Tag Archive | personal
Vomit Writing Magic Muse
Being a playwright- finding your muse is very important- having your space, having your music, having your spells, chants, and charms around you as you write is very important. But sometimes it just doesn’t come. My first mentor/friend in playwriting was Stephen Adly Guirgis. Outside of my mother, he was the first person who told […]
Very Appropriate
Hello! The African-American (AFAM) Studies Department at Boston University is hosting an event, which guarantees to unpack cultural politics with you… {Stealing Culture: The Complicated Politics of Cultural Appropriation} Tuesday March 20th, 6-7:30pm BU Photonics Center, RM. 206 8 Saint Mary’s Street, Boston, MA 02215 Imagery courtesy of artist: Shannon Wright, “Shared or Stolen: An […]
Art in the 2 Minute Era or: How I Learned to Make Art and Hate the Bomb
Today the doomsday clock was set to 2 minutes till midnight. Was the clock not already at 11:58? Has it not been at 11:58 for as long as I have been alive? It seems to me that I have been living in the dusk of two minutes to midnight for years now. It seems to me […]
capture it.
I am very happy to go home after a long, tiring semester. I’m really excited to see my family and spend time with them. Though I am excited to go home, there’s been something on my mind about home that I haven’t really addressed. Over the past couple months, my grandmother’s memory has been worsening. […]
A Message to Myself
Dear me, You’re graduating college next semester. It’s hard to believe that it’s here. As the end of this chapter inches closer, I wanted to share some thoughts, advice, love that I think is useful for going into your last semester of college and beyond. Create a schedule. Have a routine. It’s important (especially as […]
I took on way too much this semester
I’m doing a lot. I’m stressed. I’m taking 5 classes I have rehearsal every night I’m an intern at Company One I’m the president of a club on campus I’m apart of STAMP (Senior Theatre Arts Major Productions) I’m a teaching assistant of Acting I and organizing the Dreams Project I have a job I’m […]
Feeling Empty
Sometimes I sit down to write these posts and I find that I have very little to say, sitting here thinking about how I have nothing to say makes me think about the general emptiness that can come with being an artist. In discussions, I’ve had with fellow artists I’ve found the common trend of […]
As a writer
The setting is the first thing I think about – Where? In my plays the set becomes more than a prop, it becomes as much of an organism of force as the living characters on stage. When I begin to develop a play I think about how I can manipulate the set into consciousness. How […]
WTF is a play cycle – Pt. 6 – Night Cap
Returning to my former naive B.A. acting studies questions: They can do that? Of course they can, the mind and hand of a writer has no restrictions. If the writer feels the stories out of Pine City is incomplete and if there is an audience that will watch or read another visit. There will be […]
WTF is a play cycle – Pt. 5
I remember the day well when I first heard the words – play cycle A week before, my B.A. acting professor had given my small troupe a play to analyze – Craig Wright’s Orange Flower Water. It was my first real touch on something contemporary – very exotic and exciting to me. The play examined […]
Let’s Talk About Drag, Again!
Perhaps I will sound like a broken record by having another discussion about drag but who says that’s a bad thing? This weekend I had the pleasure of performing 2 numbers in the charity drag show Drag on Fire and at the risk of sounding daramtic…my life was changed. I came alive. The moment I was […]
WTF is a Play Cycle – Pt. 4
The Purpose of Play Cycles/Artist Prophet The Greeks were not only telling tales to reintegrate their citizens but they were developing stories that encapsulated their history, stories that allowed the viewer to examine civilization. In Julie Spark’s Playwrights’ Progress she states that the greek plays were performed as a mode of civic self-examination. Writers get […]
Facing the Future’s Looming Presence
As a senior in college, I keep getting asked the same questions over and over again. “What do you want to do after graduation?” “What can you do with a theatre major?” “Do you want to be a Broadway star?” (Let’s be real, though. If an opportunity to be on Broadway came knocking at my door, you […]
WTF is a play cycle – Pt. 3
Going All The Way To The Beginning – What Cycles Meant to the Greeks Skimming through the index of old theatre history textbooks looking for modern cycle plays I came across the word – Trilogy. Millennials typically think of a trilogy as a collection of books – that eventually turn into blockbuster movies but looking […]
WTF is a play cycle – Pt. 2
But Why Serializations? Similar to our desires to be intrusive, we have a natural instinct of habit which modernly can perpetually turn into rituals and addictions. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon in the 1950s, found that it would take roughly twenty one days to create a habit or one episode of Absolutely Fabulous to get […]
Excavating Whiteness 1
As an artist, I have come to learn that my moral compass drives most of my creative decisions. Coming from a hill town community in Western Massachusetts and attending a performing arts charter school that offered ELA electives focused on race informed my perspective in ways I’m grateful for to this day. To embody my […]
How Theatre School has let a Black Girl Down
It was a dream come true when I heard about the upcoming season for the 2017-2018 school year at BU’s School of Theatre: we’re putting on an August Wilson play, Gem of the Ocean. For those of you who don’t know who August Wilson is, August Wilson (1945-2005) is one of our great American playwrights. […]
magic
i am sitting on a stack of platforms in room 109 watching my peers play an ever-growing game with an inflatable beach ball. they are trying to keep it in the air as long as possible. they have all turned into kids again, eyes going wide as the ball descends over their heads, their […]
The Importance of a Challenge
For this last post, I want to talk about my final dramaturgical project and my experience of working on a text that was especially outside my realm of comfort. When choosing a play at the beginning of the semester, I knew I wanted something that would really test my dramaturgical skills. I didn’t want to focus on […]
Drama Lit Blog 2.0: BU School of Theatre 