Theatre that feels contemporary without sacrificing the enduring questions that have kept Greek drama alive for more than two millennia. [more]

Adapting Greek theatre for a modern audience is less about making ancient plays "relevant" than revealing how relevant they already are. The central conflicts in Greek drama — power, revenge, justice, family, war, faith, and identity — remain as urgent today as they were 2,500 years ago. The challenge is translating the form, not the emotions. [more]

If you ask an aspiring playwright how to write a successful play, you'll hear a familiar list of rules. Show, don't tell. Build realistic characters. Never address the audience. Keep the action moving. Hide the machinery of the theatre. Then there's Thornton Wilder. He ignored nearly every one of those rules — and wrote some of the greatest plays in the American canon.

A show "doesn't work" when the audience understands what is happening but doesn't feel what is happening. The machinery of theatre is functioning, but the dramatic experience isn't. This can happen in many different ways. [more]

One of the most common mistakes beginning playwrights make is starting with an answer. They know what they want to say. They have a theme. They have a moral. They have a position on politics, love, family, religion, capitalism, or art. The play becomes an elaborate demonstration of a conclusion they reached before writing the first scene. But plays are not arguments. They are investigations. A play begins not with an answer, but with a question. [more]

Every producer says they want a hit. Yet theatre has always depended on flops. A flop is not merely a bad show. A flop is a show that costs more than it earns. The distinction matters. Some terrible productions make money. Some brilliant productions lose it. The economics of a flop reveal a peculiar truth about the theatre business: success and failure are often determined long before the curtain rises. [more]

One of the paradoxes of acting is that repetition is essential, but repetition is deadly. A play may run for weeks, months, or years. The actor says the same words, crosses to the same places, picks up the same glass, opens the same door. Yet the audience must never feel they are watching something repeated. More importantly, the actor must never feel it. The challenge is to play the same scene for the first time, every time. [more]

Playwrights like to believe the script is the play. Directors like to believe the production is the play. Audiences generally don't care which is true. They experience the event in front of them. And one of the most powerful authors of that event is the room itself. [more]

On August 14, 2003, one of the largest power failures in North American history plunged much of the northeastern United States and parts of Canada into darkness. More than 50 million people were affected. Cities stopped. Elevators froze. Traffic lights died. Subways stalled between stations. And then there was Broadway.

Every performance has two casts: the actors onstage and the audience in the seats. The script may be identical from night to night. The blocking may be fixed. The lighting cues may fire at precisely the same moment. Yet no two performances are ever the same because no two audiences are ever the same. [more]