Friday, March 16, 2018
The news that Chicago is losing the American Theater Company–here’s the Chicago Tribune story–is stunning. Artistic Director Will Davis was let go, and the board has decide…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 04:23PMTuesday, November 28, 2017
Another Giving Tuesday, another day spent deleting emails unread and maybe unsubscribing from the places that send more than two in a day. And I work in the arts. But every year, it’s the …
SOURCE: 2AMT at 04:24PMWednesday, August 9, 2017
Let’s posit two categories of theatre. To be dramatic (that’s what we do, right?) we’ll call the first category “Sit-down-and-shut-up” theatre, meaning theatrical productions in wh…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 05:36PMThursday, March 23, 2017
I often feel alone. My life experiences and the demands of my day-to-day are so specific to my life producing and performing in small budget theatre that it often feels that outside of rehea…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 12:48AMTuesday, February 14, 2017
This past weekend on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Scott Simon talked with David Marcus, a senior contributor to The Federalist and the artistic director of a theater company in New York City…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 04:03PMThere is good conversation and bad conversation. We’ve all been party to both. We’ve all had those talks that go late into the night and feel like you’re solving the world. Additive co…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 04:03PMFriday, February 3, 2017
It’s no accident that ancient and renaissance playwrights were drawn to write plays about heroes and nobles. Not only were they aspirational figures whose lives would be ripe for curiosity…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 11:32AMWednesday, June 29, 2016
I’m almost as busy as you are. In that rush of “on to the next thing” I currently get most of my news on the fly from my Twitter and Facebook feeds. On a quick scroll throu…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 02:06AMFriday, June 17, 2016
After careful consideration and conversation, it’s time. The 2amt hashtag is shifting to #2thtr. This week’s events and hashtag fever have been catalysts, but we’ve been mo…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 03:52PMAbout six and a half years ago, we started the #2amt hashtag on Twitter. If you’re on this site, you know it’s a conversation about theatre–performance, production, promoti…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 12:45PMMonday, June 13, 2016
The Chicago Reader published as careful and deliberate a piece of investigative journalism covering the arts as I can ever remember reading. In the piece Amy Leavitt and Chris Piatt laid o…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 02:28AMTuesday, March 1, 2016
Effort. Webster’s defines effort as “work done by the mind or body: energy used to do something.” I spend more time than you can imagine thinking about, analyzing, and trying to minimi…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 10:12AMThursday, February 11, 2016
Although I was raised in the Catholic Church, I am not a practicing Catholic. The few times I have been in a house of worship in the past two decades involved either a wedding, a christening…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 03:42PMWednesday, January 20, 2016
This post may skate on the edge of self-promotion, because I am going to be drawing attention to a brief e-book I’ve co-authored; but I have a good story to tell about how this book is an …
SOURCE: 2AMT at 11:24AMWednesday, September 23, 2015
I spent all day absorbing what people said about New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players’s now cancelled performance of The Mikado at NYU’s Skirball Center. I read blog posts, groaned at c…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 12:37PMWednesday, September 16, 2015
Why the Mikado is a No-No, and Other Painfully Obvious Realities About Race Representation in the Theatre Nearly 4 years ago, as a fresh face on New York’s scene, I attended the inaugu…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 01:50PMA roundup of articles about the current and recent productions of The Mikado and the controversy surrounding them. Leah Nanako Winkler from Sept 2015: The Mikado in Yellowface is Coming to t…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 01:50PMMonday, September 14, 2015
I have long had an interest in arts groups using transitioning commercial and retail spaces to alleviate space crunch. On hearing that Matt Cosper and his Charlotte-based ensemble XOXO are t…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 07:32AMMonday, August 24, 2015
We are not doing a great job of teaching our actors to care for their instruments properly. This is clear to me when I read (regularly) about an actor in a particularly difficult physical ro…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 11:13AMTuesday, August 18, 2015
I have long had an interest in arts groups using transitioning commercial and retail spaces to alleviate space crunch. On hearing that Matt Cosper and his Charlotte-based ensemble XOXO are t…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 03:18PMThursday, August 6, 2015
There is a mental habit formed early in the development of the modern American psyche: the immediate and perpetual recentering of yourself as the underdog. Our prevailing American narrative…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 12:31PMTuesday, June 2, 2015
I am not a keynote speaker for TCG this year, but if I were, this is what I would say. The Theatre Communication Group national conference this year is called Game Change. As both a…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 02:56PMWednesday, April 22, 2015
I’m fascinated by observing chefs interacting with food. Unlike most folks who create they can’t avoid their work outside their “studio”, they need to eat after all. …
SOURCE: 2AMT at 05:46PMThursday, March 26, 2015
I’m in Kannsas City for a TCG gathering about audience engagement that has sort of morphed into a gathering about working across institutional lines. Now this is a topic I’m thor…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 07:14AMThursday, March 19, 2015
Let’s see if I have this straight. Women write about bias–unconscious or not–in an industry, they set up a group to support fellow women in said industry, men immediately c…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 11:50AMWednesday, March 4, 2015
I would wager that, when faced with a show you don’t know, you do something similar to the math I do. You cobble together the basic geometry of the show from the elements you do know.�…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 11:30AMTuesday, February 17, 2015
Actors are not alone in needing to manage nerves, but compared to most professions, yours is unique in terms of how frequently you are placed in nerve inducing situations in order to get the…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 09:56PMWednesday, January 21, 2015
Earlier this month, the Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA) held its 25th annual conference, hosted by the gracious staff at San Francisco Shakespeare Festival; the event was comprised o…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 01:37PMThursday, October 30, 2014
The 2014-15 theatre season is underway, causing me, desperately, to try not to fret over photos of strangers in first table reads as they begin to train their instruments to say those words …
SOURCE: 2AMT at 12:09PMTuesday, October 28, 2014
You don’t have to program it during the holidays to sell a bunch of easy tickets. That tactic works for lots of companies though, which made me wonder why. With anything as big as A Christ…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 02:59PMFriday, October 10, 2014
SOLVING THE PROBLEM AND REPAIRING THE DAMAGE As a Pilates teacher/movement consultant who specializes in how clients move/behave within their own environments, I spend a lot of time out of m…
SOURCE: 2AMT at 04:17PM