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Issue 103 Spring 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
The Select Equity Group Series on Theater. The Academy Award winner on how acting has helped him perfect his other love— directing for the theater. Just opening: Little Flower of East Orange at LAByrinth Theater Company.
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Winter Miller accompanied Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nicholas Kristof to Chad, interviewing refugees from the Darfur genocide. The result: her stark, highly emotional play In Darfur.
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Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar have compressed dance and theater into their own spectacular hybrid. The Other Here is running at the Dance Theater Workshop through September 29.
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Sarah Ruhl won a MacArthur for The Clean House, which just closed at Lincoln Center in New York. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel sets the stage.
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On the craft of directing and playwriting for a woman’s body, the body politic, and a people’s soul.
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Playwright Theresa Rebeck bring us the most memorable of contemporary visions in her plays. Director and producer Evangeline Morphos speaks with Rebeck about storytelling, Beckett, censorship, and the true nature of laughter.
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Celebrated for his dissection of WASP America, playwright A. R. Gurney talks with colleague Romulus Linney about Gurney’s most popular plays: The Dining Room, Sylvia, The Cocktail Hour. His latest, Indian Blood opens.
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Gabriella De Ferrari speaks with venerated choreographer and BOMB Living Legend William Forsythe just after his extraordinary new production Kammer/Kammer premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
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The celebrated playwright and author converses with theater producer Morphos (behind, most recently, Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell) about his new book of short stories, A Primitive Heart. In all of Rabe’s work, the past haunts his protagonist.
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Edge Theater Company produces unequivocally complex new American plays that bring a provocative mix of dark humor and ardent wit to bear in their exploration of life’s messy contingencies. Carolyn Cantor directed their latest, Orange Flower Water.
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Haitian choreographer and drummer Peniel Guerrier was trained in traditional Haitian and African movement, and his choreographies acknowledge each tradition’s rhythms and rituals while fusing them in unexpected ways.
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Playwright Romulus Linney has been following Laura Linney’s career since its inception—he’s her dad. Fresh from roles in Clint Eastwood’s film Mystic River and Donald Margulies’s play Sight Unseen, the actress is working non-stop.
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New York-based cartoonist Ben Katchor is a recorder of vanished and vanishing places. His latest project, a full-blown musical-theater production titled The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, brings his drawings and writings to the stage.
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Suzanne Farrell was both George Balanchine’s muse and his collaborator in expanding the possibilities of ballet through experimentation and invention. Here Farrell shares stories from the Balanchine years and observations on dance with poet Emily Fragos.
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Screenwriter and playwright Jon Robin Baitz is the author of the award-winning play Three Hotels and the critically acclaimed Mizlansky/Zilinsky. His characters are often towering figures who have dominated the lives of those around them.
>>>Gina Gerson’s latest film, Prey for Rock and Roll, tells the bittersweet story of Clam Dandy, a grrl group based on the ‘80s punk band Lovedog. Preparing for the lead role, Gershon channeled her inner rock goddess.
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Prolific playwright and film director Neil LaBute has a reputation for freezing his characters in moral headlights, exposing their initial reactions to turmoil or devastation and unapologetically documenting the aftermath.
>>>Playwright David Greenspan is a veteran of the downtown New York theater scene. Known as much for his masterful performances onstage as for his sharp, complex and darkly funny plays, Greenspan has concentrated on acting for the past several years.
>>>Christopher Shinn’s play Four received rare praise when it opened last year in New York. Fellow playwright David Greenspan speaks with Shinn about the flawed characters that people his plays and his upcoming tragedy, What Didn’t Happen.
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Award-winning playwrights Romulus Linney and Donald Margulies delighted in trading stories about pitfalls, paths avoided and paths followed—in particular, Margulies’s Dinner with Friends and his upcoming God of Vengeance.
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Wendy Wasserstein has revolutionized contemporary American theater through her complex explorations of the lives of women; for The Heidi Chronicles she was the first female playwright to receive a Tony Award, and since then has become a legend.
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Copenhagen’s success was a surprise to the playwright: why would packed houses care to listen to three actors discussing physics? Copenhagen won the 2000 Tony Award and the Evening Standard Theatre Award in London, both for best play.
