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The Present - Sydney Theatre Company

Cate Blanchett stars in the adaptation of Chekhov’s first play, adapted by her husband, Andrew Upton, presented by the Sydney Theatre Company.

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The Winter’s Tale - Citizen’s Theatre

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The Town Hall Affair - The Wooster Group

“THE TOWN HALL AFFAIR delves into the revolutionary fervor of feminist thinking and art “happenings” in 1970s New York. The piece is based on the Hegedus & Pennebaker film Town Bloody Hall which documents a panel held at Town Hall in 1971. The panel featured feminist thinkers and activists – including Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling – with Norman Mailer serving as moderator.”

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The Glass Menagerie

“The experience I had doing this play in Amsterdam was life-changing, and the fact that we’ve managed to put together this cast to do it on Broadway is the most perfect outcome I could have imagined. Like any sane person, I’ve been hoping for Sally Field to carve out some time to do a play again. When I saw her Mary Todd Lincoln, I started dreaming of her as Amanda Wingfield. As for Joe Mantello, seeing that original production of Angels in America, in which he starred, was a great source of inspiration for me at the time. Because Joe is such a wonderful director, he has had very little time to act. I'm incredibly lucky that he has agreed to come back to the stage to play Tom.” - Director Sam Gold

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3-Legged Dog

“3-Legged Dog exists to produce new, original works in theater, performance, media and hybrid forms.  Working out of a strong literary tradition, our mission is to explore the new narrative possibilities created by digital technology, and to provide an environment for our artists to create new tools and modes of expression so that they can excel across a range of disciplines.”

Mac Wellman’s The Offending Gesture

Vaclav Havel’s Hunt For A Pig

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Excerpt from SITI Company's bobrauschenbergamerica

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House of No More - Big Art Group

“House of No More is the third and final part of a conceptual trilogy of 'Real-Time Film' begun with the works Shelf Life and Flicker. In this last part, the performance starts with the reenactment of a crime experienced by "Julia", a woman who thrusts herself on screen in her quest for her missing child. But simultaneously as this thin premise unfolds, the performers develop an antithesis-- that the story is being faked as it is being created, that even as it is conjured, it is being dispelled. And yet, as Julia herself dissolves into this corrupt transmission, even as she herself becomes ghostly and multiplied across the reality of her life; what emerges is not a battle for the ownership of an absolute truth, but a thirst for a satiating lie.”

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Commune - The Performance Group

“COMMUNE, a built piece based on American communal living in the '70 and the Charles Manson murders, by The Performance Group, directed by Richard Schechner at The Performing Garage, NYC, 1971. The ground plan shows the main architectural seating on multi-levels surrounding a main playing area, although performers and audience mingled among each other. The photo shows the spectators seated dangling their feet in various-sized areas. The metaphor used for the environment was a 19th century sailing ship suggested by rope handrails and ship's ladders.”

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[stagetoday]

The Mercury Theatre: Caesar

“This was the company’s first production, opening Nov. 11, 1937. Addressing its current relevance, Welles wrote in a press release, “Our Julius Caesar gives a picture of the same kind of hysteria that exists in certain dictator-ruled countries of today...our moral, if you will, is that not assassination, but education of the masses, permanently removes dictatorships.”

Welles continued to refine a style he’d begun with Faustus, viewing the stage as a canvas. Stage manager Ash says, “when (Welles) directed it was visual--he saw how it would look. Then he put people there.”

“Welles's modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar, streamlined into an anti-fascist tour de force that Joseph Cotten later described as "so vigorous, so contemporary that it set Broadway on its ear." The set was completely open with no curtain, and the brick stage walls were painted dark red. Scene changes were achieved by lighting alone. On the stage was a series of risers; squares were cut into one riser at intervals and lights were set beneath it, pointing straight up to evoke the "cathedral of light" at the Nuremberg Rallies. "He staged it like a political melodrama that happened the night before," said Norman Lloyd, who played the role of Cinna the Poet.”

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Mining the drama of everyday life in 'Gulf View Drive'

“Throughout the “Nibroc Trilogy,” playwright Hutton has shown how the everyday lives of fundamentally decent people can be every bit as compelling as those who break bad. They can also inspire in face of ever-present social issues. Along their journey, her characters have had to cope with disability, unemployment, sexism, spousal abuse and illiteracy. Amid the racist undercurrents of a pre-civil rights era, Raleigh and May face a final test of character that we all could only hope to pass with as much integrity.”

