Charles Busch returns in Die Mommie Die! and Harvey Fierstein and Faith Prince star in A Catered Affair. Here's one for our VA readers - Mill Mountain in Roanoke. Finally, a book that actually explains how totally dirty Shakespeare's plays are - get this one to high schools ASAP. Theater Times has a brief email interview with Julia Cho. Third Rail Rep. opens Craig Wright's Grace in Portland. A couple of really good reasons to cancel opening night in Edmonton.

Terry Teachout, writing for the Wall St. Journal, points us to John Barry's excellent essay for The Smart Set, Confessions of a Community Theater Critic. (Yes, there were three links in that little sentence.)

Barry's essay doesn't just make a couple of good points, it's also a highly enjoyable read. His examples of small-town pomposity sting with familiarity.

I was the Frank Rich of Baltimore, and I hurled my bolts of insight from the mountaintop: If you like your Shakespeare straight up and easily pegged, the Bard's later plays can be problematic. I could offer veiled criticism: The main characters are a little less fiery than one might expect. And I could always end with a bang: This is the late Shakespeare, who pleases some, tries all, and doesn't really care if you walk away a little confused.

Of course you know that we at TheatreForte are avowed comic book geeks, including a special soft spot for the "capes and tights" genre. But could the opposite also be true? Can comic book geeks also be fans of the theatre?

Decidedly not, according to a recent poll on the front page of SuperHeroHype, where a resounding 73% of respondents are not at all interested in seeing Spider-Man: The Musical when it eventually debuts on Broadway. Despite the proven musicianship of U2 and director Julie Taymor, it seems that the vast majority of superhero fans would rather do something - anything - else if they happened to find themselves in Manhattan with an extra $100 to spend.

Perhaps there are still unpleasant memories of It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman lingering in people's minds. Or maybe fans of the wallcrawler fear a cringe-inducing shot of Broadway camp into their beloved action-adventure franchise. Or maybe they'd rather spend that $100 on a Midtown Comics shopping spree. But whatever the case, one can be pretty certain that there is limited crossover appeal from the comic book market for projects like this.

It's been a lot of fun to watch from the sidelines, but now Isaac Butler has tagged me. That is, I'm it.

Well, it's taken a little bit for me to get around to responding, thanks to the opening of The Thugs. However, the tech/hell week of the show did enable me to get in touch will some of my fortes, so to speak.

For the record, here's the description of this week's meme:

Make a list of five strengths that you possess as a writer/artist. It's not really bragging, it's an honest assessment (forced upon you by this darn meme). Please resist the urge to enumerate your weaknesses, or even mention them in contrast to each strong point you list. Tag four other writers or artists whom you'd like to see share their strengths.

1. Will power.
Much of what I accomplish happens through sheer force of will. I'd be lost without it. It's my ability to push.

2. Slay don't wait.
I get started. That's why I get stuff done.

3. I work hard.
As Mos Def says, "My work is personal. I'm a working person. I put in work. I work with purpose."

4. I can flow in many contexts.
I do a good job of relating well to people from all walks of life. I can do the business-speak when necessary, but I know how to talk to 14-year olds from downtown as well.

5. Merciless clarity.
I know what I want and I edit most everything else out. I'm the same in my writing. I'm the same when I clean my house. I'm a good cruel editor.

So, that's that. I did it. I got it done. Aren't you proud of me?

10 plays have been announced for inclusion in Plays and Playwrights 2008. "Will drugs, sex and a 'rock star' save Portland’s most expensive theater?" Two theaters in South L.A. are ready but empty and un-booked. San Fran's Rhyme Time Theatre presents Race is a Lie, in verse, starting in October. LA's 2007 Ovation Awards nominees have been announced. Nashville's Belmont University has a big, new space. "National Honours 100 Years of Larry Olivier." Steppenwolf readies its ad campaign for Broadway.

The amazing thing isn't how they spent the money ... but how did a Christian Theatre Troupe in Pigeon Forge get $90,000? Don't miss Three Eco-Friendly Self-Propelled Clowns @ The Garret Studio TBG Arts Center. "Ten Musicals Selected for Perfect Pitch Showcase." IT awards announced. American Actor has begun (or will shortly begin) taping in Philadelphia. NYTheatreCast interviews Nero Fiddled, who are awesome.

