Recently added articles from TheatreForum:
EDITOR'S NOTE
Jan 01, 2009; ... With Issue #34 we present our usual vibrant celebration of eclecticism with articles and plays by authors and subjects from around the world. U.S. writer Jeff Johnson has written about "Emerging Themes and New Aesthetics in Contemporary Finnish Theatre." David Bradby, Professor Emeritus of Royal ...
Emerging Themes and New Aesthetics in Contemporary Finnish Theatre
Jan 01, 2009; ... Two new plays that opened this winter in Helsinki illustrate themes prevalent "on the street" in Finland today. Heikki Kujanpää's Birth of a Salesman (Kauppamatkustajan syntymä) places an asterisk on the "success" of the liberal capitalism-adopted by the Finnish government after the collapse of ...
MICHEL VINAVER'S PAR-DESSUS BORD (OVERBOARD) IN 2008
Jan 01, 2009; ... A recent article in TheatreForum by Jim Carmody explored the unusual rehearsal methods employed by Michel Vinaver, whose epic play Par-dessus bord (Overboard) has proved to be one of the major events of the 2007-08 theatre season in France. In his article, Carmody set out the reasons why Vinaver ...
THE FRANKLY IMPOSSIBLE DRAMA OF MAKSYM KUROCHKIN
Jan 01, 2009; ... It was a long time ago, in another era, when Maksym Kurochkin said something to me that stuck. I was asking about the runaway hit he was enjoying with a wild and woolly play called Kitchen, in which ancient Nibelungs morphed into modern Russian cooks before the whole lot was overtaken by Attila ...
REPRESS AND EXCITE
Jan 01, 2009; ... VISITING FISH An apartment so small it doesn't matter where the action takes place in it. GOOD ACTOR: I hate that shithead. I don't like him and I don't want to see him. And you want me to make speeches in his honor. FISH: Please! GOOD ACTOR: Why are you asking? ...
SOME TRACES OF KATIE MITCHELL
Jan 01, 2009; ... Mixing new technology with live performance can have its drawbacks. In July 2008, the first preview of director Katie Mitchell's newly devised piece, ...some trace of her, at the National Theatre in London was cancelled due to "technical difficulties": the cast was not ready to perform the ...
The Truth Itself is a Kind of Bias: an Introduction to The Rant
Jan 01, 2009; ... For eight years, I worked at New York City's official agency for investigating police misconduct. I began as an investigator, looking into allegations as minor as casual rudeness and as serious as death in custody. Later I conducted outreach, speaking at precincts, schools, community boards, ...
A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEW THEATRE
Jan 01, 2009; ... New Theatre has produced a year-round season of plays in Coral Gables, Florida, since 1986 - the year it was founded by husband and wife Rafael and Kimberly de Acha. In May 2006, Rafael de Acha retired after 20 years at the helm of the company. New Artistic Director Ricky J. Martinez and Eileen ...
THE RANT
Jan 01, 2009; ... Note: The action of the play is seamless. While scenes take place in different times and locations, there should be no pause or blackout between the end of one scene and the start of the next. The last line of one scene is followed by the first line of the next without pause; the characters can ...
Needing the Dragon: Physical EXperience vs. Cerebral Analysis in Banana Bag and Bodice's Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage
Jan 01, 2009; ... Clad in fur-trimmed leather, Beowulf, the epic warrior-hero, does a fey little dance to the calypso rhythm. "Bum bum bum bum bum," he sings, flanked by attractive female backup singers wearing leather helmets (unpub. playscript). Before him, squirming at their lecture table, three academics sit ...
Dancing to the Cosmic Murmur: John Cage, Richard Foreman, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma's No Dice
Jan 01, 2009; ... Nature Theater of Oklahoma's first self-devised work, Poetics: a ballet brut-which, by a fluke of programming, actually premiered in New York several months after the group's second, more expansive piece, No Dice in January 2008-was listed by the Under the Radar Festival as "a manifesto on ...
EDITOR'S NOTE
Jan 01, 2008; ... A near miracle happened at dinner. We were invited to dinner by members of a foundation that has generously contributed to the support of TheatreForum. Suddenly we were asked if we would like to print TheatreForum in color. They would increase their grant to cover the additional printing costs ....
DIMITER GOTSCHEFF: THE FINE ART OF POLITICAL SPECTACLE
Jan 01, 2008; ... Among the current crop of innovative directors working in the contemporary German theatre, Dimiter Gotscheff stands out for several reasons. The Bulgarian-born director is one of several foreigners who have made their mark on the German theatre. Gotscheff, who is 64, has worked steadily since ...
DMITRY KRYMOV DESIGNER'S THEATRE
Jan 01, 2008; ... "We want to take this children's tale and puff it up, puff it up, puff it up into a Biblical tale." -Dmitry Krymov, before a rehearsal of the dramatization of Andrei Platonov's "The Cow." Moscow, 23 March 2007. Chekhov offered up the wisdom that if you display a gun in the first ...
Altruists and Torturers: An Introduction to The Unmentionables
Jan 01, 2008; ... I'm going to go out on a limb-stake out a wildly radical position: I think torture is bad. Really, really bad. I think that if we torture people (which by the way, doesn't work) we've instantly surrendered the moral high ground and lowered ourselves beneath the level of any possible enemy, ...
THE UNMENTIONABLES
Jan 01, 2008; ... THE TIME IS THE PRESENT The set is a large upstairs bedroom and adjoining spaces of Don and Nancy's villa in western equatorial Africa. The house was built in the late nineteenth century, but has been rather extensively renovated, and decorated in a style that connotes American good ...
TRANSMOGRIFYING BRUNO SCHULZ'S UNIVERSE: DOUBLE EDGE THEATRE'S REPUBLIC OF DREAMS
Jan 01, 2008; ... It is a chilly night in November, though winter has yet to arrive full force to western Massachusetts. Audience members mill around outside on a farm while the smell of the surrounding greenery and the smoke from distant wood burning stoves permeates the air. The doors open, and the audience ...
AFTER THE FLOOD: RESURRECTING PRAGUE'S ARCHA THEATRE
Jan 01, 2008; ... In August of 2002, the Czech Republic was hit by a wave of devastating flooding, affecting what many reports estimate at over one-third of the country's population. Few areas were hit harder than the city center of the nations capital, Prague, which sustained massive damage when the Vltava River ...
MAKSYM KUROCHKIN: A WRITER FOR PARADOXICAL TIMES
Jan 01, 2008; ... (ProQuest: ... denotes text stops here in original.) In Vodka, Fucking, and Television Maksym Kurochkin sketches the rather scabrous portrait of a sarcastic, self-effacing, offensive, painfully sensitive and intensely proud writer whose "life and work," to use a standard phrase, have run ...
VODKA, FUCKING, AND TELEVISION
Jan 01, 2008; ... HERO: I'm an old man. I'm 33 and according to science I haven't been able to learn anything new for the past eight years. After 25, people don't change. Everyone knows this, but the hero is the only one who accepts it. I, obviously, am the hero. Studying after the age of 25 is a waste of time ....