Category Archives: learning.about.things

No Audience Member Left Behind: Howard Gardner, Shakespeare, and Writing for Everybody

Yesterday, I heard a script for the first time, at the table reading with the cast of this commission I’m working on for young audiences. For a playwright, the first table reading is half Christmas morning and half job interview, full of explosive joy and barbarous self-judgement. It’s got me thinking about Shakespeare, Sudoku, and “multiple intelligences.” Continue reading

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Filed under educational.theatre, how.to.write, learning.about.things, play.in.progress, shakespeare, the.horse's.ass, unabashedly.emo, young.audiences

My 4 Favorite Online Writing Resources

Ever get stuck in your own brain when you’re trying to be creative? Here are my Top 4 favorite online resources that help me shake things up when I feel like my mind is in a rut. Continue reading

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Filed under how.to.write, internet.is.awesome, learning.about.things

Grab the Nearest Protagonist

Right now, I’m in the middle of a play. Not in the middle of writing one. I’m IN a play, physically. Who’s it about, who’s the protagonist?

What makes a “protagonist” anyway? Continue reading

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HELEN press and process roundup! Hot Trojan-War Performance-Installation Media-Blitz Life-Lesson Action!

So, the two-weekend workshop of The Helen Project all the way back in May got some really sweet press, which I never posted here. D’oh! How silly is that? Pretty silly, yes? What should I do about it? Oh, I could go ahead and post those quotes now? Okay! Also, how did the workshop go, and what happened with the two different editions? Oh, I’d better lay that out too, because the second weekend was bananas, and taught me the kind of “valuable lesson” one might hear in voiceover at the end of an afterschool special! Continue reading

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Filed under about.me, exit.theater, helen.of.troy, hella.avant.garde, learning.about.things, play.in.production., play.in.progress

A Great Play I Didn’t Write, And The Story Of My Only A+.

Want to watch a great play I didn’t write, right now?  Check out this fabulous video of kids performing the totemic avant-garde piece “Offending The Audience” by Peter Handke.

I’ve loved this play since studying it in college, me and a friend in the-world’s-most-intense-theater-seminar.  It was just the two of us (young, good haircuts, a little too cool for school) and the famous Carl Weber (old, bald, German and brilliant, Bertolt Brecht’s assistant director and right-hand man at the Berliner Ensemble), sitting on the couch in the famous Carl Weber’s office Monday and Wednesday afternoons. Continue reading

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Filed under about.me, hella.avant.garde, internet.is.awesome, learning.about.things