The theatre world is mourning the passing of Marcel Marceau, who died on Sunday.

Articles can be found at NY Times, MSNBC, and CNN, and even on Seth Godin's blog; but we're going to remember him with these words from our dear friend Dave Wallingford, master sound designer.

We'd all be lucky to attain a tiny fraction of the aptitude, facility, and agility he readily retained until the day he died; and even luckier to ever taste the level of virtuosity and mastery he reached. It may sound cliche, but it's more true with him than any other performer I've seen. To our joy, and surely the joy of thousands of stagehands around the world, he'd never stop talking and cracking jokes backstage, and I'd never before seen a bunch of jaded stagehands who were so taken with a performance that all headset chatter stopped and all eyes were onstage.

This is the fifth in a series of reflections about David Mamet's controversial yet influential book, ten years after its initial publication. Click here for the previous installment.

Mamet considers acting to be a profession that has been taken over by amateurs, "a profession of the genteel class... the hobby caste" as opposed to the buskers, gypsies, and those "noble" performers who came up from the streets. I don't disagree with this diagnosis, but it's interesting to me that Mamet is currently working on a movie about mixed martial arts prizefighting, which is notable for attracting athletes from a middle-class background who have the extra time and money to pursue martial arts classes at the local dojo. This is dramatically opposed to the boxing circuit, which historically tends to cull its athletes from low-income backgrounds, those who depend on boxing for their livelihood and a chance to escape the cycle of poverty.

It seems inconsistent to denigrate the dramatic amateur while at the same time celebrating the MMA. But maybe in comparing acting to prizefighting I'm also putting oranges in apple carts.

Please click here for the next installment.

This is the fourth in a series of reflections about David Mamet's controversial yet influential book, ten years after its initial publication. Click here for the previous installment.

Autumn quarter begins this week at Ohio State, which means I will once again find myself buried under stacks of books and journal articles. Time, then, to wrap up my review of True and False so I can focus on reading and writing about things that have little, if anything, to do with theatre... When I left off, I think I was somewhere around the "Auditions" chapter, which means that I will attempt to breeze through the last eighty pages of the book by picking out some of the passages that I found most interesting, especially now that I'm re-reading the book at 29 rather than the impressionable age of 19.

Mamet reveals a pretty strong anti-authoritarian streak during his examination of the audition process, much of which is surely a product of his Boomer-generation skepticism of the establishment. Having already dismantled our trust in schools and the education model, he now sets his sights on "the talent agent, the casting agent, the producer." Many are themselves failed actors who "seek the real or imagined security of a hierarchical system."

I LOVE COMICS!!! And I won't hide it anymore.

This post started out as a really long comment in response to this post at Parabasis. Eventually I figured it would be long enough take up real estate here.

Isaac is reading Douglas Wolk's wonderful and much-anticipated book, aptly titled Reading Comics and has done a great job of selectively quoting a very complex and important argument down to this paragraph:

...Ugly comics aren't "agreeable": they refuse outright to provide any kind of pleasure that isn't mindful. They may have an immediate impact, but that impact isn't satisfying on its own, and it can't by itself sell anyone a fantasy or an ideal. Unpretty drawing makes the fantasy of participation or identification less easy and powerful; it calls us back to what's really going on in the image and in the narrative it belongs to. The viewer is forced to look beyond the image's surface for what it might mean...

Isaac unpacks these ideas for a couple of paragraphs and then gets to the part I've been thinking about a lot...
"So a certain amount of thorniness, of clunkiness, of messiness, can really unlock some deeper things. "

Slay posted on the closing of Houston's leading avant-garde theatre company, Infernal Bridegroom Productions (1993-2007), back in July. IBP's website has already vanished into the ephemera of the cyberspace cemetary; their myspace page, however, is still receiving comments from grieving community members ("...why god why...").

