#theatre for a new audience

[caroleditosti]

'Orpheus Descending' One of Tennessee Williams Most Incisive Works is a Searing Triumph

Maggie Siff, Pico Alexander in Orpheus Descending (Gerry Goodstein) The hell of the South abides in Erica Schmidt’s revival of Orpheus Descending, currently running at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn until August 6th. Tennessee Williams’ poetically brazen work about the underbelly of America that reeks of discrimination, violence, bigotry and cruelty seems particularly regressive in the…

[platoapproved]

Finished season 2 of IWTV with my friend who was totally canon-blind, who helpfully chimed in right after Louis delivered his "when I come back you better be gone" line to Armand: "so uhhhhhhhhh this is why the day after this aired everyone had to listen to your 'heavy metal heartbreak' playlist for 8 hours at work?" with me just sat beside him like "😭💔😭💔yeah 😭💔😭💔"

[maingh0st]

Would you like to see the series adapted to a live action or animated series?

can I be so real and admit that I honestly don't care? I'm not a big tv/movie watcher to begin with, and I understand the desire to see a story you really love on screen—but books vs. shows/movies are entirely different mediums, and there are always going to be compromises/changes made in the process, and in my experience it just ends up being dissatisfying a lot of the time

if I had to choose, though: animated, 100%

[hamartia-grander]

Forget about gritting your teeth through someone's media analysis that is egregiously incorrect. Some character/story analyses I see on here are literally just verbatim re-tellings of what happened in the story - the literal things you are supposed to understand, and the connections you're supposed to make to get what is happening - and they're phrased as crazy theories or analyses. And I just want to scream, because no, you're not weird or 'reaching' for coming to that conclusion, that is quite literally the exact thing the story was trying to tell you. You are stating blatant fact as some incredible discovery. Like that person who thought Lucy Gray Baird saying she was 'going to find Katniss' was "an accident" or maybe they were crazy. But I guess everyone's gotta start somewhere, even if you think saying 'did anyone else ever realise that Darth Vader's theme plays when Anakin does something evil???' is some mind-blowing observation. Like, shit, in a world where media literacy is so sorely lacking, quite literally witnessing a story and noticing details of it is considered analysis. Whatever.

[personinthepalace]

Day 7 in NY: saw ppgw for a second time!!!

[metanarrates]

have you ever played the stanley parable? if yes what do you think about it?

i actually played tsp for a college class in video game narrative analysis a few years back! specifically, tsp was part of curriculum so we could discuss choice mechanics, and the illusion of choice in games. given tsp's somewhat unusual approach to choices and endings, it was a great pick for the purpose of class discussions.

i do like the game a lot. i consider it to be an interesting take on choices in games, and it's definitely got the potential to be influential for how future games approach choice. (slay the princess is clearly inspired by it for example lol.) however, given that it's a game devoted to pushing a single concept - what are the limits of choices and endings in video games? - to its limit, it ends up feeling a little sparse as a game. even if it is genuinely clever and funny, it also doesn't offer way too much outside of that. it feels like a semi-joking, semi-serious thesis statement rather than a full game experience to me.

is it a good game? yes. i think something like tsp is necessary for the medium to continue evolving. but it's hard for me to be interested in it on its own merits. it's been three years since I played it and the only thing about it that sticks with me is the possible games in future that could further riff on its concepts

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

time for midsummer 🥹

[the-cat-at-the-theatre-door]

modern productions of cats stop age-ing down the characters challenge. let jelly be older let jenny be older let skimble be older. and not even casting wise because that is another discussion entireely i think. just how the characters get played they most seem to be so much younger. even munkustrap skews SO young lately and hes not even an old character

One of my IRL friends once said that Munkustrap is a 40 year old man and I have never been able to read him as anything else, and tbh that tracks. Hard agree. Munkustrap being anything but in his thirties or more does not compute to me. Late twenties if I am being *really* generous. The vocal maturity alone is already in this...really weird young tenor high spot that I don’t like - what I’m going to call the “theatre kid” belt voice fresh outta school and it stayed that way - the 2016 Revival, if you will. 

