2AMT: 2 a.m. theatre – Thinking outside the black box since 2010.

Things may look a little chaotic for a bit as we move to a new server and start bringing the site back to life.
One thing we’re trying to figure out with this new theme is getting it to show authors’ names on posts and on post excerpts. Slightly larger avatars would be lovely as well. But that’s okay–for a while, it wasn’t even showing multiple authors on the...

The news that Chicago is losing the American Theater Company–here’s the Chicago Tribune story–is stunning. Artistic Director Will Davis was let go, and the board has decided to fold the company.
It’s the last paragraph that’s distressing.
Under Davis, the theater took a more experimental turn, far from the pathway of developing new work with commercial potential, and although some of the productions were innovative, audiences dwindled and the financial picture deteriorated further, leading...

Another Giving Tuesday, another day spent deleting emails unread and maybe unsubscribing from the places that send more than two in a day. And I work in the arts.
But every year, it’s the same thing. An avalanche of emails, often from theatres and organizations I haven’t heard from most of the rest of the year, each one asking for money, think of the arts at this most special time of the year. At the same time...

Let’s posit two categories of theatre.
To be dramatic (that’s what we do, right?) we’ll call the first category “Sit-down-and-shut-up” theatre, meaning theatrical productions in which the audience is fundamentally expected to watch attentively but take no action that might disrupt the flow...