Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...
“It’s like if ‘When Harry Met Sally’ ended with everybody getting hit by a truck”: Inside the “Year of Lear” and the terrorist plot that changed Shakespeare
Salon.com: Terrorist attacks are not unique to our age. Near the end of 1605, a group of radical, disenchanted Catholics plotted to overthrow the British government by blowing up the House of Lords, killing King James I, and wiping out the nation’s religious leadership, which had in recent generations become Protestant.
The Unsung Gender-Parity Warriors
AMERICAN THEATRE: In 2002, a New York State Council on the Arts study by Susan Jonas and Suzanne Bennett showed that 17 percent of all works produced on the city’s stages were written by women. There were no more reliable statistics until this August, when the Lilly Awards and the Dramatists Guild released “The Count,” a report on the gender of playwrights programmed in major nonprofits across the country over the past three seasons, which showed that the number of works by women was 22 percent. Our own American Theatre tally, culled from upcoming seasons at Theatre Communications Group member theatres, puts the figure at 21 percent, meaning we’re at least holding steady for the next year.
This Ain’t No Quick Change
Breaking Character: Theatre is always in flux because our world is always in flux and theatre is just an expression of the culture—or reflection, if you want to go cliché about theatre holding up a mirror to society, but then I get fixated on why doesn’t theatre spell all words backwards and show the sun setting in the East like when you take a selfie with an iPhone. But while theatre is always fluidly changing, albeit is slowly, much about it stays the same and some of our most traditional forms of theatre are still enjoyed the world over. If this wasn’t true, we would have tossed Shakespeare to the curb next to Pseudodilotitus many centuries ago.
Argentina Proposes a 100-Year-Plus Copyright Extension on Photography
Electronic Frontier Foundation: A new front has opened in publishers' global war on the public domain. Lawmakers of Argentina's ruling party are proposing a vast extension of copyright terms on photography—from 20 years after publication to 70 years after the photographer's death. That means that the term of restriction of photographic works would be extended by an average 120 years.
The Other Canon: 10 Centuries of Plays by Women
AMERICAN THEATRE: In 2002, I was working as an arts analyst in the theatre program at the New York State Council on the Arts, where, in partnership with Suzanne Bennett, I had recently completed a three-year study on the status of women in theatre which generated a widely read report. Encouraged by my interest in the subject, two visionary directors, Gwynn MacDonald and Mallory Catlett, approached me to fund “The First Hundred Years: The Professional Female Playwright,” a remarkable yearlong citywide staged readings series directed by an eclectic group of directors, complemented by symposia involving a slate of distinguished scholars. I heard for the first time the names Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Joanna Baillie, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, and many others. This was the beginning of my education about the Other Canon: some good, some great, some successful in their time, some way ahead of their time, all almost erased from history and the repertory.
No comments:
Post a Comment