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

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.

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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

Table of Contents:

Up Front
Tom Sellar
Tanya Dean
Juliana Francis Kelly

A Crisis of Purpose? A Forum
Compiled and introduced by Ryan M. Davis

The Booking of the Play
George Hunka

Babes in the Woods: Big Art Group’s SOS
Jacob Gallagher-Ross

SOS
Big Art Group

Uncreative Writing: Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet
Karinne Keithley

Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet
Nature Theater of Oklahoma

Books
Alan Ackerman on The American Play: 1787 – 2000

Productions and Events
Kathleen Cioffi on Year of Grotowski
Stephen Nunns on Grotowski’s Local Legacies
Miriam Felton-Dansky on Chautauqua! and The Provenance of Beauty

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Caden Manson is a director, media artist, and teacher. He is co-founder of the media ensemble bigartgroup.com and network, blog, and publisher, contemporaryperformance.com. He has co-created, directed, video- and set designed 18 Big Art Group productions. Manson has shown video installations in Austria, Germany, NYC, and Portland; performed PAIN KILLER in Berlin, Singapore and Vietnam; Taught in Berlin, Rome, Paris, Montreal, NYC, and Bern; the ensemble has been co-produced by the Vienna Festival, Festival d’Automne a Paris, Hebbel Am Ufer, Rome’s La Vie de Festival, PS122, and Wexner Center for The Arts. Caden is a 2001 Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellow, is a 2002 Pew Fellow and a 2011 MacDowell Fellow. Writing has been published in PAJ, Theater Magazine, and Theater der Zeit. Caden is currently an associate professor and graduate directing option coordinator of The John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama.

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