ELIZA BENT

For $1.99, you can download an audio drama set on the ferry — Is a play still a play when the actors aren’t aware they’re actors? Is a spectator still a spectator when they become a part of a set? Is a theatre company still a theatre company when it’s called This Is Not a […]

It’s not every day that a playwright starts her own theatre company and then wins a prestigious, game-changing grant. But such was the case for Sibyl Kempson, whose 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. was founded before she was selected as a USA Rockefeller Fellow last year. “The company came before the grant,” says Kempson. “But it seemed cosmically connected.”

Contemporary audiences sometimes expect classic dramas to be updated for modern times, but that’s not Red Bull Theater‘s approach. The 12-year-old company — whose primary mission is to stage Jacobean-era plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries  — is currently mounting a lively and faithful production of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Duke […]

Lisa R. Clair turns her medical condition into a trippy musical performance — For playwright/actor Lisa R.Clair, receiving a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis was an oddly enlightening artistic moment. “I thought, ‘At least now I have an ending for my show,’” she deadpans. Clair’s What’s YOUR Problem? A Deep Space Lounge Act, which she also […]

What is it about the idea of a perfect community that’s so alluring? And is the attempt to make art all that different from the quest to create a utopia? Members of the theatre ensemble Piehole found themselves wrestling with these questions as they developed Old Paper Houses, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad and running through […]

Actors are often told to make a character “their own.” But what exactly does that mean? And how do actors put themselves into a role when they’re playing someone who’s almost twice their age? For the 40-year-old performer Elizabeth Dement, who stars as an 80-year-old retiree in Christina Masciotti’s Social Security, at the Bushwick Starr […]

Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles Nick Bright, the American investment banker who’s kidnapped and held for ransom in Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, certainly evokes some sympathy. In the play, which is now at New York Theatre Workshop, he has to raise his own ransom […]

“When you look at YouTube and the culture of social media, you see how the rest of society is now a ‘creator.’ We expect to take professional level photos on our phones, so why not empower the audience to create a musical on the spot?” So says improv artist Mike Descoteaux. That’s why his show Blank! The Musical allows the audience to create every single element of the full-fledged musical they se

Chances are you’re familiar with Raymond Scott’s music… you just don’t know it. The 20th-century American electronic music pioneer composed many of what became animation’s most infamous tunes, even though he didn’t write them with Bugs Bunny in mind. Director Jon Levin was humming one of Scott’s melodies, “Powerhouse,” when a friend described how, despite […]