One of the exciting parts of the No Passport conference in New York was the NoPassport Press launch of three new books of collected plays by Oliver Mayer, Anne Garcia-Romero, and Alejandro Morales. They look beautiful and two of the three are listed on Amazon already–they are print-on-demand books from lulu.com.
It’s interesting to consider the potential effects of small-scale, DIY printing such as lulu.com offers. It means that a group like NoPassport can make plays available in print–though distribution is always the mighty elephant in the room when it comes to publishing. However, maybe the Internet really is starting to change this, allowing for rhizomatic networks of communication and interest, not just “tree” hierarchies of value and access (I’m borrowing Deleuze’s terms: rhizome and tree knowledge). (more…)
On Thursday I’m scrambling from work in Cambridge MA to the Amtrak train line, where I’ll be joining No Passport for an all-day conference “dreaming the americas-the body politic in performance” at the Martin Segal Center in NYC. There are some wonderful folks participating –check out the program and come along if you’re in town.
No Passport is a loose coalition of “pan-american artists” concerned in one way or another with border issues , founded by Caridad Svich. Or as the blurb for the program has it, it’s “a Pan-American theatre alliance & press devoted to action, advocacy, and change toward the fostering of cross-cultural diversity and difference in the arts with an emphasis on the embrace of the hemispheric spirit in US Latina/o and Latin-American theatre-making.”
If you happen to be in Providence or have friends in the area… TROJAN BARBIE is having a reading at the Providence Black Rep at 7 pm on Monday, February 25th. All are welcome.
Black Rep is a cool theatre with an Affiliated Artists program, many of whom will be involved in the reading (including my director, Nadia Mahdi–also an amazing actor who NY folks may have seen perform with Theater of the Two-Headed Calf).
Black Rep also has a bar and live music a lot of the week, which puts it way up there in my view… why don’t more theatres in the US have cafes and bars? People like to socialize afterwards and it’s nice to talk about a show over a drink, to schmooze with the actors etc. (Yet another of the American theatre mysteries….)
Cool post from Chicago playwright Marisa Wegrzyn on women playwrights, the canon and the Big Picture- read it here.
(Thanks to Adam Szymkowicz for pointing this one out).
This “big picture” idea (ie., men write about the broader political sphere, women write about small personal relationship things) must have some empirical basis, but it puzzles me since I (and the women playwrights I connect with) all engage in our work with the larger political world. Often with women as–um– characters rather than devices or love-interests or bitches, it’s true. And we’re hardly alone–off the top of my head I can think of twenty or thirty very well known women whose plays are politically and formally expansive (which can be multiplied by the hundreds I don’t know of). (more…)
Trojan Barbie is having a reading at the Providence Black Rep on Monday February 25 at 7 pm. Nadia Mahdi, a close pal and colleague, will direct. This is a bit different for me because the director and I (she’s an affiliated artist at the theatre) pitched the play to the company. Indeed, I am slowly getting over my modest and maidenly approach to theatre, which involves waiting for people to recognize my brilliance and beg me to let them do my plays. ( The problems in this approach are fairly substantial and may account for part of the syndrome that Paula Vogel pithily describes as “Women get prizes; men get productions”). (more…)
