The official blog of the Dramaturgy Department at Baltimore's CENTERSTAGE. For posts related to our current and upcoming shows, click the links to the right. Alternatively, you could begin at the beginning, and explore our posts in chronological order.
Latest release of My America videos from CENTERSTAGE look at home, place, geography, and more.
#MyAmerica @CENTERSTAGE_MD
#newplay
In CENTERSTAGE’s My America project, just over 50 playwrights take a look at, or go looking for, “their” America. Here, the NYTimes does it in a different way.
#MyAmerica #newplay
have you watched the latest MY AMERICA videos? well, here you can explore them and the project from various angles, through prisms thematic, personal, or geographic - and follow some oblique tangents too!
No, not the Pinter variety. Local boy, playwright Gwydion Suilebhan, reflects on his journey backwards and forwards to tonight’s MY AMERICA premiere:
“Making Good in Baltimore” - Gwydion Suilebhan
When I was a boy growing up in Baltimore, my parents would often go out to the theater. They’d get dressed up, eat a nice dinner at a nice restaurant (usually Tio Pepe), and make their way to Centerstage. For what may seem like obvious reasons, those always seemed like magical nights to me: very grown-up, very meaningful, very important. I romanticized the entire experience, enjoying it from afar. I was always very concerned about whether or not they’d had a good time… and they always did.
More than three decades later, I’m now a playwright, and I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that the pinnacle of achievement in my craft would be to have my work appear on stage at the very same theater. And tonight — I honestly still can’t believe I get to say this — it will.
This evening marks Centerstage’s 50th anniversary. To celebrate, the theater created the My America project: fifty playwrights were asked to write two-minute monologues exploring the state of our country. Our monologues were all filmed by director Hal Hartley, and they’re going to be screened all year long in the theater’s lobby. In addition, a small sample of the work created for the project — including my short piece, ANTHEM — will be performed live this evening.
I’m honestly not sure I’ll be able to stand the excitement. I may faint when Kwame Kwei-Armah, the theater’s artistic director, calls me up on stage. Or get cold sweats. Or both. No, really. I actually mean it.
Part of my anxiety, I should note, comes from a few of the other 49 names on the list of 50 playwrights: Anna Deavere Smith, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Neil LaBute, Christopher Durang, Lynn Nottage, Lydia Diamond (my classmate from Northwestern — go NU!), Lee Blessing, Marcus Gardley, Naomi Wallace, Rajiv Joseph, Qui Nguyen, Kia Corthron, Melanie Marnich, Dan Dietz, Willy Holtzman, Sam Hunter, Julie Jensen, Lauren Yee… you get the picture. I’m incredibly, incredibly humbled to be among them.
Still, though… it’s the thought of my young parents, all dressed up in date clothes, sitting in the same space I’m about to be in, the same space in which my adult words are about to be spoken: it just doesn’t get any better than that, let me tell you. Not even a little.
http://www.suilebhan.com/2012/09/28/making-good-in-baltimore/
It’s time for CENTERSTAGE’s semi-centennial anniversary hooplathon! Yes, 50 Fest is here.
For more on the multi-day, multi-venue, multi-disciplinary, multi-media extravaganza, here’s our Director of Community Programs and Education, Julianne Franz:
Wonder what’s happening this weekend? Friday through Sunday, we’ll be BUZZING:
Go to http://www.centerstage.org/2012-13Season/50Fest.aspx
Here are a few highlights of things not to be missed … and totally free!
Street Painting on Monument Street, Friday and Saturday
My America Playwrights on the 6th Floor on Saturday at 12 noon
Poe, Poe, Poe Shows from 4-7:30pm on Saturday in The Head Theater
DJC is Charisse – spinning on the outdoor stage
Rumors of Flash Mobs up at the Monument at 12:45pm and 2:45pm (not to be missed) on Saturday
Three open sessions of rehearsal for The Completely Fictional-Utterly True-Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe in the Andrus Rehearsal Hall.
Ping Pong Tournaments (compliments of Single Carrot) throughout the day on Saturday on Monument Street
If you’ve got wee ones … 12-4pm on Saturday for a Toddler Workshop, Sing-Along-Songs, and Storytelling
Julianne Franz
Director of Education & Community Programs
Newest release from Baltimore WHAM maestro reflects on the state of our union.
(Source: newyorker.com, via newyorker)
Low, Dirty Place: Maryland Morning considers the Civil War parole camps of Annapolis and the vicious nest of iniquity that arose around them. yet Baltimore gets all the grief….
With the debut of CENTERSTAGE’s My America project drawing ever-nearer, featuring 50 very short plays by 50 playwrights, we’re starting to gather some context and perspective. These many pieces examine, in a wondrous variety of ways, the questions “What is my America” or “Where is my America?”; here is another inquiry into the question that continues to stymie and stimulate—just what is “America?”
“NOW, I’m not proud of what I did,” my friend Donna said the other day, her voice dropping to a low, confessional register.
Donna is black, in her late 40s and a graphic designer. Three generations of her family owned a Victorian row house in Washington until a probate dispute a while back forced them to rent in the Maryland suburbs. Driving home from work in the city recently, she took a shortcut through the alley where she frolicked in her youth, but which she now barely recognized, with its three-story decks and Zen gardens that led onto sidewalks freshly paved in red brick.
Donna tooted the horn at a parked car blocking her path. The car’s owner, a white woman, dawdled away in her garden nearby. With a blithe wave, the woman suggested a detour. Donna refused. She intended to wait her out, but then the words just tumbled out: “If you didn’t want to follow the rules, you shouldn’t have moved your white” — and here she used an expletive — “into D.C.!”
This is the rage, long simmering just beneath the surface, that is bubbling over now that Washington, the once-majority-black city immortalized in George Clinton’s 1975 funk classic “Chocolate City,” has lost its black majority. But even before the data corroborated that demographic milestone last year, Washington’s makeover had created something of an identity crisis.
(via Farewell to Chocolate City - NYTimes.com)
Photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
(via npr)
For [Time’s] annual Making of America Issue, Jon Meacham takes a look at the life and times of this enduring yet embattled idea.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2117662_2117682_2117680,00.html #ixzz1z1r56ddB
Tim Smith of the Sun considers the 2012-13 Season at CENTERSTAGE (including the 50 world premieres of the “My America” project).
