159 stories from Parabasis
By Isaac Butler Up on Howlround today, you'll find this lengthy piece about innovation in arts business practices in anticipation of the "National Innovation Summit for Arts & Cultu…
"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 distrust…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
By 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 …
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…
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…
By 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…
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…
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…
One of the glorious problems that keeps a play from a second life as a book of poetry (or most plays; I'll give you the Greeks and the odd, rule-proving exception like Ntozake Shange) is the…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
