 |
 
A theatrical kaleidoscope exploring the rapidly-changing world we live in, Caryl Churchill's Love and Information depicts a world where non-stop streams of information threaten the very essence of our humanity. Churchill (Cloud 9, Top Girls) reaffirms her continued ability to reinvent herself as a playwright and keep her finger on the pulse of contemporary life, as she illuminates society's fascination with high-speed information using her quintessential wit, candor, nimbleness of language and more than one hundred characters just trying to make sense of what they know. Love and Information will receive its U.S. premiere at New York Theatre Workshop in the 2013-2014 season.
Chekhov's Three Sisters & Woolf's Orlando offers two renderings for the stage by Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play) and includes an introduction by the author. In her stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending, period-hopping novel, Ruhl preserves the novelist's vital ideas and lyrical tone, bringing to the stage the life of an Elizabethan nobleman who's magically transformed into an immortal woman. In her fresh version of Three Sisters, the Anton Chekhov classic of ennui and frustration, Ruhl employs her signature lyricism and elegant understanding of intimacy to reveal the discontent felt by fretful Olga, unhappy Masha and idealistic Irina as they long to leave rural Russia for the ever-alluring Moscow.
4000 Miles & After the Revolution includes two plays by the award-winning author of Belleville (2013 Drama Desk nominee) and The Great God Pan. Known for delicately detailed character studies that subtly balance humor and insight, Amy Herzog has crafted an astute and ironic drama in After the Revolution, a bold and moving portrait of an American family forced to reconcile its thorny and delicate legacy. In her other critical hit and 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist, 4000 Miles, a young man seeks solace from his feisty 91 year-old grandmother in her New York apartment in a quiet rumination on mortality and how two outsiders find their way in today's world.
I Am Shakespeare (Nick Hern Books) is a dramatic exploration of the Shakespeare authorship debate by actor and former artistic director of London's Globe Theatre, Mark Rylance. "For some reason," Rylance notes, "the Shakespeare authorship controversy pierces deep to the heart of identity for some people. It was the extreme reaction of otherwise reasonable people that inspired this play." This provocative play introduces us to four candidates and their respective claims while asking fundamental questions about what makes a genius, and why it all matters anyway.
Humana Festival 2012: The Complete Plays (Playscripts, Inc.), edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie, includes a foreword by Les Waters. The collection, which is comprised of all the plays from the 2012 Festival, includes: Eat Your Heart Out by Courtney Baron; How We Got On by Idris Goodwin; Death Tax by Lucas Hnath; Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards by Greg Kotis; The Veri**on Play by Lisa Kron; The Hour of Feeling by Mona Mansour; Oh, Gastronomy! by Michael Golamco, Carson Kreitzer, Steve Moulds, Tanya Saracho and Matt Schatz. The volume also includes ten-minute plays by Laura Jacqmin, Nicholas C. Pappas and Kyle John Schmidt.
A truly original new play by Catherine Banks, It Is Solved by Walking (Playwrights Canada Press) uses the lens of Wallace Stevens's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" to tell the story of a woman beginning to unearth the blissful and painful memories of her marriage after her former husband's death. Banks, on her Governor General's Literary Award-winning play, notes: "To Wallace Stevens, poetry was the light of the imagination, and so, by the end of the play, I just wanted it to be flooded with light-with that feeling that all the darkness had been defeated."
|
|
|
The seventh play in Wilson's Century Cycle about the African-American experience in the Hill District of Pittsburgh was a 1992 Pulitzer finalist. On May 6, the national finals of the Annual August Wilson Monologue Competition, presented by True Colors Theatre Company, will take place at the August Wilson Theatre in NYC.
|
The most recent work by this 2005 Pulitzer finalist (Eno also received the inaugural Horton Foote Prize for Middletown) was Gnit, an adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt that premiered at the Humana Festival in March.
|
The 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner is the second piece in Hudes's The Elliot Trilogy, which concludes with The Happiest Song Plays Last, currently in the midst of its world premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.
|
A 2008 Pulitzer finalist, this mock documentary exploring Asian identity in America will receive its London premiere at the Park Theatre (opening May 21) and a YouTube adaptation that will receive its first public screening at the 2013 TCG National Conference.
|
|
|
 John Logan
The Tony Award-winning playwright of Red is back on Broadway. And on the West End. And at the Oscars.
The three-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter of such films as Skyfall and Hugo, John Logan returns to the stage with two
new plays on Broadway and in London's West End, respectively.
 I'll Eat You Last (Oberon Books) is a one-woman show about legendary Hollywood super-agent Sue Mengers, whose clients included Barbra Streisand, Cher, Gene Hackman and Mike Nichols. Currently on Broadway, starring Bette Midler, I'll Eat You Last is nominated for the 2013 Drama League award for Outstanding Production of a Broadway or Off-Broadway Play.
