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For World Theatre Day: A Key to the Theatrical Heart of Travalanche
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 in 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, and some of my articles on key theatrical figures. Note: this is mostly about the so-called “legit”, or dramatic theatre; for the variety theatre (vaudeville, circus, etc.) peruse the entirety of this blog, of course, it’s thousands of articles. Ditto, biographies of actors — too many to list here. I’ve linked to some playwrights, directors, critics, teachers, and theoreticians, but my biographies of actors number in the thousands. Just use the search device and look them up.
Anyway, 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:
Some Indie Theatre Heroes
Theatre Roots and RelatedFolk Culture
The Method
Avant-Garde/Modern Theatre History
Some Modern Critics
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