In Print: Yale Theater Journal Publishes Scripts of Big Art Group and Nature Theater of Oklahoma

Editor — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:19:15 +0000

Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet and Big Art Group’s SOS have been published in the new issue of Theater Journal. The issue focuses on the changing nature of playwriting, the impact of the economic crisis on theater in the US and Grotowski’s anniversary in Poland.

Below is a quote from the editor, Tom Sellar, about the published texts and the larger issue of publishing new playwriting.

Is all writing for the stage necessarily playwriting? What should we call the collection and arrangement of found texts — a strategy embraced by the first Internet generation, raised on pastiche and now testing its capacities onstage? Or words created by some process of research, improvisation, or collaboration that — deliberately or unknowingly — disregards constituent elements of dramatic form?

This issue began as a simple collection of enthusiasms: the two American scripts it contains, performed in 2008 and 2009 by Big Art Group and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, reflect the linguistic, thematic, and structural creativity of New York’s reinvigorated self-producing ensembles. But these two projects, shaped and defined by innovative collaborative models, led us to contemplate other questions about the evolution and fate of playwriting: what exactly does it mean to publish a script at a moment when print can no longer claim to guarantee dissemination of an artistic expression…

- Tom Sellar, Theater Journal 40:2 doi 10.1215/01610775-2009-024

© 2010 by Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre