“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 11:25AMby 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 10:00AMby 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 10:03AMby 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 03:17PMBy 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 11:43AMBy 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 08:18AMBy 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 03:05PMBy 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 10:33AMBy 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 08:43AMBy 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 08:22AMBy 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 07:32AMBy 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 08:53AMby 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 01:37PMby 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 11:33AMOver 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 10:13AMBy 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 01:41PMBy 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 01:47PMMike 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 12:27PMEarlier 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 03:49PMIt 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 06:39PMFrequent 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 09:55AMAs 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 02:19PMGeorge 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 12:52PMA 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 01:22PMIn 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 06:26AMIt'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 10:57PMOver 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 12:49PMBy Isaac Butler Beautiful, passionate, compelling:
SOURCE: Parabasis at 03:30PMPerhaps 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
