Here are some articles from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...
Pulitzer Winner Bruce Norris Retracts Rights to German Troupe's Clybourne Park Over "Blackface" Casting
Playbill.com: Bruce Norris, whose play Clybourne Park features white and African-American characters — to Pulitzer Prize-honored, Tony Award-winning effect — stripped a German theatre company of rights to his drama when he learned that a white actress would be using makeup to play a black woman.
Paperless Process
Stage Directions: It began as a class discussion that went productively off-topic. My Stage Management I class at Carnegie Mellon University was discussing the increased use of computers and technology in doing their shows. The reading assignment for the day was from The Backstage Guide to Stage Management, and the chapter outlined Tom Kelly’s good-natured curmudgeonly attitude toward the modern tools we use to do our theatre. Kelly’s generation had seen many advances in technology in life and work, whereas these students had grown up using computers almost every day. With this mindset, it seemed that stage management could adapt and take advantage of these advances in the same way that other production departments have, and this led to other queries. Paperwork is both a defining aspect of the stage manager’s job and a bane of our collective existence. But if you take it out of the equation, perhaps the job becomes more than the familiar but endless printing of documents, and as a by-product, wastes far less resources. Technology could be a tool to streamline and refocus the process. The discussion became, could you actually stage manage a show completely without paper? Two juniors in the class—David Beller and Brooke Marrero—had shows coming up early in the following semester. I proposed a challenge to them: do their shows without using paper, and see how the job changes.
Holler: If You Can Make It Here…
HowlRound: We’ve all been there. If not about moving from the Midwest to NYC, then we’ve struggled about moving from Waukegan to Chicago, or Tucson to Los Angeles, or Saxapahaw to Raleigh. The lure of the Big City—Bright lights! Fame! Glory! Artisanal cupcakes! —Will sooner or later make us question the worth of our piddling little small-town lives. Some of us will resist that temptation, others will dip our toes in “just so that we can say we did,” and still others will dive head-first and never look back. Many before me, from EB White to Jay-Z to PrettyLady, have opined on the psychology (or psychosis) of choosing New York. I’ll keep my response focused on the questions you raise from the perspective of a mid-career theater artist who has started to build a professional presence in the city.
No, You Can't Use the Nets' Specialized Lighting System
WSJ.com: And then there are the lights. The arena actually has two sports lighting systems: one for the Nets and one for everyone else. The one for everyone else is a metal-halide system, which is the sort of bright, white lighting used at most sports arenas. When the Harlem Globetrotters played the first basketball game at Barclays earlier this month, arena officials turned these lights on. They also will be used when Barclays is host to college basketball—and that includes Kentucky's game against Maryland in November. (Yes, even John Calipari will have to settle for the regular lights.) The Nets lights are different: Six flying trusses, suspended 75 feet above the court, will house 468 tungsten-halogen fixtures that will beam a warm glow squarely onto the court. Karen Goldstick, the principal at White Plains-based Goldstick Lighting Design, which was in charge of the project, said the effect is that the playing surface will pop like a stage—"theater-like," she said—and the rest of the arena will go dark. "You'll notice a big difference in color," said Goldstick, who also works as the NBA's official venue lighting consultant.
Getting the Most Out of Gen Y
Analysis from TRG Arts: For decades, the arts industry has chased new audiences, especially younger audiences. Today, that chase is directed at the largest population under 30 years old in human history. It’s little wonder that Gen Y (born 1981 – 2001) is a hot topic for arts marketers. As a data-informed member of Gen Y, here’s a take on my generation of arts consumers.
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