From The Plays of Max Sparber

In his blog, Max Sparber offers a good explanation of just what a playwriting workshop is (for any of you newbies out there), and a thoughtful list of dos and donts for playwrights in the midst of one. I'm not sure I agree with his suggestion that they aren't a good idea for beginning writers; so long as they're run well and not offered too early in the writing process, they can be one of the best training tools available -- certainly better than having an unready play fully produced. (I speak from more than one long-ago experience.) And if the feedback can sometimes be bewildering, well, that's what dramaturgs are for -- to help the writer pick through it. But Sparber's many other suggestions for structuring the experience are right on the money, and I particularly like his suggestion about cutting unfunny jokes, "even if it traumatizes the script as a work of literature." If that wisdom were applied to the comedies of William Shakespeare, they'd be about a third shorter.

 

From The Guardian (London)

Think of it as American Idol/Canadian Idol/InsertYourCountryHere Idol for playwrights. It's The Play's the Thing, the current Channel 4 reality series which sees 30 playwrights vying to be produced in the West End.

 

From The Guardian (London)

In his latest play, Rock and Roll, Tom Stoppard considers the country of his birth, Czechoslovakia, for the first time in his writing. But not just Czechoslovakia: "When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state."

 

From The New York Post

Bulletin: Peter Shaffer writes new play about the mysterious death of a famous classical composer. What's that you say? He already wrote Amadeus? Uh-uh. Different composer.

 

From The Stage (U.K.)

Zimbabwean playwright Cont Mhlanga gives an interview to The Stage while two state police detectives wait outside the doors of his theatre. Mhlanga says poets, playwrights, and even nightclub stand-up comedians have now been targeted as "enemies of the people" by Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Operation, as part of President Robert Mugabe's ongoing campaign against alleged dissidents. Meanwhile, the theatre company's website contains an illuminating editorial about the problems and obligations facing artists in a nation without any state structures to support them. Click here and scroll down to the May, 2006 entry.

 

From Whitless.com and The Advocate

Avenue Q playwright Jeff Whitty writes a letter to Jay Leno after one-too-many of the same old tired gay jokes. "Mr. Leno, I have a sense of humor. It's my livelihood. And being gay has many hilarious aspects to it -- none of which, I suspect, you understand." Meantime, at the Advocate.com, Jim David says it's time to lighten up, and notes that some people are offended by parts of Avenue Q: "Should Jeff remove the offending scene from the show? Not on your life."

 

From Canada.com

What do you do if you find the term playwright a bit too confining? You plunge into events like Edmonton's NeXtFest, where many of the plays' creators skip the writing-it-down-on-paper-first part. Fresh from the Brighton (U.K.) Fringe, where they performed in the back of a semi, Ottillie Parfitt and Polly Wiseman present Fierce, about a pair of Furies "out to enjoy themselves and look fantastic in fishnets while they're doing it."

 

From The Jamaica Gleaner

Sound familar? Veteran Jamaican playwright Trevor Rhone laments the disappearance of serious writing for the stage in his country, in favour of light comedies and musicals.

 

From Lancaster Online (Lancaster, Pennsylvania)

Anyone who's seen the documentary Moon Over Broadway, about the rocky New York hatching of Ken Ludwig's play Moon Over Buffalo, will know the playwright's a nice guy. And anyone who's seen Lend Me a Tenor will know he's a skillful writer. But really -- is he the right one to be completing an unfinished play by Thornton Wilder? Apparently Wilder's estate thinks so. We can only hope it's more along the lines of Wilder's The Matchmaker than Our Town.

 

From the History News Network

Did Henrik Ibsen unknowingly script Adolf Hitler's rise to power and beyond? In Ibsen and Hitler, author Steven F. Sage argues that the Fuhrer internalized the journey of Julian the Apostate, last pagan emperor of Rome, as presented in Ibsen's 1873 play Emperor and Galilean, and took it as the blueprint for his own crazed plans -- even to the point of cribbing some of the dialogue. Sound far-fetched? Consider this: at the close of Emperor and Galilean, the wounded Julian cries, "The Third Reich will come!" (Buy the book here.)