Playwriting
Far away from any coastline. Where the wind strikes the water for the first time. Where waves start to grow. A young wave stretches its quivering back, reaching for the wind.
A CAST of eight: ACTOR, CHEF, COMPOSER, DANCER, FILMMAKER, PAINTER, and siblings: SISTER and BROTHER. If necessary, ACTOR may be played by a PHOTOGRAPHER.
Capaurisces (pronounced “kuh-pour-i-ces”)—a combination of a far-flung galaxy made of “99.99 percent dark matter” and an artist colony in New Hampshire—is the unlikely setting for Daaimah Mubashshir’s The Immeasurable Want of Light, a collection of short plays recently published in book form as part of the playwright’s ongoing project Everyday Afroplay. Beginning in 2016, Mubashshir developed a daily writing practice in response to Chris Ofili’s Afro Muses painting series, offering a sustained meditation on Blackness and the Black body.
The Restless Souls novelist on reading his reviews, working as a medical equipment tester, and writing responsibly about war and trauma.
The playwright discusses his formative years, rejuvenation of historical material, and how race is coded into theatergoing itself.
It takes a rare kind of playwright to evoke the head-spinning contradictions in our national political psyches.
A play that updates European absurdist techniques to take aim at liberal America’s great existential troubles: race and gender.
This guide is for women who feel that they will soon be engaged in a new revolution to overthrow the soul-crushing social codes that govern their sexual, professional, and familial lives.
“Women in Denmark should be both women and men at the same time, but ‘men’ and ‘women’—what does that mean?”
“There’s the scientific and mathematical—how stuff is—and there’s the prosaic, the poetic—how people are.”
New York sees two of the playwright’s most recent works performed this fall, The Flick and John. She talks with Kan about her fondness for Chekhov’s plays, writing for certain actors, and the music of speech.
Madness, melodrama, mundanity, and the legacy of Antonin Artaud.
While the now-accepted wisdom is that Bertolt Brecht was one of the major dramatists of the past century, this same acceptance often tends to obscure the most unique aspect of his work, namely: his struggle through the decades to find new ways to present his deep political and social commitment—not just in his subject matter, but, equally, in the formal strategies of his distinctive theatrical form.
Tina Satter speaks about formalism, her perverse sense of humour and the importance of family drama.
Katherine Cooper speaks to playwright Adriano Shaplin about baffled audiences, favoring amateurism over professionalism, and what The Crucible got wrong.
David Greenspan’s plays are at once grotesque and beautiful; they pontificate on meta-theater and self-consciousness, while remaining familiar and intimate.
“I went through a period in my twenties when I really resented the pressure to be happy that I felt from my parents and from the world at large, because aspiring to be happy doesn’t always lead to the most interesting life.”
“All art aspires toward music, so I try, as far as I can, to make a symphony out of the language.”