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Pulitzer-prize and Tony-award winning playwright Marsha Norman has just completed a run of her acclaimed play Trudy Blue. Painter April Gornik talks with Norman about a misdiagnosis that altered the lives of Norman and her character.
>>>In 1999, Laurie Anderson mounted her operatic take, Stories and Songs from Moby-Dick, on Melville’s classic at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Clifford Ross joined her for tea and conversation over Melville’s very own bible—marginalia included.
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Legendary cross-dresser and co-founder of the theater troupe Split Britches joins playwright Craig Lucas for non-stop laughter and revelations about alternative theater, life, drugs, and the busting of conventions in general.
>>>Joseph Chaikin changed the face of theater with his Open Theater company and collaborations with Sam Shepard. The avant-garde director, who has garnered just about every theater award, speaks with Liz Diamond.
>>>Zoë Wanamaker’s performance in Sophocles’s Electra brought New York audiences to their feet every night in 1999. Catharsis never had it so good. Film director Betty Gordon talks to the legend.
>>>Coco Fusco gets to the bottom of Elevator Repair Service’s avant-garde theater performance style: old movies, exuberant dance and controlled chaos are layered onto such varied sources as Tennessee Williams, Berlitz language tapes and Andy Kaufman.
>>>Ian McKellen’s legendary performances have braced audiences for several decades. En route to L.A. to tackle Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Sir Ian McKellen, actor and activist, has a drink with playwright Scott Mendelsohn.
>>>Fairy tales do come true if playwright Martin McDonagh’s meteoric rise in London, with four productions staged in the same season, is any indication. His plays are Irish tales told with all the violence, humor and magic of a banshee.
>>>Who has a better sense of irony and humor, English or American actors? Victor Garber and Alfred Molina give us an inside view of Yasmina Reza’s play Art and compare notes on how two guys from either side of the Atlantic pursue art in the theater.
>>>Martin Sherman’s Bent played on Broadway in 1979. Since then, the playwright had been living in London. In 1998, with A Madhouse in Goa and the film version of Bent, Sherman returned to the States with a vengeance.
>>>Playwrights Philip Kan Gotanda and David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) compare notes on the East/West conflict, the Third World Movement, and Gotanda’s play, Ballad of Yachiyo.
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Paula Vogel’s play, How I Learned to Drive, has won a slew of awards for its honesty, compassion and profound humor. The actress Mary-Louise Parker, who played the role of L’il Bit, now gets to direct, this time an interview.
>>>Uhry’s first play, Driving Miss Daisy, won a Pulitzer Prize. His Obie-nominated play, The last Night of Ballyhoo, is a poignant and hilarious encounter with an Atlanta family of German-Jewish descent just before the outbreak of WWII.
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The Designated Mourner was the talk of London. Novelist Patrick McGrath does lunch with Wallace Shawn, one of our most endearing playwrights and actors, to discuss his play, now a feature film.
>>>Stephen Haff has directed the American premieres of Canada’s most respected playwright, George Walker. Often compared to Sam Shepard, Walker creates working-class characters who walk the edge of comedy and despair.
>>>Jon Robin Baitz wrote the lead character in The Substance of Fire with Ron Rifkin in mind. The playwright and the actor have an intimate talk about their friendship and life in the theater.
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Scott Elliott’s meteoric rise as a theater director is hailed as the return to the tradition of ensemble acting.
>>>Stuart Cohn examines composer Richard Einhorn’s extraordinary opera Voices of Light, based on the life of Joan of Arc and Carl Dreyer’s classic film.
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Playwright and screenwriter Frank Pugliese and actress Martha Plimpton get real about what it means to make work, get work and keep on living in New York, L.A. and the theater world.
>>>What does illusion, Kafka, Gospel music, Bunraku puppets, Sophocles, the Baroque and a dog named Rose have in common? Lee Breuer. One of our most gifted theatrical directors talks with painter Mike Goldberg.
>>>William Pope. L walks the line between performance and theater; art and political activism. He and Martha Wilson talk about art and racism in America.
>>>Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Adrienne Kennedy talk of the foundation of family and the rage of the imagination.
>>>Ridge Theater walks the line between opera and the avant garde, biting over a hundred sounds a minute. An original look at how they do it.
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