That’s August Wilson over there on the left. Though he is gone, he is far from forgotten, particularly at the Black Playwrights Convening, which happened under the auspices of the American Voices New Play Institute in Washington, D.C., this past January. Arena Stage asked Isaac Butler to be the event’s Twitterer-in-chief, and he raised Cain and questions in relatively equal measure. Here, in the second of our three-part series on the convening, he answers a few questions about his time down South.

How did you get involved?
Out of the blue one day, this awesome woman named Amrita Mangus, who works at Arena, e-mailed me and said, “We’d love to have you come down and write about this convening we’re doing about diversity, and we want to pay you to do it.”  I had met David Dower—Arena’s associate artistic director, who runs the New Play program there—at the annual TCG conference, and we got along well, so I assume it came through him. Anyway, David has this great group of fellows and whatnot who are really motivated and hyper organized, and are true believers. Three of them got to organize convenings on subjects relevant to new-play development. The first was on diversity. I went there and blogged and Twittered, but I got so caught up in Twittering that I basically had no time to blog so my blog posts that I wrote for them were…subpar, I’d say. But my Twittering was awesome! I was all, like, posting provocative things people were saying and asking interesting questions and picking fights with people, and it made for a good Twitter feed. So this time, when they had me back, they decided to make me Twitter Bossman. Read more »

On a recent weekend in January, Washington’s Arena Stage held a conference of black playwrights at their annual meeting for the  American Voices New Play Institute—it was an opportunity for big names like Lynn Nottage to share space with smaller (but up-and-coming) names like Marcus Gardley, as well as a forum for the discussion of the health of black theater. The Institute invited three cyber-savvy bloggers  (Parabasis animating spirit Isaac Butler, 99 Seats alter ego J. Holtham and Mission Paradox’s Adam Thurman) to twitter and blog the event—there was even a streaming video of some of the new play readings themselves—and you should bustle over to the website to check out the bounteous offerings.

TONY then asked the three bloggers to tell us about their experiences Down South and to reflect on their reflections. It’s wheels within wheels, people! This week we feature Adam Thurman’s responses. Check back next week for Holtham and Butler.

Time Out New York: How did you get involved in going down there?
Adam Thurman: At my blog, Mission Paradox (missionparadox.com), I cover a wide variety of arts-related issues.  My core subject is marketing, but I often discuss subjects like diversity, leadership, etc.  David Dower, at Arena Stage, found one of my posts and was kind enough to invite me down to cover the convening. Read more »

When was the last time you saw eager young people’s faces like these at the theater? Much less at that home for literary erudition and political consciousness, the New York Theater Workshop? Well, subscribers, brace yourselves for the youth onslaught—or at least inure yourself to lots of their baggy pants and cussin’—because Trey Parker and Matt Stone have chosen to debut a new musical at NYTW next season. In 2008,  the South Park duo were penning a Mormon musical for Broadway; Cheyenne Jackson even gave interviews about his performance as “the main missionary, Elder something.” Is this it? The press release from the theater is keeping mum. Also, when the Mormon show was broached two years ago, the boys were collaborating with the full Avenue Q team—Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx—but now only Lopez is on board. Perhaps this is a different project? We can only hope that Jeff Marx hasn’t taken to wearing an orange parka…

At any rate, this news eclipses even NYTW’s welcome confirmation of Ivo Van Hove’s production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, and yesterday I wouldn’t have believed that possible. Suddenly, fall can’t come quickly enough. For all  those too desperate to wait till August for a hit of Parker’s musical genius, may I suggest adding some “Shpadoinkle” to your day? It will leave your heart as full as a baked potato.

Hop to it, all ye Anglophiles: Over at the Pearl Theatre, George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance is only playing through this weekend. In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that my sister, crackerjack sound designer Jane Shaw, worked on the show, which makes me far too implicated to review it. But—dash it all—mere ethics can not prevent me from tooting Sean McNall’s deserving horn. There he is on the left, hushing the endearingly apoplectic Dan Daily and trying manfully to hold onto his liquor. For lo these many years, the Pearl has been McNall’s oyster, and he has played leads from a brainy Hamlet to Tennessee Williams’s smoky, befuddled alter ego in Vieux Carre. Here, though, he shines in a supporting role, so I think we can get away (just!) with calling him a scene-stealer. We’ve known for a while that he’s a killer with text, but in Misalliance he gets to show off his prodigious-physical comedy talents—he toodles about in Charlie Chaplin drag, hides in the furniture and, somehow, contrives to look a full foot shorter than in his last Pearl outing. Class warfare has never been so cute.

