Some of my favorite evenings in the theatre have left me irritated. Not mildly dissatisfied with the parking or wishing the second act were shorter, but irritated by what the play had made me confront. I didn’t want to have a drink with its characters. I didn’t approve of their decisions. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I approved of the playwright’s. But days later, I was still arguing with the thing. That seems like a respectable achievement for an evening in a room. [m

Five actors walk onto a stage, and an entire world follows them. A mother becomes a magistrate, a lover returns as a stranger, and someone who died before intermission is suddenly serving drinks. Let's explore the theatrical possibilities of a small ensemble playing a multitude of characters — and what makes an audience happily follow along. [more]

A production closes. The set comes down, the costumes go into storage, and everyone moves on — or says they do. But certain shows keep running somewhere in the back of your mind. In this episode, we talk about the productions that stay with us and how they shape the work that follows. [more]

Sometimes the plan needs to change. The project stalls, the audience doesn’t respond, or the brilliant idea turns out to be considerably less brilliant in practice. In this episode of Nutty & Slutty, we talk about how to adjust course without making everyone who believed in the original direction feel foolish for showing up. [more]

The first act gets to make promises. The second act has to keep them. That is an unforgiving change in working conditions. At the beginning of a play, a stranger walking through a door can be fascinating simply because we don’t know who she is. By the second act, novelty has spent much of its allowance. We know the people. We understand the trouble. Now the playwright has to make something happen that justifies all the attention we’ve already paid. [more]

Somewhere along the way, “relatable” became one of the highest compliments we could pay a character. Audiences want to see themselves; producers want protagonists who test well; writers are advised to give everyone recognizable wounds, ordinary desires, and redeeming flaws. But recognition is not the same as engagement. Great characters do not need to resemble us. They need to reveal something we cannot stop looking at. [more]

A play does not hold together merely because every event follows logically from the one before it. Logic is useful, but it is not the same as coherence. A play holds together because everything — the characters, conflicts, images, jokes, reversals and silences — is pulled toward the same invisible center. [more]

play can be rehearsed for weeks and still remain unfinished. The actors may know every entrance, the director may have shaped every pause, and the playwright may believe every line has found its proper place. But until an audience enters the theatre, everyone has been working with a theory. The audience is the test. [more]

Playwrights tend to think dialogue is what characters say. But dialogue is also what they refuse to say, cannot say, or desperately hope someone else will say first. Silence is not an absence of dialogue. It is dialogue stripped of words. Onstage, a silence can accuse, seduce, punish, protect, surrender, or lie. It can be the loudest moment in the play. But only if the playwright knows what is being said beneath it. [more]

Every writer knows the line. It may be witty, lyrical, devastating or startlingly true. The moment you wrote it, you felt the whole piece rise to meet it. You underlined it. You quoted it to friends. You waited for actors to discover it in rehearsal. Then, sooner or later, you confronted the terrible possibility that the line you loved most did not belong in the play. [more]