There’s a quiet absurdity to submitting a play: you’ve made something intimate, alive and unruly — and now you’re asked to flatten it into PDFs, bios and word counts. The trick isn’t to eliminate the friction. It’s to contain it. Start by accepting that submission is a different craft than writing. You’re no longer discovering the play — you’re packaging it. That shift alone saves a great deal of anguish. [more]

Some plays aren’t fully written until an audience is present. On the page — or even in rehearsal — they can feel thin, repetitive or oddly paced. But in a room with people, they “close the circuit.” What’s missing is not text; it’s response. [more]

There’s a particular kind of presence — one that theatre people recognize immediately, even if it’s hard to name cleanly. We sometimes call it stillness with authority, or simply stage presence at rest. It’s the actor who doesn’t need motion to generate attention; the room organizes itself around them anyway. Not because they’re inert, but because everything in them is alive and contained. [more]

Somewhere along the way, a peculiar habit crept into the theatre. Plays stopped trusting themselves. Instead of drama — messy, human, contradictory — we began getting lectures with lighting cues. Characters step forward not to pursue their desires, but to deliver tidy arguments. Scenes pause so someone can explain the moral of the evening. Conflict evaporates because everyone already knows the correct position. [more]

The relationship between a director and a playwright has always contained a certain tension.  It is built into the nature of the work.  One person authored the thing; the other must make it live in space, time, and bodies.  When it works well, that tension sharpens the play.  When it fails, it becomes a struggle over ownership. [more]

In theatre, laughter behaves less like a private emotion and more like a physical event moving through a room.  Directors and comedians sometimes speak of it almost the way a musician speaks of acoustics: something with timing, momentum, and transmission. A few forces are at work. [more]

You just walked out of the theater. The lights are still too bright. You’re holding the program like it might explain what just happened. Okay. Let’s talk about that conversation. [more]

Not meaningless.  But absolutely … inflated. Here’s what happened. Once upon a time, a standing ovation meant: the audience was stunned; something transcendent just happened; you physically could not remain seated. Now? [more]

Ahhh, discounted tickets — the thing every theatre company needs and secretly resents at the same time. Let’s talk about how to handle them without tanking your revenue or your audience’s perception of value. [more]

When people say a director is “invisible” in theatre, they usually mean this: You don’t see the director’s hand; you just experience the play. It’s the opposite of a production where you walk out saying, “Wow, what a bold directorial concept.” Instead, you walk out saying, “That play wrecked me.” [more]

Short answer? Community theatre is as good as regional when the only real difference left is the paycheck. Let’s unpack it. Community theatre levels up fast when the director treats it like art instead of a hobby: clear concept; tight pacing; real table work; actual dramaturgy.

“Based on” and “Inspired by” look similar on a poster … but they behave very differently on the page and legally. Let’s untangle it. [more]

Short answer?  No. Longer, messier, more honest answer: theatre isn’t dead — it’s just not centerstage in the culture the way it once was. Theatre used to be where ideas went to fight.  Now those fights break out everywhere else first: streaming, podcasts, stand-up, YouTube, TikTok.  The culture didn’t stop wanting stories; it just stopped waiting for a curtain to rise. [more]

The theatre experience begins well before the curtain rises.  Don’t make your audience overcome obstacles before the lights dim.  If they’ve had to fight the website, repeatedly circle the block to find parking, feel foolish at the box office, read an unprofessional (or no) program or sit through a self-serving curtain speech, they arrive armored.  [more]

The play Doubt works powerfully onstage because it’s built for theatrical pressure, not cinematic expansion — and the film version exposes that mismatch. Onstage, the play thrives on confinement. The audience is trapped in the same moral box as the characters, forced to interrogate language, tone and silence.  Film, by contrast, opens the world up — and in Doubt, that openness weakens the core tension. [more]

When people talk about a screenplay “opening up” a stage play, they usually mean expanding space, time and visual language without losing the play’s core engine (language, power dynamics, theatrical tension). [more]

Because “bad” and “successful” measure different things. A play can be technically clumsy — thin characters, obvious themes, awkward dialogue — and still succeed because it hits a nerve that craft alone doesn’t control. [more]

There isn’t one single “best” seat for everyone — but there is a sweet spot, and it depends on what you value most. NOTE: These tips are for a theatre with 99 seats or more.  Smaller theatres typically have good seating options (except on the extreme sides), but the tips below can apply. Here’s the short, honest breakdown from a theatre-maker’s point of view for a large theatre. [more]

Trigger warning:  This post may piss you off. Theatre should make us uncomfortable.  That discomfort is not a flaw to be mitigated but the point: a live encounter with ideas, bodies and emotions we’d rather avoid.  Trigger warnings, when they pre-emptively sanitize experience, risk training audiences to manage their feelings instead of confronting them.  [more]

Watching a play as a theatre creator is different from watching it for pleasure. You’re not judging taste — you’re studying craft under pressure. Here’s how to do it without killing the magic. 1. Watch the problem, not the plot. Every play is trying to solve a dramatic problem. Ask early: What does this play need to make true? What tension is it built to sustain? What would break if one character disappeared? Don’t track events. Track necessity. [more]