abioshins
My Guide to Making the Most of Your Theater Minor
My Guide to Making the Most of Your Theater Minor, or How to Alliterate Your Blog Posts, or Goodbye Yellowbrick Road (College Edition). Being a theater minor was hard and compelling. Not only did it take a bajillion credit hours and hard work, but it also involved a certain amount of making a place for […]
Genocide? Rock on!
Earlier this weekend I sat in the audience of BU on Broadway’s production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Going into the play I knew almost nothing about it. I’d heard a couple of the songs, but mostly out of context. I really only knew that it was about Jackson. Let me say, I am a little […]
Goooooooooooo Sports!
This Friday The Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA is unveiling Albert Beirstadt’s 1870 painting “Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast.” As far as landscapes go, Bierstadt did a pretty good job (this is an understatement). As far as museums go, The Clark is my favorite (Western Massachusetts has a special place in my heart). But […]
Gloria’s Cause: An Examination of Present America in Light of the Past
Dayna Hanson‘s piece Gloria’s Cause is first and foremost a collage. It is not entirely dance theater, not exactly a musical, and it is definitely not a straight play. It kind of takes place during the Revolutionary war and it also kind of takes place now. In my first encounter with it on Ontheboards.tv, I did […]
A Note on Casting
A few months ago I wrote a post called “Disability in the Theater” in which I gave my embarrassed account about how little I knew about physical disability in the theater. At the time, I focused more on the idea of people with physical disabilities playing roles typically performed by abled bodied actors. Since then […]
Visual Stroytelling
Something that has started to interest me more and more is the way that theatre makers create the visual landscape of the play. How do we read a script and then from that, develop the visual world of the play, drawing on scenery, lights, costumes, and more? The visual world of the play has its […]
In Response to Emma Weisberg
I was perusing Howlround.com earlier today and came across Emma Weisberg’s piece “The Language of ‘Gender Parity’: 19 Women Playwrights and Their Voices.” Something that comes up in the piece is the idea of “women playwrights” and the narratives they tell. Weisberg spent some time interviewing women playwrights and their perspectives on the gender parity […]
Shockheaded Peter and his DIE-dactic Friends
What do Heinrich Hoffmann, Mark Twain, and Julian Bleach all have in common? A little selection of stories called Struwwelpeter. Hoffmann originally wrote this illustrated set of ten rhymed stories about children in 1845. Like the tales of the Brothers Grimm, those in Struwwelpeter (also Shockheaded or Slovenly Peter) are considered didactic in nature. Indeed, fairy tales or […]
Vaginas 4 All
Last week I saw Boston University Athena’s Players annual production of The Vagina Monologues. It was clearly a meaningful experience for the cast and crew. All of my friends who were involved said they had a great time. I loved going and supporting them. But I had a little bit of a problem. I’ve actually […]
Disability in Theater
So I have always kind of vaguely been aware of the fact that people with disabilities are hugely underrepresented in the theater. Like, duh. How many productions of have you seen where the lead actor is actually in a wheelchair because he can’t use his legs? If you said zero, we would have said the […]
History is Time that Won’t Quit (much to our dismay)
In Suzan-Lori Parks‘ essay “The Elements of Style” she writes,”History is time that won’t quit.” It is a line set apart from the others. It has its own title: history. For that reason it stands out (though a number of other lines have their own titles too, so it does not stand out too much). When I first […]
Queen Victoria Taught me to Teach
I am currently in a class called CT575, General Teaching Methods. It is a standard education class where we learn the basics of lesson plan creation and classroom management. The last few classes, however, haven’t really looked like education classes though. They have looked something a lot closer to a mediocre acting class. While we […]
Reviewer or Critic?
A couple weeks ago in class we had a conversation about the difference between someone who reviews theater and someone who critiques it. The consensus was that a reviewer is someone who writes about a play towards the beginning of its run in order to give a yay or nay on whether someone should see […]
Family Theatrics
Sometimes my friends tell me I should write a play about my family. Not my immediate family, but my extended family on my mom’s side. There are seventeen of us in the Boston area–eighteen if you include my great grandmother’s sister, Phyllis. There are also four generations of us. I’ll make a chart so it […]
Boston Mayor’s Art Czar
wbur Boston’s NPR news station recently put out a piece entitled “Who Should Be the Mayor’s Arts Czar? Our Nominees.” This piece lists Ed Siegel and Greg Cook‘s top picks for the person to fill the role of the new cabinet level position in the arts that Mayor-elect Marty Walsh promised us. The list was […]
Fa(r)ce Value
In Patricia Davis’ most recent post on HowlRound, she writes about how Taffety Punk’s Riot Grrrls are able to wring humor from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Very few people actually like Titus Andronicus. It is a gory follow up to the work of Seneca and a lamer precursor to the work of John Webster. We appreciate it for […]
We Need Them. They Need Us. Where’s the Problem?
Reading the blog this week, I was struck by something that one of my fellow classmates, Rachel Rees, said in her post, “They need it more than we do.” She argued that the members of CFA should share their art with the larger university because the larger university is in need of the type of […]
When Life Feels Too Much Like the Play (Part 2)
Last night I had the opportunity to see the Newton South production of Spring Awakening and given the experience I had, I feel the need to do a follow up on my previous post on the subject. (If you have yet to read that, I suggest reading it before you continue here.) Needless to say, […]
When Life Feels Too Much Like the Play
There’s something that I need to process with other theater artists. Over the past two weeks there have been two teen suicides in the city of Newton (just a green line visit away from BU). One of the teens attended Newton North and the other attended Newton South. The body of the Newton South Student […]
Drama Lit Blog 2.0: BU School of Theatre 