The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #220: Jennifer Steil
“Ultimately art is about making sense of our brief lives on earth.”
...more
Posts Tagged: theater
Everything Is Happening All of the Time: Talking with Sven Ratzke
Sven Ratzke discusses his new show, WHERE ARE WE NOW.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Malcolm Tariq
Malcolm Tariq discusses his debut collection, HEED THE HOLLOW.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #75: Deborah Kampmeier
I met Deborah Kampmeier at a workshop in November. We were two weeks post-election; the room was raw with emotion, and electric with conversations about resistance. This tall, badass woman dressed in all black sauntered into the room, and chose a seat at the table. When she read, my solar plexus exploded, and I couldn’t stop […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Kea Wilson
Kea Wilson discusses her debut novel We Eat Our Own, the influence of film on her work, and what she’s learned from working as a bookseller.
...more
The Dark Lady
In my imaginings, Ava was always a woman driving at night, a face behind glass in a shiny speeding vehicle, motoring down the road.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Abraham Burickson
Rick Moody talks with Abraham Burickson, Artistic Director of Odyssey Works, a San Francisco-based theater company whose works are designed for an audience of one.
...moreReimagining The Tempest
How to create a credible contemporary novel from a work written four centuries ago for the stage? In a New York Times Book Review, author Emily St. John Mandel reviews Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, a modern interpretation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Jamie Brickhouse
Jamie Brickhouse discusses Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother, a memoir that chronicles his intimate, near-fatal journey through alcoholism, and living HIV positive.
...more
Discovering Septimania
I set off for Rome with my fiddle and a backpack, planning to busk as long as the tourists could stand it.
...more
Baltimore, Offline
Social media’s role in all this is especially strange in that it makes people feel obligated to speak out, whether they’ve thought hard about their place in the discourse or not.
...moreTragedy in Spades: a Crime Documentary (the Play)
Probably internationally acclaimed playwright Liza Birkenmeier, dubbed “the next big thing” by someone somewhere, who wrote national bestseller “Funny Women #136: Recommendation Letter” is also here to help you with your weekend plans. The cultural moment we are in is obsessed with true crime . . . and with truth, and with crime. Through April 9th in […]
...more
Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #23: Plays to Devour on the Page and the Stage
Of course it’s tremendous to see a play on stage, but reading a play, its script, is a pleasure in its own right. I think for many of us the notion of reading plays was ruined in high school, what with the dreadful, hackneyed line-by-line dissection of Romeo and Juliet and Our Town led by […]
...more
No, Lolita
He wasn’t just my teacher. He was the rockstar teacher of our theater program.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Mark Leyner
Mark Leyner on his new book Gone with the Mind, pressuring the novel form, being a purist Dionysian, and artisanal pap smears.
...moreBinge-Watching Bolaño
The latest installment in the trend of adapting the unadaptable is none other than Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, a sprawling, digressive novel to which director Robert Falls has allotted five hours of mixed-media stage time. Performances will begin at Chicago’s Goodman Theater on February 6. Bring snacks.
...morePicturing a New Shakespeare
At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier reviews a new collection that gathers posters for productions of Shakespeare from around the world. This collection has posters from fifty-five countries, ranging from the earliest advertisements for Shakespeare’s plays into productions from the present day.
...moreAnother Lost Work by a Dead Writer
If it seems that “lost” books, short stories, and everything else are coming out of the woodwork, well, they are. The Strand magazine has just published Twixt Cup and Lip, an early play by William Faulkner written in the 1920s: The Strand describes the play as “a light-hearted jazz age story.” Prohibition is under way, and […]
...moreHarry Potter Headed to the Stage
J.K. Rowling announced on Twitter that she is writing a new play to tell portions of Harry’s stories that the books skipped over. The new stage show include Harry’s parents, Lily and James Potter, but Rowling stressed it is not a prequel. The show will open in London in 2016.
...moreResurrecting a Soviet Satire
The New York Times takes a look at Dying For It, a new adaption of The Suicide, a 1928 satirical play written (but never performed) under Stalinism.
...moreBrecht in Love
Who would’ve thought Bertolt Brecht would turn out to be such a romantic? While his newly released Love Poems are surprisingly erotic compared to his better-known plays, they retain that Marxist flair we know and love: Brecht’s love poems might just as easily be dubbed the death of love poems, since he is concerned with […]
...moreHelp Support The Grimaldis
Bay Area local Dane Ballard is the writer and producer of The Grimaldis, a musical about the decline of a show-biz family: “For generations, the Grimaldi family has thrilled audiences the world over. From the opera houses of old Europe to America’s silver screen, they were the quintessential showbiz family. Now the last surviving member of the […]
...moreNew Fire
La Bloga interviews writer and director Cherríe Moraga about NEW FIRE–TO PUT THINGS RIGHT AGAIN, which premieres this week at Brava Theater in San Francisco. Moraga discusses how the play’s structure reflects the conceit of moving beyond convention, as well as the metaphorical presence of La Llorona and use of multimedia in her productions. New […]
...moreTheater-Wise: A Very Short Q&A With Niki Selken from Ko Labs
A couple days ago, I saw this short blog post in Publishers’ Weekly that asked whether writers could make more money by putting on literary performances than by selling books (short answer: no.) This dismissal seemed premature to me. I like to think that the lack of willingness among the general public to attend readings […]
...moreStaging A Beautiful Apocalypse
Today is the birthday of one of my very favorite living writers, Samuel R. Delany. (I spoke once here before about how I share with Junot Diaz an abiding love for Delany’s work.) All it took for him to become my favorite was to read his legendary, mind-boggling and notorious sci-fi apocalyptic epic Dhalgren a […]
...moreThe Rumpus Review of War Music
If you live in San Francisco you’ve probably seen the signs on storefronts and taxis—the posters eye-catching and cryptic: War Music, flanked by a wing and a gun.
...more