After the performance on Sunday, April 10, I moderated a panel discussion with Brian Ammons (Duke, Education), Sean Metzger (Duke, English, Theater Studies, AMES) and Jeff Storer (Duke, Theater Studies and Durham’s Manbites Dog Theater). Our discussion (which lasted 55 minutes! we had great questions and great sharing from those who stayed to talk and […]
Bertolt Brecht
Laramie Sparkles
Never having been in the tech booth for a show, I had no idea what I signed up for when I offered to run the light board. I’ve acted, directed, and built/helped design sets for shows, but have never had the privilege of running around backstage in all black making sure that all those magic […]
Brecht Bytes #4
Since my feedback has been centered on paying attention to the specificity of expression within your characters’ testimony — switches amongst verb tenses, the distinction of different kinds of punctuation marks, the colloquial turns of phrase that marks region and culture, and the vagaries of individual word choice — I found a Brecht poem that […]
Brecht Bytes #3
This week’s bit of Brecht comes from a poem titled “Speech to Danish Working-Class Actors on the Art of Observation” written between 1934 and 1936 around the time of the writer’s exile to Denmark in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. (Brecht’s German citizenship was revoked in 1935.) I believe this piece […]
Brecht Bytes #2
Today’s bite is a poem that I think captures the way Jeff has been encouraging you all, in these past 2 weeks of individual meetings, to both doubt what’s on the page and what the character is saying and to be active in your choices every moment. It also touches on our continuing discussions as […]
Brecht Bytes #1
I mentioned in our last official class”meeting that I would be posting some poems and material from Brecht for the next few days to correspond to rehearsal meetings that are one-on-one with individual actors as they develop their “roll call” of characters. I think these snippets or “bites” (I just had to make it a […]
How to tell the story?
This past Tuesday, three groups of students made class presentations on the three “supporting” plays we are reading in preparation for The Laramie Project. The plays — Our Town (1938), Execution of Justice (1986), Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches (1991) — represent a through-line of performance form and content that have direct connections […]
Chronology as historiography
For tonight’s class meeting, students have been asked to read and discuss the intersections between three scripts and two pieces of theater theory/analysis alongside The Laramie Project. In advance, I’ve sketched out a chronology of these texts so we might identify an emerging historiography of documentary performance in relation to when (and by whom) these […]