You may already know behatted, be-bearded neoburlesque presenter Jonny Porkpie, the writer-performer particularly popular for his themed Pinchbottom Burlesque shows, which he hosts with his wife Nasty Canasta. In fact, you may have even voted for him in the mayoral election. But you may not have realized that Porkpie is now a published author. His recent offering The Corpse Wore Pasties dares to tell the story of a chap named Jonny Porkpie (so Paul Auster–ish!) who finds himself on the hook for an ecdysiast’s murder. Here’s a little taste to get your tassels in a twirl:

“The corporate world was just as I remembered it, a symphony of shared desks, dead faces, tired hands tapping away at keyboards, an occasional surreptitious glance out the window, at the clock, or at that other employee you fantasize is someday going to invite you for an erotic tête-à-tête in the supply closet.

It filled me with a dread I had not had the displeasure of experiencing since those first few months out of college, when I returned to New York and tried to settle back into the city of my birth in a profession that didn’t involve taking off my clothes.

It was a mistake. I’d made my first entrance in this city naked and kicking, and that was clearly the way this city wanted me to stay…”

If you feel you’d enjoy Jonny’s work a bit better while it’s being read by a topless woman, be sure to hit Madame X on January 29 to see the Naked Girls Reading series slip between its pages.

Josh Fox, the lo-fi impresario behind the shows like The Bomb and the current Auto Da Fe, is probably one of the few experimental directors who hasn’t been seduced by that ubiquitous design siren: video. Instead, he tends to keep his media projects in a separate bin—witness his documentary, GasLand, premiering at Sundance next week.

CAN YOU DO THIS WITH YOUR TAP WATER?

If you’ve got any questions about multitasking, activism or the death of history, Fox, playwright Masataka Matsuda and others of his Auto Da Fe collaborators will be answering questions after the performance tonight at the Baruch Performing Arts Center.

I love Under the Radar. I’m a little worried that I love Under the Radar the same way that Patty Hearst loved the Symbionese Liberation Army—I can’t really imagine a time when I wasn’t at an Under the Radar show (or on my way to one), and next week I will require a lengthy detox process. But right now, I love it. In an earlier post, we tipped you to the shows that have already had one New York go-round and earned our back slaps and high-fives. Now you can click through for a slate of new reviews and one nonreview recommendation, just in case you aren’t taking our approach and planning to see it all. Read more »

There is only one theatrical cure for the depression that attends the end of the holidays, a time when your show-a-day schedule magically turned into an eggnog-an-hour schedule, and you finally got around to rereading your favorite books from childhood. (FYI: Star Trek novels do not always hold up.) Dragging back from such hedonism can be rough. So clear your mind by turning to the flurry of festivals, the frenetic batches of shows angling for your attention at venues like the Public, P.S. 122, 3LD and the New Victory. Since this is the season for the APAP (Association of Performing Arts Presenters) convention,  we’re besieged by Under the Radar, P.S. 122’s COIL and a few unaffiliated others, all hoping for the magical sprinkle of touring money. So, what’s getting the buzz? Click through for our on-the-hoof reviews and rumors…and be sure to tip us off if you see something wonderful! Read more »

One of the year’s loveliest shows—one of the eeriest and most spectacular—requires a little investment. Not so much of money, but of time. Punchdrunk, the hotshot British company that builds ornate, immersive environments for its shows, has created Sleep No More…in Boston. Despite the seven-hour round trip—part of it on a shockless, overnight Fung Wah bus—I can still honestly vouch for the experience. Admittedly, the second cast (most of the Brit players have headed home) can be less than convincing, but even with watered-down Punchdrunk, Sleep No More will expand your notions of what’s theatrically possible. If your budget stretches to a Zipcar-enabled bop up to Brookline between now and February 7, I encourage you not to read after the jump: Punchdrunk’s sharpest tool is surprise, and you wouldn’t want to blunt the edge. That warning issued, you can buy tickets here, or click through to read about what you’re missing.…

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One tinily annoying thing about Lincoln Center’s New Visions programming: It’s hella short. Heiner Goebbels, director-composer of arch, casually ravishing works, has a show coming up, but it’s only on for a scant five days.  Blink, you miss it. But it’s worth keeping your eyes open for chances to see Goebbels’s work: his Hashirigaki was a delicately amusing braid of Gertrude Stein and the Beach Boys, while his Eraritjaritjaka played merry pranks on space-time via Elias Canetti texts and some cannily wielded video. This time he gives up on live actors entirely: Stifters Dinge is “performed” by robot pianos that move through steaming, alien landscapes, which echo with the lost voices of philosophers. If there is life on Venus, this is their PBS. Buy tickets here.

