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]

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]

This is my 200th blog post. I wish I could say I began with a grand plan — that I knew what this blog would become and where all those words would lead me. I didn’t. I simply had things I wanted to say.

Theatre people love to speak of productions that “work.” The phrase suggests a well-built machine: every beat lands, every scene turns, every performance belongs to the same world. But some of the most memorable nights I’ve spent in a theatre did not work — not completely. They were uneven, overreaching, occasionally baffling and sometimes downright misguided. Their failures were not evidence of indifference. They were the bruises left by ambition. [more]

Theatre should leave a bruise. Not necessarily a wound, and certainly not a lesion neatly bandaged before the audience goes home. But something should remain tender after the lights come up — a thought you cannot touch without feeling it again. You should carry some evidence of the encounter into the street. Otherwise, why gather living people in a room to watch other living people risk themselves in front of us? [more]

There is a moment in almost every table read when the play quietly leaves the room. It usually happens after a promising beginning. The actors are engaged. The jokes are landing. Then the reading ends, everyone looks down at the script, and somebody says: “On page seventeen, would she really say she took the freeway? Wouldn’t she say the 101?” And just like that, the discussion has begun — not about the play, but about the freeway. [more]

Writers are terrified the audience won’t understand. So we explain. Then we explain the explanation. Then, just to be safe, another character enters and explains it again. By the time we are finished, no one in the audience is confused. They are simply bored. [more]

Every writer has one. The play we circle but never begin. The screenplay whose title has been sitting in a folder for years. The book we describe many times it has become a form of procrastination. We tell ourselves the subject needs more research. The structure isn’t clear. We’re too busy with other projects. All of which may be true. But it isn’t the truth. [more]

The American theatre likes to describe itself as a home for new voices. But producing a new play is rarely a simple vote of confidence in a playwright. It is a financial decision disguised as an artistic one. [more]

Early in their careers — before David Mamet wrote only polemics and Neil LaBute wrote the same play over and over again — they were often grouped together because both wrote combative dialogue about power, masculinity, sex, and betrayal. But they made speech work in fundamentally different ways. [more]

Theatre is the only major art form that is designed to disappear. A novel remains on the shelf. A film can be streamed decades later. A painting hangs in a museum, growing more valuable with age. But a play exists only in the strange agreement between actors and audience that, for the next two hours, this imagined world is real. When the curtain falls, that world vanishes. Every production is an act of planned extinction. [more]

There is a strange moment after a standing ovation. The audience rises. The applause swells. Actors embrace one another backstage. Friends congratulate you in the lobby. Someone tells you they've never seen anything like it. Another says your play moved them to tears. You smile. You say thank you. And somewhere in the back of your mind a voice whispers: "The second act still drags." [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]

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]

There is an old saying in theatre that you had to be there. It sounds like an excuse for exaggeration, but anyone who has spent enough time in a theatre knows it's true. Some performances survive beautifully on film. Others become almost incomprehensible once they're separated from the electricity of a shared room. The difference isn't talent. It's the mysterious chemistry that exists only between actor and audience. [more]

The house lights have come up, the audience is stretching, and the conversations have already begun. Some people seem certain about what they've just seen. They know what they think, how they feel, and where the story is headed. I am not one of them. [more]

In theatre, the loud moments get remembered. The quiet moments get believed. A standing ovation usually arrives after the emotional explosion — the breakdown, the confession, the eleven-o’clock number. But what often lingers days later is something smaller: a pause before an answer, a character sitting in silence, two people avoiding eye contact at a kitchen table. [more]

A theatrical star isn’t just someone who performs well — they bend the space around them. The audience tracks them even in stillness. Directors build moments for them. And other actors, consciously or not, adjust their energy in response. [more]