Theatre

“Telling a lie over and over can make it seem true. It can also remove agency from the viewer, ceding the individual’s judgement over to the expectations of the story being told. Brecht refused to let his audience lose themselves in the funhouse mirror of such representations. ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it,’ he wrote.” – Zócalo Public Square

“As I was at the beginning of my education as a young director, as well as a nervous, nerdy intellectual, I asked Helene Weigel about the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht’s famous ‘alienation effect’ theory. … Weigel laughed and said something like, ‘Don’t pay any attention to Bert’s bullshit and theoretical nonsense. Just look at the work. Look at the work, and see what you see.'” – American Theatre

“Set in fin de siècle Paris but supercharged by 75 pop songs, it opened to a rave from The New York Times (‘This one’s for the hedonists,’ exulted Ben Brantley), and it was regularly selling out all 1,302 seats, even during a holiday season when it cost $799 to watch from a cafe table encircled by cancan dancers.” Then came COVID, of course: not only did the show have to close, 25 (!) members of the company, including all three leads, got sick. – The New York Times

Jesse Green: “I admit that I do it too. … But even these comparisons are reductive — in both directions. Shakespeare’s characters are much richer and more readable than someone as unforthcoming as Trump. At the same time, we’d be lucky if he were merely Shakespearean; no made-up villain, even Iago, is as alarming as someone for whom all the world is truly a stage.” – The New York Times

“We will definitely find you … and we will hang you side by side.” So said a column in Sovietska Belarus, the more-or-less official newspaper of the post-Communist dictatorship. The targets were Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, who fled to the UK as political refugees in 2011 but have continued to work long-distance with Belarus Free Theatre, which they founded in 2005 and which still produces and performs dissident drama in secret. – The Daily Mail (UK)

“For the most part, it didn’t aim straight at the president. … Rather, producers elevated formally adventurous, politically incendiary plays — like Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me and Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play — that spoke meaningfully to our nation’s troubled soul. Audiences, hungering for that holiest of dramatic experiences, catharsis, used the ritual of theatergoing to think and hurt and heal.” – The New York Times

Jonas Loeb, communications director of IATSE, says this time around turning music venues into a vaccination center would require a new configuration. “It doesn’t use any unusual technique.” He adds, “The workers know those venues better than anyone else and can help hook up all necessary utilities quickly and efficiently. To them, it’s a relatively normal job, but with different stakes.” – Variety

“No one is going to want to see my Donald Trump” now. Anyone who is seeking Trump comedy after Jan. 21, I just feel bad for them.” – Washington Post

Three national lockdowns in Britain, as well as tough social distancing guidelines, have hampered the business of England’s court system this past year, creating a huge backlog of cases. Since July, the country’s courts service has been renting suitable spaces — like theaters, but also conference centers and local government buildings — then turning them into temporary courtrooms. – The New York Times

What does it look like when a small-scale, long-term community effort in Detroit is connected to a small-scale, long-term community effort in Seattle or Dallas? What is there to learn and exchange in that story being shared? In a national or federal approach to storytelling, you lose so much texture, so much detail, because in an effort to make stories accessible to more people, to build power on a bigger scale, stories get reduced. – Howlround

“Everything about the experience of using a computer is still flat, everything uses these windows, but then we also have high-speed processes that allow for these windows to actually be functional.” – Howlround

Puppetry had never been part of the Yiddish theater tradition, but in 1920s America, they were all the rage. So in 1925-26, a pair of writers created a Purim shpiel (the Jewish equivalent of a Christmas panto) with puppets. It was such a smash success that the two men ended up creating a puppet company that put on Yiddish shows nine times a week year-round in New York City and toured the Eastern Seaboard and Midwest, Cuba, Britain, France, Poland, and, ultimately, the Soviet Union. Yet the whole odyssey lasted less than a decade. – Smithsonian Center For Folklife & Cultural Heritage

Shows were running in the French capital for a few months last year, before a big new wave of COVID infections led to a new lockdown and a crop of new productions were going to waste. But not anymore: leave it to Parisians to find an inventive way to break the rules while officially obeying them. – The New York Times

The NEC’s roots lay in a drama workshop for Harlem youth that founder Robert Hooks ran in a makeshift theater in his apartment until the landlord found out. The professional company was born in 1967 with a Ford Fourndation grant, and it went on to become perhaps the most successful Black theatre group in the world, with a Pulitzer, two Tony Awards, more than a dozen Obies — and more than 4,000 alumni (including quite a few famous names) who learned acting, directing, and theater tech there. – American Theatre

On January 17, 1921, in a north London theatre, “an English magician called Percy Thomas Tibbles literally and laboriously sawed through a sealed wooden box that contained a woman. It was a sensation and has since become one of the best known magic tricks, performed with all manner of tools and varying degrees of blood – always involving someone cut in half and nearly always with them miraculously put back together.” – The Guardian

“Has it really happened that way, though? To go back to my paragon, Pauline Kael, she was perceived as shaping the course of Hollywood, and I’m not sure she did when you look back at it. Culture — like history, and we know how perverse and also cyclical history can be — follows its own inevitable patterns. … I don’t think critics are shapers. I think we’re mirrors.” – American Theatre

The situation under the third lockdown is, if anything, worse than in March because the freelancers don’t have anything to fall back on. “In telephone interviews this week, four theater freelancers said they had set up their own businesses to get through the pandemic; another said he was working as a delivery driver; and another said she was relying on a combination of unemployment checks and parental support.” – The New York Times

Swinging the Dream, a 1939 musical that flopped after 13 performances despite (or because of?) having a cast of 150 and three bands. It’s being revived, rewritten, and live-streamed during the pandemic. – The Guardian (UK)

“Since pay equity leads to higher quality work, any company interested in having the best product to share with their community will center pay equity within their company because the benefits to the business are undeniable.” – Howlround

“Arts workers in the NHS, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, actor Michael Balogun and theatre company 20 Stories High are among those recognised in this year’s The Stage 100 list, which has been reimagined to celebrate the industry’s response to the pandemic.” – The Stage