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. 

I will say I don’t think we can fully separate the conversation of the casting age of the performers from this overall point - 20 year-olds really shouldn’t be playing individuals who are meant to be 50 plus when the performance world already has so few roles for them/fucks them over by casting younger people in age makeup when they do. Like, no, Old Deuteronomy shouldn’t be 26 in 2022. Doesn’t matter how good they are - they’ll still be good in fifteen years. Neither should Gus. Neither should Grizabella. That should be the baseline standard on its own. With the other cats that are perhaps meant to be on the older side (though again, this is more up to interpretation in, say, Skimble’s case but tbh it has no reason to be), you can get moreso away from stricter limitation and “act” a bit older and cast more vocally mature individuals, but like...30+ year old performers exist. Their abilities don’t suddenly disappear after they turn 40. They don’t stop existing after 50. If they’re worried about them keeping up or their ability to perform in something demanding like CATS up to 9-10 times a week, cast multiples - Korean and Japanese theatre does this all the time (what was that? more money? that sounds like a production company problem to me).

But that’s just my opinion. 

[altaruwusmolboiz]

Does anyone have the audio bootleg or even a libretto for NYNY? I just listened to the cast album and it sounds great.

[caroleditosti]

'Des Moines,' the Opaque and Mysterious Artfully Shine at TFANA

You won't want to miss 'Des Moines.' It is at TFNA and ends on 8 January.

Arliss Howard, Johanna Day in Des Moines (courtesy of Gerry Goodstein) In Des Moines by award winning writer Denis Johnson nothing vital seems to happen during the time Dan, his wife Marta, their grandson Jimmy, Father Michael and Mrs. Drinkwater get smashing drunk and have a wild party in Dan and Marta’s modest second floor apartment in Des Moines, Iowa. Yet, in the 12 hours they spend…

[klywrites]

how did this site get even more broken lol

[standupcomedyhistorian]

Good morning, everyone! I hope your long weekend is going well. 🌞

Since today is the one-year anniversary of my first experience seeing the incredible Kate Berlant and her amazing play, I thought it was appropriate to kick off Kate Berlant month with my own interview (similar to Donald Glover's one and my self-interview for the Rothaniel taping).

It bears repeating, but SPOILERS ahead! I am incredibly transparent (perhaps TOO honest haha) about what happened for all three of the shows I had attended, most recently in February this year.

So if you have tickets to her London show and want to see the magic for yourself, wait to read these articles until you've experienced the immersive world of KATE!

I have posted the complete list of everything I am working on for this month's theme as well (more links will appear once the articles are published), and there's a fun one about every Kate sticker or image I was able to capture on my phone (Hint: It's a LOT!). Again, spoilers appear in all of these items, so don't read if you want to be surprised! 😉

I also wanted to remind you all that Maria Bamford's book, Sure, I'll Join Your Cult, is dropping this week (September 5th), so pick it up if you want to read the thoughts of one of the BEST living comedians out there. I will definitely be doing a review of it as well, so watch out for that!

Finally, I wanted to announce next month's theme: Flight of the Conchords!

One of the best musical comedy groups EVER and a major inspiration for Bo Burnham.

If you've never heard of them, here's Bo's favorite song by the Kiwi duo per his YouTube channel (and one of my faves as well): the silly-serious ode to awkward conversations, Jenny.

Thanks again for reading my stuff, and keep it here for more comedy fun! ✌🏼🐔

[unproduciblesmackdown]

love my own like theatrical relationship to shakespeare which is a) being so slow to realize like "oh, i've loved theatre? everyone doesn't just feel this way & go 'of course acting onstage would fucking kick ass' & adore rehearsals and hanging around backstage and in greenrooms and changing and performing & etc?' never really occurred to me" and b) my response to most encounters w/shakespeare being "wha" when it comes to anything granular yet the relevance still in the spirit of things lol

