Every other week, the editors of American Theatre curate a free-ranging discussion about the lively arts in our Offscript podcast.
What’d we miss? This week, we catch up on theatre news that we couldn’t get to in the last two special episodes: the closing of Profiles Theatre and the latest update on the Los Angeles 99-Seat contretemps, to name a few things. Rob Weinert-Kendt, Diep Tran, and Allison Considine also discuss the epic 2016 TCG Conference in Washington, D.C., Pokemon Go, and augmented reality. And Allison regales us with tales from her trip to the Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia.
This week’s guest is actor/director Josette Bushell-Mingo, an English artist of African descent who attended the TCG conference and took a few moments to tell Rob about her groundbreaking Swedish premiere production of A Raisin the Sun.
Download the episode here. Subscribe via iTunes or RSS.
Recommendations:
- For fans of language, check out The Wedding Gift, by Chisa Hutchinson, at the Contemporary American Theater Festival (July 8-31). Set “so far into the future it’s stupid,” where a man attends a wedding not as a guest but as a gift, and everyone’s speaking in a made-up language.
- If you haven’t read Angels in America: The Complete Oral History by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, do yourself a favor. Learn how the play’s premiere bankrupted the tiny Eureka Theatre, how the first draft of Perestroika was 700 pages long, and how Tony Kushner’s modern classic was the Hamilton of the ’90s.
- Speaking of the ’90s, if you haven’t checked out our package on the 20-year anniversary of August Wilson’s seminal “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech. Highlights include Rob’s interview with Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero, and Nathaniel G. Nesmith’s interview with author Charles Johnson about his friendship with Wilson.
