AMERICAN THEATRE: On a sweltering night in early June, a group assembled at the Labyrinth Theater Company in New York City for a reading of Micheline Auger’s #Love95Times. As friends greeted each other and everyone made their way to their seats, they watched as prominent stage actors, including Daphne Rubin-Vega, walked up onstage to sit side by side with young college students, who gasped upon seeing who’d just shown up to occupy the space beside them. Someone remarked the two groups on the stage were like “the Jets and the Sharks”; the crowd laughed.
2 comments:
I love that this program exists and I wish that more colleges would incorporate that element of collaboration. This articles gives me insight into the process it takes to write a play. I liked the comment about how writing for a show actually condenses the process. That rings very true in any creative process. Often limiting factors, like time and and resources have helped me limit the project, and thus improves it. I feel lucky that CMU allows for devised works because I think it helps young playwrights to be able to see and their work on stage. Also it is one of the most direct ways to engage the audience, because no one can write about millennial issues better than millennials themselves. I like that it gives young playwrights the chance to take risks they probably wouldn’t otherwise be able to take. As the article mentions, regional theaters have to different factors to consider than college theaters.
I think it is so important to have student play writers have the opportunity to see there work come to to life. Further more it also really important that students designers have the opportunity to actually be apart of a show from the ground up. After all isn’t that the point a making theatre our profession. If you became a designer just to recreate the shows you love you would get bored pretty quickly. I had the most fun designing a show that one, the author was still alive and could answer any question you had. You also get the learn the show in a more intimate way. Plus it has the amazing effect, because you are truly creating something from nothing, rather than recreating something that someone has already done before. With that being said its also a dangerous to have student writer and then student lean production.
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