Yes, as Fox News says, Pig Iron Theatre is a dance clown ensemble. And yes, ever since Stephen King’s It, I have felt tense around both Tim Curry and sewers. But what really frightens me, what keeps me bolting upright in the middle of the night, are clowns more like this. The buffoonish Fox & Friends, during a segment on bailout spending, jumped up and down on the delightful Pig Iron Theatre, recipients of $25,000 from the NEA. “Paper for puppets?” Fox’s glassy-eyed anchor Steve Doocy intoned, and then went on to question the aid that has gone to other performing-arts organizations, including the Minneapolis Puppet Theatre. After agreeing (watch him nod!) with the measured statements by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance chappie—who rightly pointed out the ripple effect that the arts have on their community—Doocy clung doggedly to his sneer. Isaac Butler got up a nice head of steam about this on his Parabasis blog, but it might be best just to write directly to your congressperson with some encouraging words about the importance of including the arts as part of the national economic conversation.

Cultural gatekeeping is such a messy business. What with all the decisions (Is this audience ready for nudity? Nonnarrative text? Flamenco?), it can be a difficult business. And imagine if you are not even in the arts! Imagine that you are an employee of our own federal government, an immigration caseworker, trying to determine if Dancer A or Fusion Bandmember B should be allowed in the country! Quel difficile. I admit, I am naturally inclined to dislike immigration caseworkers (hate the job, not the person!) since I think we have a draconian, isolationist system that stifles our ability to enjoy overseas talent and stomps on our identity as a nation of immigrants. But let that pass. Instead, let your eyes drift across these accounts of artists, desperate only to share their work. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, we learn about an Argentine klezmer band (I know!) denied entry by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:

The band couldn’t travel to the U.S., the agency ruled, because it didn’t satisfy a “culturally unique” requirement for a performer visa called P-3.

“The evidence repeatedly suggests the group performs a hybrid or fusion style of music…[which] cannot be considered culturally unique to one particular country, nation, society, class, ethnicity, religion, tribe or other group of persons,” read the denial. It was signed by caseworker CSC4672/WS24533.

Mr. Peimer was incensed. “How more culturally specific can you get than Jewish music of Latin America?” he asked. After Mr. Peimer did some venting on his Facebook page, a reader quipped that this is the era of “ethnomusicalsecurity.”

Someone wake Kafka up. We’ve got a story for him.

You may not know her name yet, but Olga Mukhina is actually one of Russia’s leading playwrights. She enjoyed a wave of success in the mid-’90s, and, after some time off to have a family, has now dipped her toe in our waters. Since she is one of the featured playwrights in the New Russian Drama initiative—a collaboration between Towson University and the Center for International Theatre Development—the CUNY International/World Theatre Series offers a free reading of her biggest hit Tanya-Tanya, one John Freedman—critic for the Moscow Times—called “a dreamy, effervescent, sternly honest tale of love.”  On Monday, December 7, at 6:30pm, the Segal Graduate Center will play host to the new translation by Kate Moira Ryan (The Beebo Brinker Chronicles) and conversation with Freedman and ubiquitous international theater facilitator Philip Arnoult.

Hey kids! So you’re halfway through the first semester of your M.F.A. in Theater, and you’re probably congratulating yourself on sitting out this recession. While you read Backwards and Forwards and Acting Is a Job: Real Life Lessons About the Acting Business in preparation, you look out the tower window at all your struggling brethren and  chuckle softly. But you’ll be out soon, and as your debt accrues, fear may be stacking up as well.

Here are some hard numbers you might want to keep from your parents, especially if they are the worrying sort. The Artists and the Economic Recession Survey, commissioned by Leveraging Investments in Creativity, has just released its preliminary findings. The full report will follow next spring, but this is the sort of news you want in the bleak midwinter. (Snow is predicted for this weekend…) Some quoted highlights: Read more »

David Zinn is the super-flexible set designer (he also does costumes) behind such wildly different projects as Manhattan Theatre Club’s coolly elegant The Four of Us, the wacky fun house of Charles Mee’s Paradise Park at the Signature and the spooky grandma’s living room required for Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury. This month, Theater for a New Audience has imported the Rinde Eckert rock opera Orpheus X—a wistful update of the ancient Greek myth, born at the American Repertory Theatre—to the Duke on 42nd Street’s quasi-industrial black box. While moving it from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to midtown, Zinn, director Robert Woodruff and Eckert needed to make certain adjustments. Here Zinn comments on the genesis of the set, how he serves Eckert’s vision and the resettling of his moody, projection-ridden structure into its new home. The photographs are by T. Charles Erickson. You can read Zinn’s comments by placing your cursor over the picture. Get tickets to Orpheus X here.

