#tfana

[shakespearenews]

Maggie Siff and Andy Grotelueschen in “The Taming of the Shrew,’”

[playbillionaire]

Down in the Cheap Seats

How to get more affordable theatre tickets in New York City. Here’s the same post on my Substack!

I’m not a professional, but I have been lucky enough to be attending theatre in the tri-state area my whole life, so here’s everything I know to help anyone who wants to get into seeing theatre without spending too much.

The trick of seeing great theatre without skipping a meal is to look beyond Broadway. Theatre tends to be more fluid than its marketing- almost all of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in the 21st century have premiered in smaller (more accessible) venues. Staying informed and being willingly to go outside of the usual Broadway houses is the best way to see theatre at affordable prices, and possibly catch new shows before they head to Broadway.

Here’s a couple of link that are good to know:

Playbill Weekly Schedule of Broadway Shows- A current schedule of the showtimes of every show currently running on Broadway. Shows are typically dark on Monday, but since the pandemic, schedules have changed and matinees have been added during the weekends, so it’s good to check which matinees are 2pm and which are 3pm, in case you want to try multiple lottos each day.

Playbill Broadway Rush, Lottery, and Standing Room Only Policies- Alphabetical list of all the discount ticket options for Broadway shows

Playbill Off-Broadway Rush and Inexpensive Ticket Policies- Alphabetical list of all the discount ticket options for off-Broadway shows.

Lotteries

When it comes to theatre, I feel that scheduling flexibility saves money. If you can go any time or day, you can snag cheaper tickets. I recommend entering as many lotteries as possible, as frequently as possible. When I was working at my desk job, I tried to make a habit of entering the lotteries every morning after checking my emails. Here’s all of the links to the digital lotteries- they usually email winners around 2, and give them an hour to purchase the tickets, so keep an eye on your email! (I’m not exactly sure why these shows are split up across these lotteries, rather than in one place, but it’s best to just go through all 3). As much as I love in-person rush, anyone with a full time job and commute is probably going to have a tough time getting to the box office when it opens at 10 or hanging around the theatre district hoping to snag a cheap ticket.

Broadway Direct Lottery

Telecharge Lottery and Rush- This requires signing into a social media account (very annoying), but also let’s you submit a lottery for more than one performance at a time

Lucky Seat- This one offers lotteries in several different cities, so make sure you are submitting for the New York performances

Today Tix- Need the app to get tickets, but some really great lotteries if you submit every day, especially for hot ticket Off-Broadway shows.

Discount Ticket Programs

A lot are mentioned in the Playbill article, but to keep everything together, below are my favorite ones that I’ve personally used. When a recent show I had tickets to was cancelled, I was able to check with these programs to get a last minute cheap ticket, so making/maintaining an account ahead of time is a good idea.

LincTix- Lincoln Center Theatre’s program for discount tickets for people between the ages of 21 and 35. With fees, tickets are $35.50 for any show at the 3 Broadway theatres at Lincoln Center. You can also purchase tickets for anyone else with a LincTix account in the same order. Don’t delete the email with your account number in it, you will need it to sign in every time you purchase tickets. Also, seats purchased with LincTix are always great, these are not partial view seats.

Playwrights Horizons Young Membership Discount Tickets- $20 tickets for any show for anyone under 35. You can also purchase $35 tickets for a guest to accompany you. There is also a $10 alternative for full-time students, at the same link. To sign up, you need to create an account and “purchase” a free membership, which will allow you to purchase the discounted tickets from your account. Remember to renew this every season, as it does expire.

2nd Stage Theater 30 Under 30 Discount Tickets- $30 tickets for any show for anyone under 30. When looking at performance dates, enter “30UNDER30” in the promo code window, and eligible seats will show up on the seating chart.

Manhattan Theatre Club 30 Under 35 Discount Tickets- $30 tickets for any show. Registering online allows anyone under 35 to buy 2 tickets per show. The best part is that you can bring a guest of any age- just make sure whoever purchased the ticket picks up the ticket at the box office.

