Will Power News

Steppenwolf Theatre Company announced its 2020/21 Reset Season today featuring a truncated four play lineup (originally six plays) with flexible dates to allow for greater agility in the time of COVID-19, accompanied with a robust slate of original virtual programming.

In collaboration with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, HowlRound Theatre Commons established the National Playwright Residency Program (NPRP) in 2013.

Among tonight's winners was the pre-Broadway engagement of Six the Musical. which took home Outstanding Visiting Production for its run at ART, while David Byrne's American Utopia was honored with Best Visiting Performance, Musical.

Two dozen nominations of outstanding actors, directors, designers and ensembles were announced today by The Boston Theater Critics Association (BTCA) for the 38th Annual Elliot Norton Awards.

The show must go on! We Alliance Theatre is showcasing the finalists of the 16th Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition by making all four scripts available to the public to read between now and April 24, 2020.

The Alliance Theatre will showcase the finalists of the 16th Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition by making all four scripts available to the public to read between April 9 a?" 24, 2020. 

In response to Yale University's March 7 recommendation that all campus events of more than 100 people (excluding classes) be postponed, canceled, or adjusted, in order to prevent the transmission of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Yale Repertory Theatre has implemented new audience capacity and ticket policies and a revised performance schedule for Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Carl Cofield.

Comedian and classically-trained double bassist Taco Kuiper returns to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year, with another hilarious and absurdly relatable double bass comedy production. Reluctantly sharing the limelight with Terry, her double bass, she will power through an all-original songbook, providing hysterical insights on current affairs, the beauty of hindsight, sexism, bisexuality, looking after your mental health and the perils of working in the accounting profession. Perhaps Next Time is a show about how to turn regrets into a guide on what the hell you're supposed to be doing as a twenty-something in the twenty-first century. Taco Kuiper is a comedian, singer, actress, dancer, and double bassist - or as she would put it, Melbourne's first quintuple threat.

Miley Cyrus will headline the World Tour Bushfire Relief charity concert a?" a one night only event to benefit Australian fire relief efforts on Friday 13th March at Lakeside Stadium in Melbourne. Country-rap star Lil Nas X, pop duo The Veronicas and DJ Seb Fontaine will join Miley Cyrus as special guests.

Yale Repertory Theatre (James Bundy, Artistic Director; Victoria Nolan, Managing Director) presents A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, directed by Carl Cofield, at the University Theatre (222 York Street), March 13a?"April 4. Opening Night is March 19.  

After hearing from educators and district leaders about their struggle to engage high school students in classic literature, the Alliance Theatre is pleased to announce a new playwriting initiative. The Classic Remix Project will commission leading American playwrights to create new works that revitalize, rethink, and respond to classic literary works found in most school curriculums. 

In David Mamet's book On Directing Film, he breaks down the way a linear narrative can be conveyed by placing images in direct contrast to each other. a?oeThe dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.a?? Certainly, with a majority of the action taking place upstage of a scrim and the fusion of filmed and live material, ArtsEmerson's Detroit Red, an original play by Will Power about Malcolm X's early adult life in Roxbury, leaves one feeling more as though one has watched a movie or woken from a dream than sat through a performance. Recently, I also saw Gloria: A Life, which is playing at the American Repertory Theatre. While I admittedly found the show to be trite and pandering, it obtusely fused projection effects with live performance in a way that felt cheap, gimmicky, and more like a new SnapChat filter than anything else. Contrast that with Ari Herzig's film work for Detroit Red, which snaps the audience effectively between viewpoints in black and white and splays broad images across the haziness of Adam Rigg's nondescript set. The success of the production lies in the success of the filmed elements, which establish a framing device, pinpointing the action to an exact moment in time. Additionally, the projections act as effective abstractions, allowing the actors to waver between realism and poetry as photos of their faces appear as oversized watermarks in space. Lighting designer Alan Edwards equally contributes to the cinematic feel of the piece. Sharp shafts of light slice through open space and act, ingeniously, as the camera lens might in film, focusing our attention on specifics and the relevant details. Aside from a few extraneous hat changes for the three actors who take on all the roles in the piece, between the work of Herzig, Rigg, and Edwards, the performance seems to be a study in the logistics of jump-cuts or cross-fades in real time. Adding to the film-instead-of-theatre feeling in the space, the performance actively roused and engaged the audience, which had a huge swathe of Boston school groups present. The crowd felt comfortable verbalizing responses, in part, because of our physical separation from the action presented to us, and to be able to laugh, cheer, gasp, and grimace in solidarity with those around you is a rare treat.

NAATCO (National Asian American Theatre Company) founder and Artistic Producing Director Mia Katigbak today announced the creation of The NAATCO National Partnership Project (NNPP), a national theater initiative that will ingrain the inclusion of Asian American theatre artists, technicians, administrators, and community members in the American theater.

The versatile powerhouse singer Catherine Porter is singing as often as she can these days - it keeps her happy and healthy, but singing with her famous boyfriend at The Birdland Theater is super bliss!

ArtsEmerson will present the World Premiere of Detroit Red by internationally renowned playwright Will Power. This theatrical exploration of the life of Malcolm X as he dwelled and came of age in the Roxbury section of Boston, plays the Emerson Paramount Center Robert J. Orchard Stage February 01 a?" 16, 2020.

New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) (Artistic Director James C. Nicola and Managing Director Jeremy Blocker) announced today performers, presenters and the host for the NYTW 2020 Gala, honoring NYTW Usual Suspect & Tony Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Three Pianos at NYTW) and Tony Award-winning producer Jordan Roth (Producer of Hadestown; President of Jujamcyn Theaters). The Gala will be held on Monday, February 3 at Capitale (130 Bowery, New York, NY 10013).

An old fashioned hearing aid and a strong willed woman at its helm with dreams as big as the universe she wishes to discover is one of many centralized themes presented in this brilliant staging of Lauren Gunderson's Silent Sky at American Stage Theatre. At the center of the stage two desk faced by numerous books on shelves in a workspace for women at Harvard University, where women are paid a mere .25 cents on the hour to a?oecomputea?? and manually log the patterns of stars in the galaxy given on glass plates by their male counterparts. At this point in Harvard's history women were not allowed to work alongside the men no matter their prior education or status. Men had their place, and women had theirs and men liked to make sure the women knew their place in the hierarchy. It was one women's dream to be credited amongst the likes of men in the Astrology department, and through sheer will power she set out to prove just that.

ENSEMBLE STUDIO THEATRE (EST) and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Doron Weber, Vice-President, Programs) along with the EST/Sloan Project, are pleased to announce new EST/Sloan commissions for the 2019-2020 season.

The ArtsPower National Touring Theatre brings the multi award-winning book written by Danny Schnitzlein and illustrated by Matthew Faulkner to the Adelphi University Performing Arts Center (PAC) on Saturday, October 19. Its newest original musical theater production, The Monster Who Ate My Peas, is a funny and poignant story about a young boy who doesn't want to eat his peas.

Project: Transform returns to Education @ Hartford Stage this fall, with acclaimed Pike St. playwright, actor and teaching artist Nilaja Sun serving as guest artist. Connecticut high school students with a talent for writing, acting, dancing, music, poetry or art are encouraged to apply for the free innovative performance program celebrating diversity and acceptance.