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]

Exposition is the information the audience needs in order to understand what’s happening — who these people are, how this world works, what happened before now and what’s at stake. Exposition is pressure. It’s the past intruding on the present. It’s context arriving at a moment when it’s inconvenient, painful or destabilizing. [more]

In most stories: Protagonist = the character whose goal/need drives the plot. They make the key choices, take the biggest risks and experience the main change (or refusal to change). Antagonist = whatever most actively blocks that goal. This can be a person, but also a system, a force of nature, a community, a lover, an institution, time, addiction, grief, shame, etc. [more]

Writing a mystery romance play means braiding two engines at once: desire and secrecy. The audience should lean forward because they want answers — and because they want these two people to collide. [more]

A dramaturg reads an early draft, gets what the writer is doing, then becomes a long-term advocate — connecting the playwright to theatres, keeping the play alive across years and productions. Example: Dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen read an early draft of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, messaged her enthusiasm, introduced the play to colleagues and pushed for it to be programmed. [more]

Dramaturgy is the craft of helping a play (or musical/opera/dance piece) make sense and land with an audience. It’s the bridge between the script, the production team and the world the piece comes from. A dramaturg is the person who does this work. [more]

Environmental theatre is a style of performance where the whole space becomes the stage — and the audience is placed inside the world of the play rather than watching it from a separate “front.” [more]

Visual imagery in theatre is everything the audience sees that carries meaning — sometimes louder than the text. It’s not “pretty pictures;” it’s story, pressure and philosophy made visible. [more]

Musicals can do a bunch of things more easily than straight plays — not because they’re “higher art,” but because they have extra gears: music, rhythm and often choreography. But before we get started, what are your favorite musicals, and why? [more]

In a play, the point of no return is the moment when the characters’ main problem stops being avoidable and becomes inevitable. After this beat, the story can’t go back to “before” — even if everyone suddenly wanted to. It’s often called the commitment or crossing-the-threshold moment (not necessarily the climax). The rest of the play becomes the cost of that choice. [more]