The Thaumaturgy Department

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?”

…and are you part of rending our social fabric?

Well, that title pretty much says it all. Click through for a wealth of more specific links.

It’ll be the 125th anniversary of Historic Eatonville at this year’s annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. January 21-29, 2012.

Discussion of Their Eyes Were Watching God from the NEA Big Read program—featuring Ruby Dee, Robert Hemenway, Carla Kaplan, Bret Lott, Azar Nafisi, Jerry Pinkney, and Alice Walker.

A notable Hurston biographer reflects on the two languages or twin idioms of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Both of these play out in Gleam, the stage adaptation of Hurston’s classic novel—starting rehearsals in a few days at CENTERSTAGE.

Howard Shalwitz of Woolly Mammoth gives his list of reasons why theater matters, and makes our lives better. What would be on your list?

A Change Is Gonna Come

By John Lewis for Baltimore Magazine

New artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah not only wants to transform Centerstage—he wants to redefine Baltimore. ….

A fabulous, interesting, and thoughtful new blog from a longtime grants-maker at the wonderful Mellon Foundation, now a grad student and Big Thinker on the cultural scene. Seems somehow unfair to lump the maundering and often random assemblage of thoughts and impulses that we collect here on tumblr under the same name as something as carefully constructed and well-conceived as what Diane has put together, but there you go. Go read what she has to offer.