Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2017 i American Theatre

UNLIKE CHINA’S FILM INDUSTRY, WHICH IS constantly in the limelight, Chinese theatre enjoys the benefits of the shadows, so to speak. Without the tight scrutiny of the public or the censors, it has mushroomed into an art form with an almost unimaginable range of diverse works. On the other hand, most of these have failed to find even a limited audience, let alone commercial viability. According to an official report, Beijing alone saw 24,440 live performances for the year 2016, registering 1.7 billion yuan ($247.7 million) in box-office receipts and 10.7 million total viewers. Pop concerts accounted for 593 million yuan, the biggest category, followed by various dramatic arts, with 260 million yuan. Beijing has the highest concentration of both venues and performances. One should, however, refrain from extrapolating the…

LOOKING BACK, FRANCINE REYNOLDS CONCEDED that the decision to program Best of Enemies was, in her words, “naïve.” Reynolds, artistic director of New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Miss., wasn’t even thinking about the then-upcoming 2016 election season, and, like many Americans, she couldn’t have imagined the outcome. In the ensuing climate of sharp political and social divides, Mark St. Germain’s 2011 play—based on the true story of a Ku Klux Klan leader and a Civil Rights activist who clashed over the desegregation of public schools in Durham, N.C., in 1971—took on a whole new meaning. “I was thinking we’d celebrate how far we’ve come,” said Reynolds, who directed Best of Enemies at New Stage Feb. 28-March 12. “I still think that’s something to do—to look at what has occurred since…

WHAT DO KIRSTEN CHILDS’S MUSICALS HAVE in common? They’ve almost all sprung from “some off-thewall inspiration,” the writer/composer insists. W “I see something that sets me down a path that, perhaps, would send someone else down a different path,” says Childs, whose latest musical, Bella: An American Tall Tale, is another work that could only have come from her fertile imagination. Bella’s path to the stage began when Childs saw a woman walking down a city street, holding the men around her “spellbound.” The woman had what Childs described as a fertility goddess figure—“full-bodied, big thighs, big bottom. This is not what we are told men find attractive in a woman!” The street scene fascinated Childs. “I’ve always known that there was this sort of attractiveness, but then you always…

NATIONWIDE: In March President Donald J. Trump released his budget blueprint for fiscal year 2018. Among many proposed cuts to domestic programs was the elimination of federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with a $54 billion increase in defense spending. Though the rationale for the cuts is to reduce the deficit, which now stands at $441 billion, combined funding for the NEA and NEH is just $300 million, itself a tiny fraction of annual federal discretionary spending, which is $1.1 trillion. The White House also called for $18 billion in federal cuts for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The proposal includes a $15 million cut to the NEA, which…

Lighting designer Emmett H. Buhmann is “trying to make a lecture hall behave like a theatre” for Company One’s new production of Jiehae Park’s peerless, the tale of a pair of high school siblings determined to get into their dream university, staged April 27-May 27 in Rabb Lecture Hall at the Boston Public Library. His big challenge, he says, are the walls. It’s “a very large, very tall, very beautiful ‘blonde’ room. This sort of bright environment is difficult to control when attempting to create isolations, so the design team has been hard at work determining the mechanics for this. Through the combination of scenic art, projection, and lighting, we have layered elements in an attempt to keep the audience’s eyes from trailing up and away from the action. The…

fter a brief out-of-town tryout near Shanghai, the cast, crew, and creative team of the new Chinese jukebox musical The Secret journeyed north to Beijing for opening night last Dec. 23. It was a bad time to travel, as “airpocalypse”—the worst air pollution of 2016—circled the capital city, grounding hundreds of flights. With restrictions on vehicles based on license plate numbers (to reduce road traffic), trucks carrying the physical production of The Secret had to be directed to the outskirts of Beijing, then unloaded and reloaded into vehicles with the right-numbered license plates for the day, before finally arriving at the Tianqiao Performing Arts Center. Strolling through the Temple of Heaven park opposite the theatre the day before opening night, Marc Acito, the show’s librettist, recalled some of the challenges…

WILL DAVIS IS HAVING A REALIZATION OVER lunch. We’re dining at a café in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood on an unseasonably warm February day, and he’s talking about his attraction to William Inge’s plays—a journey, he’s just now remembering, that had its start not that far from where we’re sitting. One of the director’s first jobs was as Damon Kiely’s assistant on Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs in 2006 at the Windy City’s American Theater Company (ATC), where Kiely was artistic director at the time. Working on that show was Davis’s introduction to Inge, whose body of work has haunted him for years. In particular the unquenched longing in Picnic has been at the forefront of his mind. So it’s no surprise that the 1953 chestnut…

