March 27 is World Theatre Day and it finds me in a certain place at the moment, gathering a lot of key ideas I keep coming back to over the years, and rearticulating them. I thought it would be a good idea to link to a bunch of pieces from the theatre section of Travalanche and organize them as a kind of finding aid, which you will find below.
While I write a lot about commercial theatrical enterprises like vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood, it's not my actual orientation. I like to romance "the business" but I find myself resistant to being IN it. While I love the creative parts, I find I tend to be more of a theoretician and I'm uninterested in tacking to the expectations of a contemporary mass audience. If people respond to me, great, but there's no joy in it for me in pleasing anybody but myself, which I guess is a pretty damning admission, but that's the long and the short of it. When asked "Who is this for?" my honest answer is always "It's for me, but I hope you like it, too", never "This is for YOU! I'm just like YOU, so I give YOU what WE always want!".
So I guess it was kind of foolish of me to pursue theatre of all things! Which is all about the communal experience. But I've been involved with it since I was 11 years old, I don't really know anything else, not that I know this, but I do persist in trying to figure it out. I've worked it from every angle: actor, director, playwright, producer, critic, historian, lecturer, fundraiser, publicist, and on some lamentable occasions, running crew. In recent years, for a variety of reasons I've been exploring solo performance more, which makes a good deal more sense, and I'll likely continue in that direction, somehow, some way.
But at any rate, I know my POV is perplexing to some people, so here's an organized list of various articles I've written that articulate some of my philosophy about the theatre, where I'm coming from, and what I admire. If you only know me from my show biz writings, this is always underneath. It's where I'm coming from. And as I say, I'll be adding more to it in the next while. Happy World Theatre Day!
My Own History and Philosophy:
Of Banks and Mountebanks
Hall, Hell and the Holy Trinity
30 Years Ago: My First Professional Play Production
30 Years Ago in NYC
My Indie Theatre "Virgil"
The American Vaudeville Theatre
My First Full Length Play
Me and the Brick
An Introduction to Me, or Don't Invite to Your Shows
Radical Thoughts for World Theatre Day 2019
Some Indie Theatre Heroes
Ellen Stewart and La Mama
Joe Cino and Caffe Cino
Judith Malina and the Living Theatre
Edith O'Hara (13th Street Rep)
Taylor Mead
San Francisco Mime Troupe
Bread and Puppet Theater and the Mettawee River Theatre Company
John Vacarro and the Ridiculous
Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous
50 Years of the Ridiculous
Everett Quinton
Ethyl Eichelberger
Spalding Gray
Dick Zigun
Charles Busch
Theatre and Related Folk Culture
Comedy of the Ancient Greeks
Carnival and Commedia dell'Arte
Shakespeare
Moliere
Francois Rabelais
Mikhail Bakhtin: Philosopher of Carnival
Bartholomew Fair
Punch and Judy
The May Pole of Merrymount
Pagan Origins of Christmas
Humorina: Odessa's April Fool's Day Festival
Avant-Garde/Modern Theatre History
Alfred Jarry
Stanislavski
Eisenstein
Meyerhold
Brecht
Samuel Beckett
Ionesco
Eric Bentley
Edward Albee
Sam Shepard
Kenneth Brown
Leonard Melfi
Arthur Kopit
Jean-Claude Van Itallie
George Ferencz
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