Dog Ear

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We’re experiencing some technical difficulties with the blog site, so we’re experimenting (we have a new look) and not everything is functional yet. Check back in a week or so and things should be working.

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Much to report. First, we welcome three new playwrights to Dog Ear, Erik Patterson, Kim Dunbar and Cody Henderson.

Above is the artwork for Cuts, Dog Ear’s second collaborative production, commissioned by the Road Theatre Company in Los Angeles: an evening of 8 ten-minute takes on duplicity, each involving a pair of scissors.

The Road is also hosting productions of two full-length plays by Dog Ear members. The world-premier of Steven Totland’s Swimming opens January 19; the SoCal premier of Mickey Birnbaum’s Big Death & Little Death follows this spring. BDLD opens in San Francisco at Crowded Fire on February 9. And Bleed Rail, Mickey’s newest play, will premiere in Pasadena at the Boston Court on May 12.

For more on Steven, look here. For more on Mickey’s hat trick, check out his blog.

– wpl

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We are pleased to observe that New York City has taken note of Dog Ear, if only briefly, in paragraph 16 of an article in Backstage.com which you will find here, which paragraph we have promoted to paragraph 3 for the convenience of our blog readers.

– wpl

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Way before the movie “Planet of the Apes” showed us the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand, I have felt the need to experience cultures which grew, fell into decadence and vanished. These are probably cautionary tales even beyond their aesthetic marvel.

Edward Albee took a trip to Easter Island, and wrote about it in the New York Times.

Mickey Birnbaum

It was truly a dog fete dog night Friday night as the majority of the group rolled out to see Katy Hickman’s splendid Bright Boy: The Passion of Rober McNamara, produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre at the Electric Lodge in Venice. It was truly gratifying to see a play that we had all read and reread make it to the stage, and wonderful to see Katy’s passion brought to life. Mickey Birnbaum even rolled from Kansas - escaping tornadoes (it’s a twister!)- where he’s been doing the Inge residency. You can read all about his ruby slipper life on his dogearblog: IT IS IN THE BREWING LUMINOUS.

In other Dog news, Joy and I were featured in a Backstage West article on women playwrights: Sisters on Stage. And feel free to FIB on my blog — To Be Determined….(and what’s a fib, you might ask…click the link).

That’s the dog-doings that I know.

jennifer maisel

What do we want these days from the theater? Increasingly, or so audiences as much as dictate, stories that come to a handy, even cozy conclusion, where life’s knots aren’t so much sentimentally unraveled as they are re- assembled in a nice, neat bow. So the London stage deserves credit this, and virtually every, season for proffering plays that take the harder, more circuitous path, leaving open-ended the fates of characters whom lesser writers would lead to the sort of preordained conclusion that leaves spectators happy but isn’t necessarily true to life.

Matt Wolf ponders the messier side of London’s playwriting world in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune. Read the rest of the article here. Then reflect on how pioneering American playwrights — and audiences — have left the English in the dust when it comes to taking chances.

Mickey Birnbaum

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You’re thinking about writing a new play. You sift through your list of ideas. You look around and see what’s being done–especially all the zippy productions at places like Louiville, or profiled in American Theatre, or even the Cornerstone As You Like It at Pasadena Playhouse, for God’s sake. You ask, am I up to this? (Maybe.) Am I hip enough? (No.) Will it make the world a better place? (Decidedly no.) So is it really, really worth it? (Still thinking.) Then you read this. You sigh a deep sigh of relief. Gratitude wells up in your heart like a broken sprinkler. You go on.

Wayne Peter Liebman

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Sexing up Shakespeare is a handy trick for directors seeking to exploit the Bard’s bawdy humour to put bums on seats. Now one woman has gone further with the most intensive search ever for sexual innuendo, toilet humour and smut buried deep in the national poet’s oeuvre.

In Sunday’s Guardian, David Smith writes about Heloise Senechal’s titillating new footnotes for a Royal Shakespeare Company edition of the complete works. Tickle this link.

Mickey Birnbaum

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In today’s New York Times, Jonathan Kalb examines Beckett’s influence on the current generation of playwrights:

SOME years back, the playwright Tony Kushner amused a conference audience by talking about two different types of theatrical enterprises: “lasagna” dramaturgy and “matzo” dramaturgy.

His own plays, like “Angels in America,” clearly fell into the lasagna category, he said, providing a grandiose, chewy and multilayered immersion in particular social realities. Matzo drama, by contrast, was thin and spare; it required what Mr. Kushner called a “spiritual discipline” that he didn’t feel equal to, and to him the quintessential “matzo of a playwright” was Samuel Beckett.

I can’t read on, I’ll read on, here.

Mickey Birnbaum

In the Sunday Seattle Times, Misha Berson offers up a smart analysis of current trends in political theater:

“Few people attend theater to be lectured at, browbeaten or hectored about what they already believe — or choose not to believe. But plays triggered by contentious, newsworthy events of our day don’t have to be dry or message-mongering. And just as the 2006 Oscar race was dominated by quality films pondering race relations, gay rights, the geopolitics of oil and terrorism, so is topical stage drama making a quiet but palpable comeback locally, for the first time in a long while. “

Read more here.

Mickey Birnbaum