What’s on your summer reading list, BPT? (part one)

Whether it’s for professional development, self-improvement, or purely for pleasure, summer is traditionally a great time to kick back and read. We asked BPTers to share the titles on their night stands with us (and, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of reading going on)…

Ginger Lazarus

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I'm not a big sci-fi reader, but I'm enjoying this classic. I randomly decided that a character in the play I'm writing reads Heinlein, and then realized I should probably know what I am talking about. So far I'm gratified by my choice. As is my husband, the true sci-fi aficionado, who has happily lined up my next ten books or so. We'll see about that...this summer I'm also hoping to get to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life.

Emily Kaye Lazzaro

This is hardly a unique opinion, but for me summer is a time for obsessive, easy-thinking novels. Crime novels, mysteries, romantic chick-lit, young adult fiction, that kind of thing. It's a Harry Potter, Twilight, Pillars of the Earth kind of time. So this summer I am going to read the last of the three Stieg Larsson crime novels (I just finished The Girl Who Played With Fire so now it's on to The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest). Then I'm going to go full YA with The Hunger Games. Put me in a beach house, on the front porch early in the morning, with a cup of coffee and a big, fun novel and I am happy as can be. Mind you, I'm also tempering this with the full body of work of Edward Albee, Peter Shaffer, and Wendy Wasserstein, so as not to let my brain go completely mushy. It's all a matter of balance.

Dates for Shea’s ‘Junkie’ announced

The dates for alum John Shea’s new play Junkie, to be produced later this summer by Argos Productions, have been set for August 25 to September 4 at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. The play will be directed by Argos Artistic Director Brett Marks and will feature Sean A. Cole.

From the Argos Web site: Is it possible to turn your life around in 30 days? A close look at one man’s search for redemption and understanding, Junkie follows Cal, a Somerville heroin addict, as he undergoes thirty days in a state rehabilitation center. Over this brief span of sobriety, Cal faces not only his own choices which brought him to rehab, but also the world he couldn't avoid. Funny and unapologetic, Junkie shows us the path to understanding is not always a clear trail.

For more information visit http://www.playsbyshea.com. Be sure to watch this space for an upcoming feature on Argos Productions.

Come and meet those dancing feet

A day that started at Jerusalem (Go – seriously!) ended here: Theatre 80 St. Marks on the Lower East Side. Well, sort of. I was walking by, and couldn’t help but smile at the sight of hoofer Ruby Keeler’s footprints in the cement. Just look at how my enormous foot (size ten, yep) has the power to dwarf even a Broadway giant! Or, at least, the footprint of a Broadway giant.

Also in front of the theatre are footprints and hand prints of Joan Blondell, Joan Crawford (…the hands that held those wire hangers!), Gloria Swanson, and…Dom DeLuise(?!) among others. Hmmm. You know me. Stumbling across things like this can mean only one thing: Google Party.

As a venue, Theatre 80 St. Marks – not unlike so many of us theatre people – has been reinvented again and again to survive the ever-changing times. It's been a speakeasy, a Jazz club, an Off-Broadway house (where You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown opened), and, in the 1970s and 80s, a movie house that screened classic films. It eventually re-opened as an Off-Broadway theatre, as the long-time home of the Pearl Theatre Company; today it hosts magic shows, fundraisers, and music and dance events. Read more about this intriguing NYC landmark here and here. I love, love, love discovering things like this.

But, back to those feet. From what I gather, the Keeler prints are from the period when the Theatre was operating as a movie house and Keeler was starring in the Broadway revival of No,No, Nannette. And to celebrate all this new found trivia: Writers, here is Keeler (with Lee Dixon) tapping on a gigantic typewriter in Ready, Willing and Able (1937). Fabulous!

30th Anniversary Season Announced!

Pictured: Ramona Lisa Alexander in Derek Walcott’s Ti-Jean & His Brothers

Photo by A.R. Sinclair Photography

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre continues its 30^th Anniversary season by presenting, in collaboration with Suffolk University, Robert Brustein’s Mortal Terror at the newly re-opened Modern Theatre at Suffolk University. National Medal of Arts winner Robert Brustein brings the spirit of William Shakespeare back to the stage in his imaginative story of political upheaval set during the ignition of the Gunpowder Plot. Featuring Stafford Clark-Price as William Shakespeare, together with Ken Cheeseman, Michael Hammond, Jeremiah Kissel, John Kuntz, Georgia Lyman, Christopher James Webb and directed by Daniela Varon.

