| Off
the Cuff recently interviewed Lynn M. Thomson, a professor
of dramaturgy at Brooklyn College and dramaturge for the musical
Rent, about her latest project, America-in-Play,
which is holding a series of readings this month at the TriBeCa
Performing Arts Center.
What is America-in-Play?
We are a new theater company devoted to immersing writers
and other theater artists in a neglected legacy of early-American
drama and theater for the purpose of inspiring new plays.
We seek to enrich contemporary voices with a deeper, wider
grounding in our culture's foundations.
What's
next for America-in-Play?
We are now doing
three nights of readings and chat with the audience, a sharing
of the work we've been exploring for the past year. Next
year, we will again be in residence at TriBeCa Performing
Arts Center, and I cannot say enough about how important
their artist-in-residence program has been to the life of
AIP. We would not exist except for the vision of the executive
director of TPAC, which is on the campus of Borough of Manhattan
Community College.
Next year we will continue our senior playwrights group
with more workshops. I intend to bring in a new first-year
group of playwrights and mix with them other artists: composers,
videographers, choreographers.
What theater do you see?
These days I
have so little time to see theater, and I regret that. I
do my best to know what is popular and what is around. …
I'm working on a musical, another project, and so am very
focused on seeing all the musical theater I can.
Who
or what are your influences?
Overall, as a
theater artist I was very inspired by the work of Peter
Brook, his ensemble work and ideas of collaboration. I was
very fortunate as a young person to see what was I think
America's greatest rep company, the APA-Phoenix, and to
be exposed to the kind of generosity and courage that comes
from artists truly collaborating. AIP holds many dreams
for me, and one is the idea of long-term association between
artists who develop a common language, a shared aesthetic
vocabulary.
What does a dramaturge do?
I believe that dramaturgy is changing the face of American
theater and moving us to new ideas about what is art and
making art. Dramaturgy is taking us into thinking about
theater again as a voice of the people, a conversation with
an audience rather than an assault on them, a place for
understanding. I think dramaturgy is helping us move to
a time when the arts can become part of the fabric of daily
life, a necessity.
Dramaturges bring collaboration and learning to a process.
Dramaturges fight an old prejudice that still pervades this
country, that making art is all about feeling and instinct,
as if those human behaviors can be separated out completely
from thinking and consciousness.
For
more information about America-in-Play, visit its Web site
at http://www.americainplay.org/.
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