Cards on the table here: I’ve been wanting to do an expressionist version of Dracula for some time now. I have all kinds of crazy ideas for it, and to that end I have done some investigations into the aesthetics of horror, and looked at some of the ways that horror works onstage. I am [...]
Archive for the ‘Scratchpad’ Category
So, I want to start up some awards in Philadelphia for independent theater. Awards are always a tricky thing; I mean, on the one hand, no one working in the arts should care about awards, because they’re bullshit, right? Even if you could accurately create a system for quantitatively evaluating performances or direction or design, [...]
On the Power of Livestreaming
Posted: August 2, 2010 in braak, Productions!, Projects, ScratchpadTags: braak, empress of the moon, livestreaming, theater, theatre
ANNOUNCEMENT: in concert with the science and speculative fiction site WWW.IO9.COM, the SOE will be livestreaming the opening night performance of Empress of the Moon. As long as you go to io9 between the hours of 8:00 PM Eastern/Standard and…whenever the show is over (I think it’ll be around 10:00 PM), you will be able [...]
Staged Readings: What Is the Point of Them?
Posted: July 28, 2010 in braak, ScratchpadTags: braak, theater
I was a hair’s-breadth from using all of my (completely imaginary, entirely assumed) authority from flat-out issuing a moratorium on staged readings. They are a pain in the ass, mostly, a lot of times they just feel like a scam, and, in my own, personal experience, they rarely provide any kind of useful feedback. But, [...]
The Tyranny of Verisimilitude
Posted: July 3, 2010 in braak, ScratchpadTags: aesthetics, theater, verisimilitude
As promised. The theater of the late 19th and early 20th century is replete with stories of daring theater managers trying to outdo each other by creating vast technical marvels; impresarios were doing all kinds of outlandish things, like building giant treadmills onstage so that they could stage Ben-Hur’s chariot race, or whole butcher shops [...]
So, in case you haven’t heard, the SOE is starting its newest project — a play about the life of Aphra Behn, the first woman to make her living as a playwright. Empress of the Moon takes place before she’s written anything, during the periods of her life when she was a spy in Surinam [...]
Empress of the Moon: the Lives of Aphra Behn
Posted: June 16, 2010 in braak, Projects, ScratchpadTags: aphra behn, braak, feminism, theater
(cross-posted at Threat Quality Press) So. My new play, The Empress of the Moon, is done-ish. First draft done, anyway. We start rehearsals for it today, and we can spend a week or so doing some major re-writes to it, because I have to start choreographing the MILLION swordfights that it requires. Right now, I [...]
The Love Jerry Controversy
Posted: June 11, 2010 in braak, ScratchpadTags: controversy, love jerry, theater
(UPDATE: Nicole from Nice People responds in the comment section here. Not a hundred percent sure how I feel yet, though I am disdainful of the idea of putting personal safety ahead of art.) (cross-posted at Threat Quality Press) Oh, well. First post, but we might as well jump right in, huh? Controversy is important in [...]
The Special Operations Executive is Iron Age Theatre’s brand-new experimental and developmental division. Here is our home page and scratchpad; it’s full of information about our new projects and (occasionally) the mad theories behind them. We’ll also be posting theory, criticism, and conjecture here, so if you’ve got something interesting to say about the theater in Philadelphia, [...]
