ProScenia Design

A New-Play Fest Stands Alone The Contemporary American Theater Festival is now the only U.S. gathering of its kind that fully stages all its offerings—and that matters more now.

A Year With Frog and Toad, Round House Theatre, 2005. Lighting by Dan Wagner with Harold Burgess, ALD.

Directed by Nick Olcott.

Sad to hear of Richard Greenberg’s passing. Three Days of Rain was, I think, the first script I designed for Round House in the season after leaving staff there, with Jerry directing , and I lived the script so much I recently went back to read it again.

Saddened to hear of Richard Greenberg's passing, we comforted ourselves by digging into American Theatre's archives about this major American writer. What a great subject and voice he was!

He first appeared in our pages after he adapted the musical PAL JOEY, in 1993: https://www.americantheatre.org/1993/01/01/richard-greenberg-now-hes-pals-with-joey/

We published his play THREE DAYS OF RAIN in our March 1998 issue. Here's his illuminating Q&A with Steven Drukman: https://www.americantheatre.org/1996/03/01/life-flows-through-it/

Then, in 2002, when TAKE ME OUT was a hit at the Public Theater, Drukman sat down with Greenberg again and dished about baseball and playwriting: https://www.americantheatre.org/2002/10/01/greenbergs-got-game/

In 2006, Terry Hong interviewed Greenberg when his work was in demand all over the U.S., including on Broadway: https://www.americantheatre.org/2006/02/01/the-greenberg-juggernaut/

Finally, in 2016, Lizzie Simon reviewed Greenberg's collection of non-fiction writing, "Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions." https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/10/20/richard-greenberg-alone-with-his-thoughts/

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Broadway review: Pirates! (★★★★), but no longer of Penzance A Gilbert and Sullivan favorite gets a New Orleans reset

Says it all.

Did ya?

Wordle 1,332 5/6

An Unbuilt Life, by Elizabeth DeSchruyver. Dir: Steven Carpenter, with Susan Holliday, JC Payne, and David Bryan Jackson. Costumes by Sigrid Johannesdottir, Lighting by Marianne Meadows, and sound by David Bryan Jackson.

When Steven and I first discussed this production, it had an entirely different look (period, even, but that's a different story); then, one day, he texted me a photo of a singular set of very distinctive firniture, and we both said, "yes, that's it!"...

Two redesigns later (and, as it happened, a whole set of furniture later), An Unbuilt Life had a distinctive life of its own. One of the challenges of The Undercroft Theatre, from a design standpoint, is that there are only so many directions one can go. But like designing for Beckett, with his vehement constraints, sometimes the binding sets you free. Kudos to the shop staff on this one: nobody expected that SL wall to flip around - snd certainly not as smoothly as it did…

(Special thanks to Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden, who stood in as emergency back up designer when I was supposed to be getting surgery…)

Arms And The Man - Washington Stage Guild - How to squeeze Shaw's three locations in time and space onto the stage of the Undercroft while paying heed to his (and director Michael Rothhaar's) seeming demand for a degree of representative specificity? God bless Matty Griffiths, who supervised the build (while playing Paul) Megan Holden, who led a veritable corps of scenic artists, and especially SM Arthur Nordlie, who got the changes down to around 12.5 minutes between acts...

Beckett says “A bare interior…”

Director Alan Wade says “a refuge…”

From what? One might ask: from everything. Endgame is not *the end*. But it is something late in the game: Clov says “winding down”…

It was while sitting in tech for The Good Doctor (a very different challenge, in a variety of ways) that I mused about the nature of the actual room the Undercroft Theater is… never meant to be a theater - a lecture hall, really but “bare” enough; and aren’t we all ending with Hamm and Clov? It certainly seems so, more and more, each day. And so was born the nugget for Endgame: We’re All In This Together. Thanks to Marianne Meadows, LD (USA829) for getting the lighting right, and to Nora Brennan for helping me source the plans for the sconces on the walls. TD: Michael Tsaltas; Scenic Charge Meaghan Zettell. Costumes: Stephanie Parks.

Why New Plays Now? A Case for Supporting the Unimaginable One of the nation’s most prolific living playwrights celebrates the theatre that has sustained him, and asks that it recommit to, and expand, its support for new work.