Roundabout Theatre Company HipTix Program- $30 tickets for any show for anyone between the ages of 18 and 40. This program also allows you to purchase 2 tickets for any show, and your guest can be of any age. You’ll receive a promo code in an email that will let you purchase the tickets, and whoever purchased the tickets must pick them up at the box office.

Theatre For a New Audience New Deal Tickets- $20 tickets for any show for anyone under 30, or any full-time student. Enter the promo code NEWDEAL when purchasing tickets and the discount will be applied. Ticket must be picked up at the box office, so bring proof of ID.

Ultimately, it is possible to see theatre in New York City for less than a nice dinner! Having a flexible schedule, entering lotteries, and looking outside Broadway is the best way to do it (also, be under 30 I guess??). Good luck!

[if-only-angels-could-prevail]

anyway i want to see g slur on broadway, henry iv at tfana, swan lake at nyc ballet, and moby dick at the met. and YES i am aspiring to be a curmudgeonly old professor.

[essaysfromthefield]

Theatre for a New Audience - TFANA

June 3, 2020

Dear Dorothy, Jeffrey, and Bob—

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. Those of us on staff who took time to contribute to this did so because we believe in TFANA’s mission, in its staff as a force for good, and in the work we do in partnership with world-class artists.

It should be no surprise that, like everyone else in America, we are deeply affected by the explosions of frustration and the eruptions of consciousness all over the country–these protests are happening again and again and again because America is still not a safe place for Black people and people of color. As private citizens, we are protesting, speaking out, sharing resources, and donating, but we know it is not enough to do this work only in our private lives and as individuals, because social justice is not a private matter about individuals. To build an equitable and just society for all of us, we must confront racism and white supremacy in every aspect of our lives: within ourselves, our families, our friends, and where we work. For us as members of Team TFANA, doing the honest work of dismantling racist systems also means us doing better at the office, on the stage, and in everything we do.

Please hear us when we say we make this commitment right now, effective immediately.

As such, we would like to request an open discussion about concrete ways all of us at TFANA can be a part of the solution. We acknowledge the theater industry is just as much built on systemic racism as the rest of the country, and we are committing to strengthening TFANA’s dedication to being a safe space for everyone, specifically our Black artists, staff, donors, board member, and patrons. In order to do so, learning about white supremacy and immediately adopting active anti-racist practices in the workplace is essential.

Here are some of our ideas:

1. Implement anti-racist training for the staff, consultants, teaching artists, key part-time employees and collaborators, and board at least twice during any given fiscal year. We would like to reach out to an organization such as People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) and book an initial training to be held as soon as it is safe to gather in-person. In the interim, we will create a shareable

file of resources for all affiliated with TFANA, and establish a group that meets

monthly to share resources and discuss ways to continue anti-racist work within the organization. We believe interested staff (and especially interested staff of color) must be included in the decision-making of what organization is tapped for this initial and any follow-up training.

Commit to amplifying voices of color, not solely on our stages, through showing support on our platforms (social media, pylons, lobby screens, website, email list, etc.) for Black artists and other artists of color. This includes projects that do not benefit TFANA directly.

Actively recruit BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) leadership within the executive team and board. We need to seek out ways to dismantle systems that prevent BIPOC from joining the board. Ideally this would happen within this next fiscal year.

Create an EDI/anti-racist board committee to hold all staff accountable. This committee would meet monthly. Representation of people of color on this committee is essential.

Enhance anti-racist training geared towards audience-facing staff (marketing, box office, ushers, house managers, etc), in being intentional upstanders/bystanders. It is imperative anyone who works front-of-house has the skills to do the following: how to recognize and combat microaggressions;

calling-in strategies and how to support those targeted in empowering ways; advanced de-escalation and re-direct techniques; and how to support those in our community targeted for gender, sexual, or hate violence. Interested staff (and especially interested staff of color) must be included in the decision-making process regarding what training is used.

