Current Issue

Theater

In Conversation

He said...SHE SAID WaxFactory reconstructs Duras with Jason Grote

by Jason Grote

Theater

Playwright Jason Grote had an e-mail conversation with performer Erika Latta and director Ivan Talijancic, the artistic co-directors of the international theater company WaxFactory, and playwright Simona Semenic, production dramaturg and executive producer of …SHE SAID. Created in cooperation with Mini teater Ljubljana (a Slovenian NGO producing contemporary theater and puppet theater) …SHE SAID will be performed at the Brooklyn Lyceum from November 3-13, as part of the Act French Festival; for more information, visit www.actfrench.org and/or www.brooklynlyceum.org.

Our Own New Deal: Planting Roots for American Theater

by Zachary R. Mannheimer

Theater

First things first: the talent must move. We must attract it by offering a drive and sense of audacity that is not true of the theater they have known…If they don’t like what we have done, let them create their own theaters— there are places all over the country ripe for them. But let them not wait for the system to accommodate them when, after making their rounds, they are already deformed.

Excerpts from: Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays inspired by the Greeks edited

Theater

There is no such thing as an original play. None of the classical Greek plays are original—they are all based on earlier plays or poems or myths. And none of Shakespeare’s plays is original—they are all taken from earlier work. As You Like It is taken from a novel by Thomas Lodge published just ten years before Shakespeare put on his play without attribution or acknowledgement. Chunks of Antony and Cleopatra are taken verbatim, and, to be sure, without apology, from a contemporary translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Brecht’s Caucasion Chalk Circle is taken from a play by Klabund, on which Brecht served as dramaturg in 1926; and Klabund had taken his play from an early Chinese play. Sometimes playwrights steal stories, conversations, and dreams and intimate revelations from their friends and lovers and call this original…