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Nocturnes: A Process Documentary

“As we start making our next show Nocturnes we’ve decided to try and open up the rehearsal space a little and show a bit about the process behind our work. Made with Leeds company Sodium this is a very short insight into how and why we make the work. We’ll follow this up next year with more as we develop the piece.”

Read more about Nocturnes here.

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Give Them a Hand: Puppet Artists Are Having a Moment

“It was a puppet invasion — all part of the 11-day Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival — and the latest proof that puppetry, a delicate and mysterious art so often restricted in this country to the children’s table, or relegated to fringe productions, has claimed a spot closer to the center. In an age when we seek relief from the relentless barrage of technology, this low-fi, handmade form provides it.” 

“You can see the shift in The New York Times, with mention of puppets now commonplace in theater reviews. But then, New York is the puppetry capital of America, where boundary-pushing directors like Lee Breuer and Julie Taymor have spent decades harnessing that hybrid art — part visual, part performance — to create fantastical worlds heavily influenced by foreign traditions.”

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‘Yen’ Is a Den of Family Dysfunction

“Physical affection is a lost art in the broken family of Anna Jordan’s “Yen,” a violent play about tender feelings, which opened on Tuesday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater. For the two teenage half brothers at the center of this British drama, to touch is to violate, to attack and, as like as not, to bruise.

“Yen,” which originated at the Royal Exchange Theater in Manchester, belongs squarely to that tradition, which might be called motherless England plays. Hench and Bobbie are clinical specimens of parental neglect, children of darkness who leave their filthy flat only to steal the barest necessities of existence.”

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Meredith Monk

“When I think about Meredith Monk, I think of her alone, on a stage bereft of instruments or props or other people. Whether in a cavernous concert hall or in a tiny club, the vision of her lone self is dramatic. With a slight tilt of the head and a grounding of the body, she opens her mouth and begins to sing. In this simplest of actions, she reveals extraordinary power.”

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Richard Foreman’s ‘Idiot Savant’

“Foreman uses language like paint; he sketches a line, or drips some words, the better to emphasize their thingness. Rarely does he ask speech to do anything as simple as clarify a point or establish a character’s motivation. He embraces mystification and flux. In the introduction to his 1989 play “Lava” (Foreman’s essays on his own work are as brilliant and as elegantly composed as George Bernard Shaw’s), he wrote, “There are writers who despair that a gap exists between the self and the words that come, but for me that gap is the field of all creativity—it’s an ecstatic field rather than a field of despair. . . . It’s the unfathomable from which everything pours forth.”’

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Robert Wilson’s Hamletmachine

“The German writer Freilgrath, a close friend to Karl Marx, said: ‘Germany is Hamlet, never quite knowing how to decide and because of that always making wrong decisions.’ When I wrote Hamletmachine, after translating Shakespeare’s Hamlet for a theater in East Berlin, it turned out to be my most American play, quoting T.S. Eliot, Andy Warhol, Coca Cola, Ezra Pound and Susan Atkins. It may be read as a pamphlet against the illusion that one can stay innocent in this our world. I am glad that Robert Wilson does my play, his theatre being a world of its own.” — Heiner Müller

“By not illustrating the text but instead juxtaposing his very American (under)-world figures, Wilson enables the spoken word to be heard and understood. The text happens within a sound scape, in which it becomes hard to tell what is live and what is being broadcast over microphone and speaker. Only rarely is the text spoken directly by a single actor without first taking an electronic detour. The text doesn’t manifest itself visually but acoustically, and it does so with considerable clarity and plasticity.” — Henning Rischbieter

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Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi

“Noguchi designed about twenty sets for Martha Graham’s dance productions, including Serpent and Spider Dress for Cave of the Heart. During the performance, Graham stood on Serpent, donned the dress, and continued to dance in the flashing metal cage.

Of his theatrical collaborations, Noguchi said, “There is joy in seeing sculpture come to life on the stage in its own world of timeless time. Then the very air becomes charged with meaning and emotion, and form plays its integral part in the re-enactment of a ritual. Theater is a ceremonial; the performance is a rite. Sculpture in daily life should or could be like this. In the meantime, the theater gives me its poetic, exalted equivalent.”

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