By now, the novelty of 13P has worn off. Suddenly, we all feel casual about a successful playwright-run company that turns its entire attention to each of its writers in turn; these days, it hardly seems surprising that this “implosion model” company (after the 13th piece, the entire organization is designed to fold) has become one of the most reliable ways to see new work in New York. But for Julia Jarcho, also known as P9, it’s still all a bit new. Jarcho has been away in Berlin and in San Francisco—where she’s getting a Ph.D. in Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric—so she feels like she’s just “swooping in” to capitalize on an infrastructure that sprang up largely in her absence. She talked to TONY about American Treasure, her dense, metaphysical, time-jumping mystery which is playing now at Paradise Factory on East 4th Street. Read more »

If you’re anything like me—in your thirties, Midwestern—you too probably dedicated a couple of late nights in the ’90s to “Crimetime after Primetime,” the grab bag of syndicated TV thrillers that filled out the late-night slots on the weirder analog channels. The best (Dark Justice fans, save your e-mails) was clearly the Canadian import Forever Knight, in which a vampire cop played by Geraint Wyn Davies swigged blood moodily from wine bottles, solved crimes and flew—which entailed the actor’s feet vanishing out of windows in slow motion. Geraint Wyn Davies earned my undying love for his work as Nick Knight, so even after he (disappointingly) turned his hand to quality fare like the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the brilliant backstage TV show Slings and Arrows and last season’s crisp Women Beware Women, he still lingers in my imagination as a beruffled vampire wallowing in big-haired melancholy. (Oh, Twilight fans, we were there before ye.) Imagine my glee, therefore, when I learned that he will be starring as the poet Dylan Thomas in Leon Pownall’s Do Not Go Gentle. Why? Because the play finds Thomas “in Purgatory, reflecting on the influences on his life.” Geraint is back, baby. Back with the undead and just where he belongs.

“My moral-outrage meter just went sky high.”

That was Julie Crosby, producing artistic director of the Women’s Project today, after hearing that the National Endowment for the Arts—now with new leadership and swelling funds!—wouldn’t be funding the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab this year. (The NEA no longer funds general operating budgets; rather it underwrites specific projects.)

The amount at issue is a mere $20,000, but the impact of an NEA award goes far beyond its actual financial gift. Smaller foundations often look to the NEA as a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” and so any NEA decision always has a profound ripple effect.

According to Crosby, the Women’s Project has received NEA support steadily in recent years, though it did lose its grant for 2007 after the departure of artistic director Loretta Greco, perhaps because there was then a common perception of the Project as a theater on the skids.

Crosby, who has presided over the theater’s resurgence, is still fuming. “This is taxpayer money, and yet they aren’t going to fund the oldest and largest theater for women in America?” The NEA’s new director Rocco Landesman has made it clear that he wants to reward excellence rather than “worthiness,” so perhaps the theater’s mission has worked (paradoxically) against it. It certainly seems baffling, though. If a string of good shows, passionate advocacy for women theater artists and a commitment to new writing can’t keep the NEA’s attention, what can?

The Performa festival drives me nuts. Founded by RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, Performa throws a very large umbrella over anything in town that can consider itself performance art—such a notoriously loose category that my actual kitchen sink, ignored dishes moldering away, has applied for a slot. Look, I’m in favor of anything that throws commissioning money at the arts (hooray!); however, even a devoted art-lover might be put off by the terrifying printed schedule (as impossible to fold as a London street map and printed in light, eyesight-destroying gray) or the website (confusing and alarmingly loud). Not to worry! First, Howard Halle alerted you to the splashy offerings from the artsy-art perspective; now we theaterites want to take a whack at the performance end. Keep reading for our top four…

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This is my second post in five days about a WNYC show. Clearly, while everybody else dashes off into the new media, I’m hunkered over the radio dial, blissfully churning my own butter and putting up preserves. But this interview with Willem Dafoe on the Leonard Lopate show adds a fun dimension to the new Richard Foreman spectacular Idiot Savant at the Public, particularly when he raises a wicked eyebrow (you can actually hear it over the air) at Foreman’s avowal that this time he’s serious! He’s quitting! No more plays for him! Willem, for one, thinks Foreman will be back.

If you’re hungry for a little vintage Dafoe (not to mention a baby-faced Jon Stewart) watch this 2002 interview, in which he manages to shoehorn in some touching chat about his love for the theater, or pop over to UbuWeb to watch Rhyme ‘Em to Death, the Wooster Group’s bizarre film version of the “trial of the goat” sequence from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Perfect amuse-bouches for the Idiot Savant…