In the midst of the oil-built Republicanism of Texas's largest metropolis (because no true Texan believes Dallas/Fort Worth is one city), IBP was a tornado of creation, challenging and entertaining themselves and everyone else to keep moving, keep inventing, keep singing and keep dancing. IBP commissioned Suzan Lori-Parks's Fucking A, Brian Jucha's We Have Some Planes (featured on the American Theatre cover, above), and the recent collaborative work with Daniel Johnston, Speeding Motorcycle. If you still need convincing that IBP worked hard and had some damn fine results, read the press release announcing their closing (under "About Me").

I had the privilege of working for IBP in the summer of 2000...

Adam Bock's The Thugs is about to debut here in Columbus, courtesy of our own Available light [theatre], and as part of our efforts on behalf of our audience, we enlisted one of our other favorite writers, Sean Christopher Lewis, (currently in Philadelphia with InterAct and Working Group) to interview Adam about The Thugs, his ever-blossoming career, the Iraq war, and other concerns of emerging playwrights. The results are funny, enlightening, and right here.

Here's a teaser, click the link below to read the whole interview.

"Politics" comes from "polus." Your city. What’s your world? That’s what politics are ... the world you want. Is yours a world where people are scared or a world where people are good? I mean in your world homeless people might be mentally ill while in another person’s world they’re willful. It’s really about how you want to build your city. I mean that’s what we’re trying to do. Write a bigger circle. More inclusion. I think I’m interested in it as a gay man I want the circle to be big enough for us. It’s so sad. I mean with the war- we can’t really see a circle that includes Iraq. If we did, if we cared, we wouldn’t be able to only see our dead. We’d keep a count of theirs. We know exactly how many Americans have died. Iraqis we estimate like 30-70 thousand. That’s our job as artists - for me, my job - how can we expand the circle.

Ann Marie Healy's Have You Seen Steve Steven? opens Sept. 15. You can read an old A.M. Healy short play, You're No One Nothing's Special, right here. New Jersey's Dreamcatcher Theatre has a season of firsts. Disgraced Productions opens ... and we all wore leather pants this weekend Under St. Marks. The Kitchen's having a block party on September 15. Fat is a 4-Letter Word makes it's West Coast debut September 7. Cincinnati theatres have a few ideas on how to attract new audiences. We've talked about the mind-blowingly wonderful Ten Thousand Things here before, their new season starts October 18 with Richard III. Anyone go to the Shrewsbury International Street Theatre Festival?

This added to this means what?

I'm referring first to Michael Riedel's article in the NY Post, sub-titled SINKING 'MERMAID' MAY MARK END OF DISNEY'S GREAT WHITE RUN and then to NY Theatre dot com's listing of the venues most searched-for on their site. Disney has three shows occupying the most sought-after venues, while Riedel suggests that The Little Mermaid will finally bring the Mouse's quest for Broadway dominance to an end, largely because of their continued artistic failure.

I guess it's too much to hope for another art-meets-commerce Lion King, isn't it?

The 11th Playwright Submission Binge has begun. Are you in on it? Harvey Fierstein weighs in on the canceled La Cage at a Florida High School. Go to Philly for the 7-hour and unabridged staging of The Great Gatsby now know as Gatz!. The Network of Ensemble Theatres is blogging their Gathering in Maine. Bill Pullman has some avant garde street cred - I had no idea. Susan Medak, the managing director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, talks it up at the YMCA. Melbourne Theatre Company gets a super-small, uber-tech theatre. Hey musical buffs - Merrily rolls again in D.C.

September the first.

Fall is now upon us. Not officially, I don't think, but in my mind, in my life, fall has finally begun.

For me it means grant applications are due, important rehearsals have begun, and marching band practice is well underway. Wait ... scratch that last part. Most importantly, though, it means the theatre season is about to go into top-gear. There will be shows to see, shows to love, shows to bitch about, and lots and lots to read. I'll be praying to find a few gems to hold in my head forever, and hoping I don't have too many nights of pure torture.

For the producer and artist in me, it'll be a flurry of days and nights of trying to get people together to make the impossible happen again and again and again. Our motto becomes "Your response to resistance will determine the success of all your future endeavors." (And yes, that's a bastardization of something Anne Bogart wrote.)

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