Category: Interview
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Dispatches from LALA Land: Double Casting and The Antaeus Company
Originally posted at HowlRound When The Antaeus Company began in 1991, under the auspices of Center Theater Group, the idea was to find a way to maintain a classical theater company within the specific environment of Los Angeles where, for most actors, a living is made through a series of one-day jobs as costars, guest…
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Dispatches from LALA Land: Latino Theater in Los Angeles es Muy Bueno
Originally posted at HowlRound I can’t believe I don’t speak Spanish. I grew up in Texas, but I took German in high school. I lived in Washington Heights for three years, yet I never learned much more than huevos y queso sándwich (though I did like being called mami). Now I live in Southern California, but…
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Playing Shakespeare’s Men
Originally Published by HowlRound Though Shakespeare created around 798 male characters, his dramatic corpus contains only about 149 female ones. That’s a ratio of roughly sixteen to three. Yet every year the best conservatories accept at least as many women as men—if not more—and every year they graduate both men and women trained to act…
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Dispatches from LALA Land: California Women Got it On Lock
Originally posted at HowlRound In just one September weekend, Los Angeles theater patrons had at least three totally different productions of Shakespeare plays from which to choose. The Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company‘s all-female Hamlet was running at The Odyssey Theatre; a three-person adaptation of Richard II opened at The Theatre @ Boston Court; and…
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All-Woman Shakespeare: A Dying Tradition?
Originally posted at Ms. Sarah Siddons did it. Charlotte Cushman did it with pants on. Sarah Bernhardt did it in prose. Eva Le Gallienne did it with Uta Hagen. As long as it’s been legal for women to appear on stage, they’ve been playing Hamlet. Next week the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company will become…
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Dispatches from LALA Land: The Evolution of Asian American Theater
Los Angeles is a very naturally post-modern city. There’s no center. There’s disparate elements jutting up against each other. It’s just so jagged and fragmented–even the start stop in the traffic. But I feel like it’s going to be the 21st-century American city because the internet makes it less important how the physical organization of…
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Dispatches from LALA Land: On the Fringes of Hollywood
Originally posted at HowlRound. This year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival–only the fourth in it’s history–featured 212 separate productions in 50 different spaces for a total of more than 1,000 performances. They took in $258,000, all of which went directly back to the individual productions. For a city not known for its theater, that’s no small beans.…
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The Women of Comic Con: How the Internet Killed the Studio Star
During the lead up to this year’s Comic Con International, a Networked Insights analysis of social media conversation showed that 54% of people talking about the conference were women. So when I arrived on Thursday morning I wasn’t surprised to see that women were everywhere as fans, experts, press, and industry. At panel discussions, in…
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Dispatches from LALA Land: Adventures in the OC
Originally posted at HowlRound. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was wary of attending the theater. LA is an industry town, and if there’s one thing I’m not interested in, it’s staged screenplays. Don’t get me wrong–I love film. I just don’t want to see it on stage. Because technology allows for far…
Holly L. Derr 