Every week, I’ve been doing a deep dive into cultural issues, usually theater-related, that are bothering me or that deserve a second look. But who needs another thinkpiece, right? I host two weekly programs on my theater company’s Faceboook page (Facebook.com/EpicTheatreCo) where I ask guests what has been keeping them creatively engaged or excited, and […]
I used to have a joke I’d make whenever somebody would tell me their theater needed to raise money fast. “Well,” I’d say, “you could always do To Kill a Mockingbird.” Sometimes when you deal in the commodities of art, things can be both profound and profitable, and you grapple with whether the profitability somehow […]
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” Through April 11, The Players at Barker Playhouse treated audiences to an emotionally intense and creatively directed streaming version of The Year of Magical Thinking, and the result was breathtaking. In 2005, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking was published […]
The last time I stepped foot in the Providence Performing Arts Center, it was to see the splendid tour of Hello Dolly! that played to less than full houses because of concerns rippling through the news that there was a strange new virus making people sick. I remember dismissing that in my review of the […]
Soon after graduating from college with a degree in theater and a lot of uncertainty as to what my next steps should be, I decided that networking might be the way to go. That led to me buying a ticket to a fundraiser at a theater where I had seen several productions while in school. […]
This past weekend, April 8 – 10, Christopher Johnson debuted his workshop performance of Invoice For Emotional Labor. The streamed, recorded performance was presented by the Wilbury Theatre Group, in collaboration with the CCRI Players and Community College of Rhode Island. Having witnessed readings of pieces of this work-in-progress over the past two years in […]
“I think we just need to focus on getting the message out that we’re back. We’re back and it’s safe. I think that’s a big enough task in and of itself.” This was a statement made toward the end of what truly felt like an endless Zoom meeting at the end of a very long […]
“If I hadn’t believed in you I wouldn’t have loved you at all” One of the great ironies that’ll be written about when people start assessing what the performing arts was like during the pandemic is that most of us only started figuring out how to do this whole digital theater thing right as the […]
“Do you think theater will survive?” Believe it or not, I started getting asked this question long before the pandemic struck. I would be asked to come in and do a Q&A at a college or attend a talkback for a play I’d written, and more often than not, somebody would ask some version of […]
Governor Dan McKee released his $11.2 billion budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year today in a budget briefing with the press. He inherits a big task from predecessor Gina Raimondo — balancing a deficit of $336 million dollars with some new budget priorities. Federal dollars will provide a big boost to state and local […]