So...hopefully I won't get into huge trouble for this, but I'm going to share something that I tell all of the students in all of my upper-level classes on the first day: I don't believe in grades, and I find they disrupt the learning process.

"Egad!" you say? "Blasphemy!" Yes, I know. You're probably making the same face as some of my students the first time they hear me tell them how I feel about grades. Many react with panic, frankly, as the only measure of success they've…

In the wake of last year’s tragic venue accidents, a group of production industry professionals got together and formed the Event Safety Alliance. At the beginning of the summer they announced an aggressive goal to create a Best…

I’ve been going to fringe festivals for a while now, both as an audience member and a producer. Each time, we’ve produced my own work--the playwright works cheap, which helps. But there’s a difference between self-producing at home and self-producing for fringe, especially if you plan to take the show to more than one festival.

At home, I have a support system: people, resources, space. Often, I’ll choose what to write based on who and what…

Recently, I've been hit by the nostalgia bus.



I'm currently home in Arizona, working on a staged reading production of a play I wrote, [gooseplay]. The show's coming along well, and it's been good to be home.…

Was watching Indiana Jones on TV tonight and caught a commercial for Hot Set on the SyFy network. I don't want to sound too much like a network shill, but I'll be tuning in. The show pits Hollywood set designers against each other in a competition style reality show. Sure, sure, I know -- Hollywood, not…

“It’s difficult to drain the swamp when you are up to your ass in alligators.”

Theatre operations are difficult. There are a lot of moving parts – time, people, money, physical things, philosophical views, material needs, artistic desires, creative processes . . . the list is endless. Each of these pull at our attention and reduce the time and resources we have to deal with the…

There’s nothing like a deadline to light a fire under you.



I don’t do this on purpose. I mean, I don’t purposely avoid deadlines. They sometimes just sneak up on me. And yes, I know that while I was watching The Hunger Games this past weekend at the back of my mind was the thought: You…

First, read this.

It's long, but man is it a good read.

It illustrates something that I wholeheartedly believe in: if you wanna succeed, you gotta fail big. I beleive this is true for anything you want to do. However, if "what you want to do" happens to be acting, know that failure will (even moreso) be a constant part of your…

“I firmly believe that when a school delivers the complete education to which every child is entitled – an education that very much includes the arts, the whole child blossoms.” - Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

Art, for the sake of art, creates well-rounded, happier people. This is one of…

Sticky stuff be dat. ‘”Dat” being the residue left behind by many lubricants. It all starts with a great plan to make something work ‘smoother’, ‘easier’, ‘like a hot knife through butter’. In the long term, though, it all ends the same: A sticky, gooey, mess.…

One question floating around the twittersphere this week is about art and place. How does art affect a place, and how does place affect art? My short answer is, yes. If I were to go into detail, I’d note--as I’ve done before elsewhere--that everything that’s built, everything manufactured, everything made was designed, and design is informed by both art and utility. What should it look like, and how will people use it? So in that sense, art informs and infuses every place…

I recently wrote about lawyers and defibrillators (http://theatreface.ning.com/profiles/blogs/protecting-your-assets), and realized that more information about WHY these miracles of modern technology are NECESSARY would be a good thing to share. According to the Mayo Clinic (ironic, isn’t it? Mayonnaise,…

Before you read any further, watch this video:

The V Motion Project from Assembly on Vimeo.

While you pick your jaw up off the floor, it is worth emphasizing a couple of points: 1) the hip hop performer was, indeed, controlling the audio…

Is predictability bad?

I wondered this when I read a recent 2AM Theatre blog post by former TheatreFace.com blogger Gwydion Suilebhan. While Gwydion’s post muses more on how the pace of global communications and technology have made it easier for spoilers to get out it made me think about predictability.

…

As the summer winds to a close and I begin thinking more frantically about the new school year, I am also looking at the last almost two years’ worth of blog posts I’ve written here on TheatreFace. We’ve covered a wide variety of topics, from the tension between art and technology to the force required to lift a wagon up a raked stage. I’m thrilled with how much we’ve been able to talk about, and hope to spend many weeks covering many more topics.

However, I have been feeling…

Maybe it's because I'm a sound designer and half of what I do is in a studio, but I no longer see a vast difference between creating for live production and creating for a recorded production.

Recording is everywhere. Thanks to shows like Jack Ass, guerilla theatre is popular on you tube and in other media. Sure, the content is mainly stunts and flash mobs, but entertainment production can now be seen by millions and the costs are no longer prohibitive. Money poor live…

It’s August 1st. Are you playwright enough?

Now that we’ve talked about exercise, speed and endurance, here’s a chance to put it to the test. It’s a project called 31 Plays 31 Days, and it’s just as simple--or challenging--as you think that sounds. Basically, you’d write a page or a scene or a moment each day. They can be connected, they can be unrelated, they can be parts of a larger…