Commit to diversifying our roster of freelancers and independent contractors. We hope to work together with the board and leadership to arrive at a solid minimum commitment, in percentage terms, of contractors engaged by TFANA who are BIPOC, and to use targeted resources (BIPOC job boards, Facebook/online groups, word-of-mouth/recommendations from BIPOC sources) to find these contractors. Once we reach our goal, we will hold ourselves accountable for continuing to at least uphold (if not surpass) this commitment and search for diverse contractors. Hiring managers will need to be held accountable for their own hiring practices. To increase accountability, we will give freelancers and contractors the opportunity to give us feedback on our practices moving forward.

Commit to supporting Black-owned and POC-owned businesses, especially vendors in our local neighborhood of Fort Greene, and divesting from companies that profit from exploitation of BIPOC and/or support white supremacy. We have

already adopted this practice when we choose food vendors for closing night, and we will adopt and expand this company-wide going forward.

Support the movement. Staff would like to open the lobby, in solidarity with the rapidly increasing number of theaters already doing so, in order to give protesters a place to fill water bottles, use a restroom, and charge phones. Theaters all over NYC are joining this movement, including The Public, Signature Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, MCC, Soho Rep, Playwrights Horizons, Irondale, I.R.T, and ART New York. We are willing to volunteer to staff this initiative in the lobby, which would occur on limited dates and hours based on availability and planned demonstrations. We would also observe curfew.

Engage a professional EDI/anti-racist consultant on an ongoing basis so we can continue to learn. An organization such as ArtEquity would be excellent to partner with to help us shape organizational culture, inform hiring practices/onboarding, and more. Interested staff (and especially interested staff of color) should be included in the decision-making process of choosing this consultant and driving our work with them.

Double down on our commitment to welcome students into our space by creating new opportunities for young people to experience more of our productions each season, and by providing pathways for young people of color to explore and pursue careers in the theatre.

Commit fiscal resources to the items above starting with the FY21 budget.

Publish these actions we are taking as an organization so we can hold ourselves accountable. We must keep re-interrogating ourselves, approaching this work with humility, knowing and accepting that our work will never be done and that it is a messy but necessary process.

Dismantling systemic racism and white supremacy within the theater world begins with us. It is vital to do this work in order to create the equitable, diverse, and inclusive community that we are striving for, and will improve the health and longevity of our company in every way. It is difficult work that we want to do, and we want to do with you. We believe in TFANA and care deeply about its future. We invite your ideas and look forward to discussing with the entire team.

In the name of progress,

Team TFANA

[maxwellsmaart]

By my soul I swear There is no power in the tongue of man To alter me. I stay here on my bond. #merchantofvenice #tfana #tarryalittle #shakespeare #blackhistorymonth #blacktheatrematters #blackboysdotheatre #smlife (at Theatre for a New Audience) https://www.instagram.com/p/CaJH984t9IC/?utm_medium=tumblr

[frontmezzjunkies]

#TimonTFANA #frontmezzjunkies reviews: #Shakespeare's #TimonOfAthens coauthored with #ThomasMiddleton edited by #EmilyBurns & director #SimonGodwin with #KathrynHunter #brooklyntheatre #TFANA @theatreforanewa @TheRSC @ShakespeareinDC http://frontmezzjunkies.com/2020/01/21/tfana-timon-of-athens/ (at Brooklyn, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7rXVLDhyqv/?igshid=maadgnrw8nlj

[cithaerons]

anyways @ new yorkers - apparently the production of merchant of venice being shown in the city right now is horrifically anti-semitic. do not recommend. 

