MARK BLANKENSHIP

By MARK BLANKENSHIP Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles You might assume that Tonya Pinkins focuses on the conflict in Rasheeda Speaking. After all, Joel Drake Johnson’s play, now in a New Group production at the Signature Center complex, basically turns a Chicago doctor’s office into […]

By MARK BLANKENSHIP When Osceola Mays sings “Oh Freedom,” we can feel what it means to her. One of two characters in Texas in Paris, a play with music at the York Theatre Company, she’s a black woman in her 80s, the daughter of a Texas sharecropper, who suddenly finds herself singing for the French […]

By MARK BLANKENSHIP Of course Dash’s arm falls off. When you lose someone, it can feel like losing a limb, and in City Of, now at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in a Playwrights Realm production, feelings like grief (and love and hope) become physical facts. Dash, a man traveling to Paris in the wake […]

At Flux, everyone, including the audience, is part of the team.

By MARK BLANKENSHIP Fans of Russian drama—or anyone who’s slogged through War and Peace-–might be startled to learn that Classic Stage Company’s current production of A Month in the Country lasts roughly 120 minutes. Since the original script for Ivan Turgenev’s 19th century comic romance can run nearly five hours, does that mean important moments have […]

By MARK BLANKENSHIP Maybe you know a theatrical person. Maybe they squeal with rapture when they get a great deal on paper towels. Maybe they rage like an opera villain when Verizon drops a phone call. These megawatt people can be intense, but they’re also incredibly captivating, turning every brunch into a platform for passion. […]

By MARK BLANKENSHIP In one way or another, most of us compete with our friends. Maybe we feel relieved that our jobs make us happier or that our marriages seem healthier. Maybe we feel the slightest bit smug when we understand a political reference and they don’t. Living in Western society, it’s just hard to […]

Company XIV is a dance-theatre company where art and entertainment crash together. This video features company members Austin McCormick, Laura Careless, and Davon Rainey.

Welcome to Geek Out/Freak Out, where theatre fans get super enthusiastic about things. This week, Stages editor Mark Blankenship geeks out (via Google Doc) with Catherine Sheehy, chair of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama and Resident Dramaturg at Yale Repertory Theatre. Mark Blankenship: Hi Catherine! As you may recall, we were […]