The following is an edited transcript of a Theatre History podcast on HowlRound.com, in which Michael Lueger, who teaches world drama at Emerson College in Boston, conversed with Siyuan Liu, associate professor in theatre studies at the University of British Columbia and editor of Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre. MICHAEL LUEGER: For many of us who perform in or teach theatre, myself included, non-Western theatrical cultures are something of a blind spot. And that’s especially true when it comes to the more recent history of theatre in China. In your book Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China, you examine the first form of modern Chinese theatre, wenmingxi. Also in the 20th century, a form known as huaju emerged. What do these terms mean? SIYUAN LIU: They are both forms of modern…

Compensation Isn’t a Competition I am writing in response to “How Theatre Work Adds Up” by Diep Tran (Feb. ’17). I was drawn to your compensationthemed issue, in part because of my former life as a LORT [League of Resident Theatres] manager, and especially because of my work with the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), which day in and day out is about ensuring artists get paid. I imagine that AT hopes, as we do at SDC Journal, that your readers find the time to read each article thoroughly— absorbing, analyzing, and reflecting on content therein and becoming better informed. To improve our chances of landing our audience, we add graphics and images to catch their eye and hold their attention. We want to inspire them, and feel successful…

The cleverly sobering axiom “May you live in interesting times” does not originate, despite several popular citations, as a Chinese curse. Instead its provenance has been traced to a speech by a U.S. Senator in the late 1930s, himself quoting a British statesman who’d never visited China himself but said he’d heard it from a British diplomat stationed there. This game of international telephone handily captures a truth about distorted perceptions of China in the West, and in the U.S. especially: Is there a major world culture about which the average American knows less and misunderstands more? Domestically we have a shameful history with people of all Asian heritages, but it’s worth remembering that our original “yellow peril” hysteria was directed at Chinese laborers in the 19th century. And while…

YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT CONTEMPORARY CHINESE theatre for very long without hearing Stan Lai’s name. Though born, partly educated, and frequently employed in the U.S.—and though his home base has long been Taipei in Taiwan, not mainland China—Lai, 62, has been a force in Chinese-language theatre and film for decades. In addition to writing and directing (his iconic theatre works include That Evening, We Performed Crosstalk; A Dream Like a Dream; and Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land), he’s been a prolific theatre founder: In the early 1980s he started Performance Workshop in Taipei with his wife, Ding Nai-chu; in 2013 he cofounded the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, an international gathering in an idyllic canal town each October, with mainland director Meng Jinghui, actor Huang Lei, and real-estate developer Chen Xianghong;…

TONI MORRISON’S NOVEL JAZZ MIRRORS THE ensemble structure of the music. The novel requires us, in the words of Ralph Ellison, to listen “on the lower frequencies” to hear and understand the different sides of the characters’ stories. Also like jazz, Morrison’s novel gives voice to a particular black experience, and shows that understanding it can require shifting the audience’s perceptions. T Likewise playwright Nambi E. Kelley’s work hinges on developing devices to help audiences to see black characters, and the real people they represent, with fresh eyes. As with her adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son for Court Theatre and American Blues Theater in Chicago in 2014, her play based on Morrison’s Jazz for Center Stage in Baltimore (May 19-June 25), helmed by artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah, stages the…

Here’s what’s playing this month at TCG theatres nationwide. For the most up-to-date information about performance schedules, contact the theatre or visit Theatre Profiles online: tcg.org/profiles. ALABAMA Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Montgomery, (334) 271-5353, asf.net The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare. Thru May 13. Sherlock Holmes, Thru May 13. The Tempest, adapt: Kenneth Cavender from Shakespeare. Thru May 14. Southern Writers’ Project, May 12-14. ALASKA Cyrano’s Theatre Company, Anchorage, (907) 274-2599, cyranos.org TBA, May 1 1 -Jun 4. Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre, fstalaska.org TBA, Shakespeare. Jun 23-24. Perseverance Theatre, Douglas, (907) 463-8497, perseverancetheatre.org To Kill a Mockingbird, adapt: Christopher Sergel; dir: Art Rotch. Thru May 7. ARIZONA Arizona Theatre Company, Tucson, (520) 622-2823, arizonatheatre.org Holmes and Watson, Jeffrey Hatcher. Thru May 6 (Tucson); May 1 1 -28 (Phoenix). Childsplay, Tempe, (480) 350-2822, childsplayaz.org Wonderland: Alice’s Rock & Roll…