Click here to purchase tickets.

The second and third new works celebrated in Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s 30^th Anniversary season feature two recent graduates of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s MFA Playwriting Program.

In a suspenseful showdown between the old and new guard, The Farm by Walt McGough examines a profession where no one can be trusted. Directed by Elliot Norton Award-winner David R. Gammons and featuring Nael Nacer and Lindsey McWorter, “the farm” is the last place you want to get caught off guard.

Hughes and Lazzaro selected for Playwrights' Commons retreat

Hughes

Alums Colleen Hughes and Emily K. Lazzaro have been selected to participate in Playwrights’ Commons’ Freedom Art Theatre Retreat in August! This dynamic duo will be joined by a number of area theatre artists (including other BU alums), in a program led by Associate Professor and Playwrights' Commons Founder Ilana Brownstein. See the full list of participants here. 

Congrats guys – this is terrific!

Lazzaro

About the Retreat

Emerging Boston-area playwrights, designers, and dramaturgs, matched into creative teams together, and taken to a bucolic, peaceful, woodsy New England retreat for a week.  While there, the creative teams would be tasked with brainstorming and writing/designing/devising theatrical projects that would have been impossible to conceive of as individual artists. 

About Playwrights’ Commons

Playwrights’ Commons is a nascent playwright development (not play development) organization whose mission is to strengthen the Boston-area theatre ecology through innovative laboratories, workshops, collaborative opportunities, and fiscal sponsorships of local artists. 

Playwrights’ Commons seeks to provide dramaturgical support to writers at all stages of their careers, with a special focus on deepening the opportunities for artists who hope to put down professional roots in Boston and surrounding cities.

Alum Emily Kaye Lazzaro: an experience of the first-ever Dramatists Guild Conference

You guys! I got back on Sunday from the first annual Dramatists Guild Conference. It was really great! Well, it was mostly great. Turns out conferences as a whole are very weird things. Also, I’m really shy, so it took me the majority of the conference to come out of my shell and make some friends. But then I did make friends! So that was great. Great great great. Here’s the thing about playwrights: we’re all so crazy to even be pursuing this as a profession that whenever we meet another person who is also stupidly doing this it’s like finding a kindred spirit. It’s such a weird, niche thing to do. I saw that this was really true when I got home and had dinner with a bunch of (non-theatre) friends and tried to tell them that I talked to Doug Wright! And David Ives sat next to me at the bar! And Christopher Durang sat on the couch next to me to wait for his taxi! And nobody cared. My friends, I mean. Just because, if you didn’t see I Am My Own Wife then you don’t know how moving and thrilling and imaginative it was. And if you were never an actor then you were never in All In The Timing in school. And you might never have read anything by Durang. Because most people don’t read or see those plays. We’re making art for a very small (some would say elite) group of people. Uh oh! Sad face alert! This is the part of the recap where I tell you about the theme that kept popping up at the conference: theatre is hard and nobody likes it! Haha. No, it’s not hard. It’s fun. And lots of people like it. But the economics are all wrong. It’s too expensive and playwrights don’t get any money, ever.

Steve Barkhimer on the Adventurous Life

Steve Barkhimer

Revered Boston actor (currently appearing with fellow BPT alum Richard Snee in Alan Ayckbourn's Living Together at Gloucester Stage), director and alumni playwright Steven Barkhimer talks to us amid a hundred projects. We caught up with him on email. 

What are you working on now?
I’ve been enlisted to help create a set of shows, three of which previewed as workshop productions in April and May 2011. Ben Evett, who started the Actors Shakespeare Project, had an idea for a theatre event, a sort of mini-series, which would be neither a fixture like Shear Madness nor simply an open-ended soap-opera. The hope, of course, is to have a number of shows, each of which stands independently and is satisfying in itself, but would spark an interest in seeing the whole series.

I’m working, incrementally, on writing and re-writing several other plays, including one for which the Massachusetts Cultural Council kindly granted me an Artist Fellowship Award. That one is fancifully autobiographical; among the others are a historical drama in verse and song, one is more brooding American-mythic, another is science-as-performance-piece; another is an adaptation of ancient classic from India -- I'll spend six weeks of my summer in India, in fact, trying to enlist some reliable assistance on that.

