Hand Memory' (2004)
[On 29 August, I posted an article by Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, on the Broadway production of the musical stage adaptation of Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, based on his...
View ArticleStaging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental?
(SHALIKO’S GHOSTS, 1975)On Thursday, 6 March 1975, The Shaliko Company began previews of Leonardo Shapiro’s environmental production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, only its third offering, at the New York...
View ArticleTheater That’s Out There!
[I’m always looking out for stories and reports about odd aspects of theater—new ways of doing it or new ways of using it. Here are two brief articles, both from the New York Times, from earlier this...
View ArticleWords with Pictures / Pictures with Words
[In a recent post, “Words and Pictures?” (25 July), I ruminated on the way film writerGerald Di Pegoand director Fred Schepisi of Words and Pictures created a story pitting “words”—that is,...
View Article'The Washington School of Color'
WhenI was recently in Bethesda, Maryland, on a visit to my mother, I saw a short review in the Washington Post about an art show at a commercial gallery right near my mom’s apartment, the Marin-Price...
View ArticleLila Oliver Asher
Back in December 2013 through March this year, the little art gallery at Maplewood Park Place, the residence where my mother lives in Bethesda, Maryland, hosted an exhibit of prints by area...
View Article'Wayside Motor Inn'
I had a busy month of theater in September, starting on Friday, the 12th, in New York City. That’s the evening I saw A. R. Gurney’s The Wayside Motor Inn at the Signature Theatre Company on Theatre...
View Article'Fool for Love' (Round House, Bethesda, MD)
My second production (of four) in September was Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at Bethesda, Maryland’s, Round House Theatre. In town for a visit with my mother, I treated her to a performance of the...
View Article'Belleville' (Studio Theatre, Washington, DC)
For the third (and penultimate) show in my September Series this year, my mother and I went downtown to the Logan Circle area of Washington to catch a matinee of Amy Herzog’s next-to-latest play,...
View Article'A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder'
My last show in the September Series was A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, the profoundly silly Tony-winner for Best Musical in 2014. I took my mom to the Sunday matinee on 28 September at the...
View Article'A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder'
My last show in the September Series was A Gentleman’s Guide To Love & Murder, the profoundly silly Tony-winner for Best Musical in 2014. I took my mom to the Sunday matinee on 28 September at the...
View ArticleBertolt Brecht and the Mental Health Players
by Kirk Woodward [Frequent guest-blogger Kirk Woodward keeps contributing the most fascinating articles on theater and several other topics. This time around, he’s reporting on a group that uses...
View Article'Buffalo Gal' (2008)
[On 1 October, I posted a performance report on A. R. Gurney’s 1977 play, The Wayside Motor Inn, which I’d seen earlier at the Signature Theatre Company. In that report, I noted that the last Gurney...
View ArticleJefferson Mays, Chameleonic Actor
[On 16 October, I posted a performance report on the Broadway production of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, the winner of the 2014 Tony Award for Best Musical. The stand-out performance in...
View ArticleAn Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)
[Twenty-two years ago, after I’d started assisting Philip C. Kolin of the University of Southern Mississippi on several of his projects, he asked me to do an interview for publication in Studies in...
View ArticleTheatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986
[In the mid-1980s, when I was working on a graduate degree in Performance Studies at New York University, I was hired to launch and edit the newsletter for a new organization for stage directors and...
View Article“A Marriage of Stage, Spirituality in Richmond”
by Celia WrenConventional wisdom holds that January can be a challenging time for theaters, with winter weather and post-holiday fatigue tending to put a damper on attendance. But in Richmond, the...
View ArticleBeth Henley and 'Ridiculous Fraud'
by Kirk Woodward[Frequent ROT guest-blogger Kirk Woodward this time contributes a rumination on the dramaturgy of Mississippi-born playwright Beth Henley, focusing in particular on her 2007 play,...
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