Critics Terry Teachout (The Wall Street Journal), Elisabeth Vincentelli (The New York Times, Newsday, and the New Yorker), and Peter Marks (The Washington Post) get together to address and argue about the latest onstage.
This week Teachout calls in from West Palm Beach, Fla., where he is working on his new play, Billy and Me, about the friendship between Tennessee Williams and William Inge, at Palm Beach Dramaworks. Teachout, who also wrote (and has directed a production of) Satchmo at the Waldorf, discusses what it’s like to be on the other side of the curtain: How does his playwriting inform his criticism, and vice versa? What’s it like to see various productions of his own plays—and does it help him gauge the variables in the shows he reviews? How does he address potential conflicts of interest?
Then Marks, Teachout and Vincentelli welcome the accomplished, prolific director Lila Neugebauer. She just had two shows back to back at Lincoln Center Theater, Zoe Kazan’s After the Blast and Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, and her collaboration with the company the Mad Ones, Miles for Mary, moves to Playwrights Horizons in January 2018 (it premiered at the Bushwick Starr last year). Neugebauer’s extensive regional credits include Annie Baker’s The Aliens and Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, both at Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. She talks to Three on the Aisle about choosing plays, the art of collaboration, what she sees as the director’s role, and her bucket list.
Also in this episode, a discussion of sexual harassment in theatre, and why we haven’t heard of it as much as in Hollywood and the media (Teachout has some interesting theories on the subject).
To round up the podcast, the trio discuss a recent show they have particularly enjoyed.
You can hear all this, and more, on Three on the Aisle.
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