 Based on the real individuals that inspired J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Peter and Alice (Oberon Books) tells the story of Alice Liddell Hargreaves meeting Peter Llewelyn Davies at the opening of a Lewis Carroll exhibition in 1932. Currently playing to acclaim in the West End, Judi Dench stars as Alice and Ben Whishaw as Peter in this new play where enchantment and reality collide.
|
|
|
Lynn Nottage and Stephen Adly Guirgis
Thursday, May 9 at 8:15 PM
92Y; New York, NY
Lynn Nottage's Ruined won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and her latest play, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, received its Off-Broadway premiere in 2011 at Second Stage Theatre. She will be joined for a discussion with Stephen Adly Guirgis, author of The Motherf**ker with the Hat, which premiered on Broadway in 2011. The evening will begin with introductions by Kenneth Lonergan and Kate Whoriskey.
For more info: www.92y.org.
Baker, Gibson, Herzog:
New Voices in the American Theatre
June 19 at 7:00 PM
The Greene Space, NYC This next event in the TCG Playwrights in Conversation series -- Baker, Gibson, Herzog: New Voices in the American Theatre -- brings together Annie Baker (The Aliens, Circle Mirror Transformation, The Flick), Melissa James Gibson ([sic], This, What Rhymes with America) and Amy Herzog (4000 Miles, Belleville, The Great God Pan), with each reading selections from her work with a conversation moderated by Village Voice drama critic, Alexis Soloski. The evening will conclude with the playwrights signing copies of their work.
For more info: www.thegreenespace.org.
|
|
|
Each month, a TCG staff member will select a TCG Books title that holds a special meaning -- whether it's a show the staffer performed in, a dog-eared acting resource, a writer that continually inspires or simply a favorite play -- and we will offer a special 50% discount off that title for the month. Currently, Gus Schulenburg, associate director of communications, has selected
Jo Carson's Spider Speculations, and here's why. |
|
|
|
|
|
TCG Titles Currently in Production
May - June
Next to Normal,
TheatreSquared (AK)
Eurydice,
A Noise Within (CA)
Next to Normal,
La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts (CA)
Collected Stories,
American Blues Theater (IL)
Next to Normal,
Southern Rep (LA)
Topdog/Underdog,
Everyman Theatre (MD)
Into the Woods,
McCarter Theatre Center (NJ)
Good People,
Syracuse Stage (NY)
The Designated Mourner,
Theatre for a New Audience (NY)
The Aliens,
Third Rail Repertory (OR)
Race,
The Ensemble Theatre (TX)
The Secret Garden,
Mary Moody Northen Theatre (TX)
Good People,
Vermont Stage Company (VT)
Time Stands Still,
Firehouse Theatre Project (VA)
Company,
Signature Theatre (VA)
The Mystery of Irma Vep, Next Act Theatre (WI)
|
|
Theatrical Visionary Richard Foreman Talks Old Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)
by John Del Signore
The Gothamist
Returning to the theatre after a three-year hiatus making films, playwright/director Richard Foreman discusses his work, including Old Fashioned Prostitutes (currently at the Public Theater in NYC):
"I try to make something that thrills me... I know that a certain number of people don't like my work at all. But they will see something I dare to suggest that's not like anything they've seen before, and they have to be prepared for that."
Familiar Folks
Make Up a Play's
Good People
by Elizabeth Blair
NPR
Listen to David Lindsay-Abaire discuss his play Good People, the most-produced play in America this season, and how it felt when his old friends from Southie showed up when the play was produced at Huntington Theatre Company this past fall.
Signature's The Dance and the Railroad to Play China in May
by BWW News Desk
Broadwayworld
STC's entire production makes the transfer to the Wuzhen Festival, marking the first time that a play by David Henry Hwang has been performed in mainland China. The playwright notes, "I think my dad would be very happy to know that the work of his Chinese American son will be coming home at last."
Once the Musical: How I fell for its honesty
by Enda Walsh
The Guardian
"We don't do musicals in Ireland," Enda Walsh, the Tony Award-winning bookwriter of Once states. "It's still a mystery to me how a song comes together. Story is my thing... The frailty of a three-minute song -- the concise honesty of that expression -- amazes me and turns me into a bucket of jealousy."
Politics Spill Onto Stage in Budapest
by Jonathan Levi
New York Times
The Hungarian National Theatre's production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America may be the biggest hit ever in Hungarian theatre history, yet legislators have severely criticized the NT's artistic director for his political views and his homosexuality, calling for his dismissal.
Conor McPherson:
A flash, an image, a feeling -- the mysterious art of playwriting
By Conor McPherson
Nick Hern Books blog
As Conor McPherson's The Weir receives its first major U.K. (Donmar Warehouse) and U.S. (Irish Repertory Theatre) revivals , the playwright reflects on the creative process: "The best moments are often those tentative notes when the ghosts first present themselves in your mind... The more real you make it, the less magic it retains."
Six Movies that Helped Lead a Playwright from the Cineplex to the Stage
by Erik Piepenburg
New York Times
Annie Baker, who was an avid movie fan while growing up in Amherst, MA, discusses the six films -- including Pulp Fiction and Jules and Jim -- that influenced her most recent play, The Flick, which received this year's Susan Smith Blackburn Prize .
|
|
|
|
|
|