namely one prominent example being i was an on campus college student where said campus has a shakespearean theater literally three blocks away, and we had like a freshmen orientation weekly class there doing shit with actors and checking out the theater, not to mention like punchcards to see four shows free (to write up about afterwards but yeah sure whatever) and this wherein also you always got student discount tickets And there were pwyw performances....kicked ass. i went there for shows so many times. i have never fucking known what tf is going on in any of the like dozen shows i saw there when a) audio processing can be tricky enough for real life modern vernacular parsing and b) sure am not used to ye old very stylized language nor any other qualities of shakespearean material so lots of times when i finally started to kind of acclimate to the language it would be like "oh wait that was the conclusion? ok. hoorayyyyy" like also c) You Have A Great Time Seeing Shakespeare Productions Anyways like again i loved going anytime. it's Theatrical and if people are just putting their damn backs into delivering and performing the material it's An Experience even if you're really not following lmfao. and i suppose one can read the text / familiarize oneself beforehand

also like my first and really one of my only like regular theatre performing experiences was my literature class in fourth grade doing a few scenes from julius caesar. i was so hype for getting cassius like one of the most prominent roles? a guy? an antagonist if you're caesar or dante??? oh Fuck yes. b/c of technical difficulties we got to perform it twice in a row when we did a field trip to some other school to perform our respective [scenes from various shakespeare plays] altogether. even back then i was way into it and cared about stuff like "we have like no Effects to make it that dramatic when we kill caesar. or like, non silent. bit awkward" and "also i like, don't know how to act and am just winging it. and of course, i'm also like 9" like in theory i do like to know How to do something vs trying to make it up myself. somewhat lol. a balance, who can argue w/that

beyond that there's also lots of things i just didn't quite realize "counted" lmfao like, when you're a theatre gay with a parent req'ing you go to church every week but you have a good time being in the choir....i was sure on those tenor harmonies & singing loud. and going relatively often to various live theatrical events, having an engaging enough time there, but also would've assumed anyone would be into it And that that's not really the same as actually being in them, of course. but that most of my firsthand experience was just sticking w/ballet for like a decade, and kind of live theatrical performance adjacency there. don't say shit, for years was effectively just like, an ensemble for the occasional performances, but even then it's like hoorayyy i Love rehearsing and being onstage and backstage and dealing w/costumes and coordination behind the scenes and shit. and eventually being like, a distinct individual character in shows, so despite again nobody saying shit you're still somewhat interpreting and doing whatever character work while also enjoying the bennies of [it's dance, so also it's choreographed]....even more clear like oh i love backstage and rehearsing and behind the scenes and onstage and putting together stage character makeup, and i don't mind tackling technical difficulties, and etc etc. didn't even necessarily have the reference like, idk, wouldn't / doesn't everyone feel similarly. classic ye old memory of like being idfk 7 or some shit simply getting to walk with classmates behind a backdrop to the opposite wing of a stage, and loving that lmao. combines a love for [backstage] and [secret passages] type deal lol, big fan of these elements

also in 7th grade doing a theatre/drama class for a few months and we couldn't really get like all this in depth extensive stuff b/c you know, intro course for like 8 weeks for rando middle schoolers, but idk it was just illustrative lmao like after julius caesar, us slapping together some kind of script and my getting to be this fun little theatrical(tm) antagonist guy again? feedback was "what was supposed to be happening" but could've stood to have learned that the enthusiasm and affinity i felt for acting onstage was perhaps indicative of enthusiasm and affinity for acting onstage rather than just, idk, the exact kind of baseline experience any & everyone would have lol. not that i would've necessarily had the chance to really do anything with that knowledge, but even now, ofc i don't particularly anticipate getting to use it, but it's great having that knowledge like ohhh i see. the entire time i've been huge into doing theatre with all these kind of adjacent & gently overlapping brushes with it. gotcha

[thefabelmans2022]

i have so many thoughts about the little mermaid (2023) and it's like. oh my god who cares.

[i-mybrunettelady]

I just finished reading Molière's Dom Juan and have so many annotations that I'm not entirely sure how I'm gonna wrangle them into a coherent essay in 10 days, god help me

If you're wondering why I'm putting lore posts on the back burner, this is why lmao