Please Don't Start a Theatre Company

Ask yourself whether this is primarily a way to meet your own artistic or career needs. If so, then give yourself a time period in which you will devote at least at much energy to advancing your career in other ways as you were going to spend reading that Nolo Press book on how to incorporate.  Make meetings with larger theaters to see if you can join forces, try to see if you can connect with someone else with a space, an audience, some kind of demand that you can supply.


Rebecca Novick, "Please Don't Start a Theatre Company" (at 2AMt)

13P in the house (in the next room, of course).

13P onstage at Joe's Pub. Ruhl above head standing in way of camera. (Photo: Jim Baldassare)

Are there any young writers that you are particularly interested in? Maybe anybody you've mentored or whose work you just enjoy watching and following?
SARAH RUHL: Yes. I just did a panel yesterday with Annie Baker, who I think is really something. I thought Circle Mirror Transformation was really lovely. And all my colleagues at 13P — a group of writers. There are 13 of us, and we're our own artistic directors of our own plays. The group came about because we were all sick of [the endless development of our plays], so here, we don't just develop our plays but can throw them up without a huge budget. Young Jean Lee is in the group. Rob Handel, Winter Miller, Anne Washburn. I'm really fascinated by everything that that group does.

(Complete interview at Playbill.com)

New CMU School of Drama course

History of Drama:
EARLY O'NEILL
Drama 54382 Mini A2


Fintan O'Toole wrote recently: "Eugene O'Neill's artistic career moves backward. The normal trajectory of a writer is from the particular to the general, from family to society, from the autobiographical to the impersonal, from more or less unmediated realism to experiments in form. O'Neill travels in the opposite direction." The only thing more surprising than the searching experimentation of the early plays is the fact that he found a band of collaborators, the Provincetown Players, who believed in them.

How did O'Neill, literally a child of mainstream theatre, discover a voice based in extreme theatrical conventions and wildly original structures? How was his artistic restlessness entwined with his radical politics?

Plays discussed will include Bound East for Cardiff, Abortion, "Anna Christie", The Hairy Ape, and Desire Under the Elms. We will also look at the crazily ambitious epics The Great God Brown (in which all the characters are masked), Dynamo (in which one of the central characters is a machine), Lazarus Laughed (originally produced with a cast of 177), and Strange Interlude, which serves as a kind of hinge in O'Neill's career. We will view Ric Burns's documentary Eugene O'Neill, the classic Paul Robeson film of The Emperor Jones, and Reds (with Jack Nicholson as O'Neill).