Friday, October 11, 2013
“Most of our friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distru…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 11:25AMThursday, October 10, 2013
by Isaac Butler For the third time since this blog's creation, Washington, D.C.'s Theater J has in some way backed down from or reconsidered a controversial play: Plans for the English-langu…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 10:00AMWednesday, October 9, 2013
by Isaac Butler Every work of fictional narrative art takes place within its own world. That world may resemble our world. But it is never our world. It is always the world summoned into bei…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 10:03AMWednesday, September 25, 2013
by Isaac Butler While I was briefly in Minneapolis, I stopped off at my friend Sally's place to record an episode of her web series What Did You Look Up Wikipedia? We has a blast. Hope you d…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 03:17PMTuesday, September 17, 2013
By Isaac Butler That was the question that lingered in my head after I read (most of) this interminable and insufferable piece about whether or not there's too much Shakespeare going on. It …
SOURCE: Parabasis at 11:43AMWednesday, September 4, 2013
By Isaac Butler Over at Howlround, Daniel Jones is yet again beating the drum for more "conservative voices in the theater." It's a well-meaning piece, but I'm not particularly sym…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 08:18AMFriday, August 30, 2013
By Isaac Butler If you care about (or are interested in) the whole Shakespeare Santa Cruz debacle, please do yourself a favor and read director Michael Barakiva's Open Letter to David Yaeger…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 11:59PMBy Isaac Butler Two things I wanted to point out: (1) In the previous post on Shakespeare Santa Cruz, I mentioned the anti-union aspects of the story and noted that the Equity minimum (that …
SOURCE: Parabasis at 03:05PMThursday, August 22, 2013
By Isaac Butler I wanted to briefly expand on the points about separate brows, class, and taste that I was circling around in my post yesterday on The Designated Mourner. Basically, one of t…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 10:33AMThursday, June 13, 2013
By Isaac Butler Another twitter inspired post... Earlier today, a group of us were talking on twitter about the preponderence of revivals of Stoppard's The Real Thing. Indian Ink has never h…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 06:19PMBy Isaac Butler Last night on twitter, Jason Zinoman and Mike Daisey got into an extended conversation about a recent ruling on unpaid internships and its implications for theater. Basically…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 08:43AMMonday, April 22, 2013
By Sam Thielman (Once again, we are happy to have Ad Week's Sam Thielman reviewing for Parabasis, this time he shares his take on "Matilda"): Early on in the April 6 performance of…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 08:22AMWednesday, April 17, 2013
By Isaac Butler First it was discovered and announced yesterday that austerity economics is based on an excel spredsheeting error and now Brooks Brothers is introducing a Great Gatsby collec…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 07:32AMSunday, March 3, 2013
By Isaac Butler Up at the Finanical Times (and not behind their paywall) Matt Trueman has a piece discussing the cultural exchange of plays between the United States and Great Britain, with …
SOURCE: Parabasis at 08:53AMMonday, February 11, 2013
by Isaac Butler Making the rounds of the internet today is this report that less than 25% of roles on New York City stages were played by actors of color from 2011-2012. 99 and I have been s…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 01:37PMFriday, December 28, 2012
by Isaac Butler I'd like to posit here at the outset something that the rest of this post rests on: Attention in theatre is important. Theatre, in fact, requires a different kind of attentio…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 11:33AMThursday, December 27, 2012
Over the holiday, Carol Piersol, the co-founder and long-time artistic director of The Firehouse Theatre Project, abruptly resigned in protest of the even-more-abrupt forced retirement hande…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 10:13AMSaturday, November 17, 2012
By Isaac Butler Something's been nagging at me about that LA Times piece I linked to earlier this week. I have to say, once again, before I delve in here, that I actually think it's a great …
SOURCE: Parabasis at 01:41PMFriday, November 16, 2012
By Mac Rogers (EDITOR'S NOTE: Shortly after I wrote my little bit about whether or not Angels In America could be produced today, playwright and ole china plate Mac Rogers mentioned that he …
SOURCE: Parabasis at 01:47PMTuesday, November 13, 2012
Mike Boehm asks in the LA Times whether it would be possible to create Angels in America today: Can such great voyages still exist? Could five years, more than $2 million in today's currency…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 12:27PMSaturday, September 22, 2012
Earlier today, I wrote a blog post in which I talked about a Village Voice hosted roundtable with playwrights David Henry Hwang, Amy Herzog and Thomas Bradshaw with writer Alexis Soloski. In…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 03:49PMTuesday, July 17, 2012
It turns out that, even with all sorts of moves taken to deflect such a possibility, David Adjmi is now forbidden from allowing subsequent productions of or publishing his play "3C" due to a…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 06:39PMSaturday, June 30, 2012
Frequent commenter Jack Worthing has left a humdinger over on a post last week about Stagegrade. Responding to the idea floated by a friend fo mine that, by aggregating reviews, Stagegrade h…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 09:55AMTuesday, June 19, 2012
As longtime readers of this blog know, over three and a half years ago, 99Seats (then writing at his old blog) floated the notion that someone should make a metacritic for New York theater r…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 02:19PMFriday, June 15, 2012
George beat me to the punch by writing about the latest gambit for a heretofore unknown to me company called Strut & Fret and in particular a producer named David Watson who sent around an e…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 12:52PMThursday, June 7, 2012
A recent New York Times video conversation between film critic A.O. Scott and the garrolous David Carr has sparked a lot of conversation on the internets about the value and necessity of (es…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 01:22PMMonday, May 28, 2012
In the wake of the last Broadway season, New York Magainze's Vulture is doing a big ole roundtable on the future of the musical and what can be done to save it that includes two pieces by...
SOURCE: Parabasis at 06:26AMMonday, May 21, 2012
It's good of the Guthrie to add more women and people of color into their season in the wake of the earlier outcry. That was the right thing to do. Details on the new announcement here. Hope…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 10:57PMWednesday, May 16, 2012
Over at the Hooded Utilitarian, a theatermaker in Florida talks about his experience making the (totally illegal and beloved) "Anne Frank Superstar." You can find his discussion of that show…
SOURCE: Parabasis at 12:49PMSaturday, May 12, 2012
By Isaac Butler Beautiful, passionate, compelling:
SOURCE: Parabasis at 03:30PMThursday, May 10, 2012
Perhaps you've heard of this whole Naomi Schaefer Riley kerfuffle, perhaps you haven't, but basically what happened was this: In a blog run by the Chronicle of Higher Education (the closest …
SOURCE: Parabasis at 11:23AM 