I’m slated to appear in, and provide music for, a production of Twelfth Night for the Actors Shakespeare Project this fall and will direct The Merry Wives of Windsor for them in the winter. Very exciting.

Works by Metzler, Zacarías part of SCR’s 2011-12 season

Karen Zacarías

Plays by two BPT alums will be part of South Coast Rep’s 2011-12 season!

Molly Smith Metzler’s Elemeno Pea, which had its world premiere – and was a massive hit – this spring at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New Plays is scheduled to open on the main stage next January. Karen Zacarías’ Jane of the Jungle (a musical commissioned by SCR and written in collaboration with Deborah Wicks La Puma) will be part of SCR’s Theatre for Young Audiences programming next spring.

[A shout-out to Catherine Trieschmann as well, who is on the SCR calendar this fall with her new play How the World Began. A Kansas-based playwright, she is not an alum herself, but we can consider Catherine part of BPT’s extended family: She is the cousin of alum Werner Trieschmann, and also happened to go to high school with this writer.]

On this coast, a couple of quick updates: Zayd Dohrn’s Outside People will have its world premiere at Naked Angels this fall (dates TBA). Wes Savick’s Remembering H.M. will be at Central Square Theater next spring (produced by Underground Railway Theater and MIT), followed by his musical Car Talk (his collaboration with Michael Wartofsky, which this spring had a student production at Suffolk University) next summer at URT.

Big congrats to all!!!

An interview with a local playwright and an update on the DG Conference

Local playwright and Huntington Fellow, Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, who has a production in the forthcoming Huntington season, recently garnered some recognition when she was interviewed by Adam Szymkowicz. Read more about Rosanna, her upcoming projects, and her experience as a Huntington Fellow.

Also, an update on the Dramatists' Guild Conference: In

addition to watching it life, 2AM Theatre will be live-blogging during the conference. If you don't know about this online community already, learn more about 2AM Theatre and follow #2AMt on twitter.

Thanks to Ilana Brownstein for the updates. Get more updates like these by joining the Facebook group, Boston & New English Playwrights.

What's the "deal"?

StageSource posted this intriguing photo of BPT Managing Director Jake Strautmann "dealing a deck of Jeff Poulos cards" on Facebook yesterday, to promote its upcoming Hero Bash. Can't tell who's winning here. This year’s event honors 2011 “hero” Jeff Poulos, the organization’s past executive director.

Thank you StageSource, for all you do to support theatre in Boston!

DG to live stream events from national conference this week

Great news for those of us unable to travel to the Dramatists Guild’s national conference in Fairfax, VA later this week: The Guild will be live streaming select events, according to an e-blast sent out yesterday. Here are the details:

 

New Play TV Live Streaming Directions

In partnership with Arena Stage, the Guild is pleased to announce that a select number of events at this year's conference in Fairfax will be videotaped for live streaming on the web. For those unable to join us, follow the instructions below to view events either in real time or after the fact, by searching the archive of NewPlay TV channel offerings.

Go to the #NEWPLAY TV channel’s webpage to watch the events live – no login necessary

http://livestream.com/newplay

Kushner Making a Living as a Playwright, Not.

Thank you to our friends at Colab and Stagesource for picking this one as it hit the blogosphere last week.   If Tony Kushner can't make a living as a playwright,  how could we?

Read more here.











And if you're interested in the book Outrageous Fortune.  Pick it up here.  (A review of this book will be forthcoming on this blog as part of our summer reading list. There's a summer reading list?  There is now.)

We all had a terrific time

L-R: K. Alexa Mavromatis, Emily K. Lazarro, Walt McGough, Colleen Hughes, Masha Obolensky, Anna Renee Pattison

BPT alums (see some of us in the rather bizarrely-lit photo above) were among the playwrights who turned out last night at Stoddard's for Playwright Night Out, organized by Playwrights' Commons.

Playwrights: Don't miss the chance to mix and mingle -- online and off -- with your Boston-area colleagues. If you haven't already, join the Boston & New England Playwrights group on Facebook to learn about future networking events, community issues and news, and to receive other updates.

Thanks Ilana and Corianna!