Government Essay Examples Page 287

Paula Vogel always encourages the students in her MFA playwriting workshop at Brown University to write plays that can be staged for under $100. The exercise is less concerned with teaching her novice playwrights how to negotiate the deplorable state of funding for the arts than it is to get them to rethink the theatrical…

In August 1991, Brass Tacks Theatre of Minneapolis announced it was closing, effective immediately. The theatre had no debt, the board and artists were united, the past season successful and fund-raising for the upcoming season secure. The theatre thanked all of its funders prior to the public announcement and served notice it would not be…

TWENTY-ONE PRODUCTIONS are scheduled to open on Broadway this spring, nearly as many as opened in the first six months of the season. And an unusually high number of Hollywood celebrities will ride into town with the productions, raising expectations among some that Broadway may once again become a vibrant part of New York’s cultural…

Women on men (and vicversa) Toward the end of Arnold Wesker’s new play Three Women Talking, a slightly tipsy character named Claire Dawn Hope delivers a long speech at an all-female dinner party. Introduced mock-portentously as “the Puzaltski story,” the speech is a vulgar joke about a wife who fills in for her football-player husband…

Faced so consistently with actors maneuvered by auteur-directors who disdain them almost as much as they loathe the transparency of good playwriting, I”m prepared, at last, to confess that Donald Wolfit was one of the greatest actors I ever saw. By which I mean to indicate, quixotically perhaps, that great actors in the full sway…

Exit, pursued by a bear” is a bit of a stretch for most theatres producing The Winter’s Tale. But on radio, this stage direction stretches imagination rather than resources: A bear’s roar, a man’s terrified scream and off? Maybe a narrator stating it simply and chillingly? Or with a smile in his voice, as with…

At a recent meeting of representatives from different arts fields, one of the participants offered a suggestion: In this increasingly conservative climate, with the religious right and conservative politicians nibbling away at the National Endowment for the Arts, perhaps it is time to look for alternative funding sources for those “controversial” art forms that are…

A chorus of nine naked males clog dance to bouncy rhythms of “THE Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” A boy with green hair is immersed upside down in a fish tank and whipped, his nude body sparking with rings through his tongue, nipples, stomach and genitals. Somebody’s Fairy Godmother is carried onstage: a four-foot-high…

Never before have we had to rely so much on nonprofit organizations to maintain elementary decency in our society as we do today, but at the same time never before have the challenges for nonprofits been tougher. Some of the difficulties arise from the nature of American culture. At our best, Americans have the enthusiasm,…

Chicago-based playwright and actor Scott McPherson has been named a recipient of a 1991 Whiting Writers’ Award for his second play, Marvin’s Room, a black comedy originally produced at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and currently running at New York’s Playwrights Horizons. The Whiting Foundation, now in its seventh year, annually awards $30,000 grants to each of…