[averbaldumpingground]

Song prompt: Ghost - Jacob Lee

He almost doesn't notice him at first, his baseball cap pulled low, slouched in between the tall Hasidic man who's folding up his newspaper and the woman with her curly hair in puffs who's got a pit bull in the duffel bag on her lap. The man's familiar gaze skids past his eyes, the moment catching. At least he thinks it does. It’s lost behind the edges of a wide brim hat and the fluorescent purple cone the dog is wearing. He wonders if it might be his eyes playing tricks.

Before he can be sure, the man gets off the train at Fort Hamilton, fading into the late afternoon crowd and quickly replaced by two kids with a boombox who insist on taking up the aisle until Bay Parkway.

--

He's just getting back from his run, the suits already lined up by the food cart on 46th and Park, the next time that he thinks that he sees him, standing with his coffee to the side, obscured by the foot traffic and the woman pacing with her cell phone at the corner. At this angle, he thinks he can make out a faded logo. It could be a threadbare, white B. Or it could just be wishful thinking. He waits to cross the street, but when he gets there, the woman is signaling for a taxi. An older man in boat shoes stares at him, the recognition flickering across his sun-tanned face.

--

The park is mostly empty this early. A handful of other runners, a dog walker with his headphones in, someone dragging a lawn chair in the direction of the Belvedere Castle, or maybe the theater beyond it. He’s tempted to stop for a bottle of water, an excuse to get his bearings. There’s a bus that’s pulling up on 81st, just the shadow of movement, a sweatshirt that seems excessive for July, even on a drizzly, overcast morning. His water bottle forgotten, he takes off toward the museum. Theodore Roosevelt looks down at him disapprovingly when he loses sight of the shadow that he’d been chasing, the men flanking him an uncomfortable pit in his stomach. There’s no one else there except for the statue and an older woman pushing a stroller, a blonde little boy holding onto her hand and yawning out that he’s not sleepy.

--

After stopping by that burrito place on Flatbush, he’s almost looking for it, looking for him in strangers’ faces: the nurse in green scrubs that hurries past him, the little girls still in their school uniforms jumping rope in front of their apartment building, the man in the wheel chair speaking Spanish to his health aide, who’s got his shopping looped around the somewhat crooked handles. There’s a couple selling mango slices from a fold out table, and a younger man in an NYU t-shirt with a shopping cart that’s overfilled with laundry. He doesn’t want to think about it, moving faster past the group of women in yoga pants and sports bras outside the Planet Fitness, the boy with his grandpa on a scooter trying to reach the ice cream truck that shouldn’t be parked where it is. He almost misses it then, those eyes that land on him, so blue they’re practically frozen, his shout lost to the road construction and the traffic.

--

It’s in Grand Central when he catches him again. Of course, it’s in Grand Central. Too many people, too much noise in the morning commute. He knows better than to bother with it most days, taking the long way past Brooklyn Heights and the bridge, up past City Hall and Chambers Street through Chinatown and turning West toward the Hudson before it’s time to double back for a few laps around the park, and then south again toward the tower, impossible to miss among the other monoliths that take up too much space and too much sunlight. Park Avenue is wide enough that it’s not as claustrophobic here as around what used to be Penn Station, with all of its stores and its tourists and that general sense of unease. He almost misses him then, almost misses the halting way he trips over his Russian, almost like he’s not used to speaking at all, as he points out something on a map to the small group that’s clustered around him, a family with too many suitcases. He—

When the crowd parts enough, when he finally manages to make his way across the atrium, his early meeting forgotten, the family’s still there, but not the man he was certain that they’d been asking for directions. Not the ghost that hasn’t left him alone once, not in these intervening years.

He’s pretty sure he’s not crazy. Not when—

There’s no one there. He’s late anyway, quiet enough the rest of them start to get worried.

--

He knows he could just walk back, enjoy the view from the bridge in the pleasant warmth of the summer finally fading into fall. Something stops him though, tells him he’s better off taking the 6 down to Bleecker and switching trains. He usually knows better than to bother.

But maybe it’s intuition, or some kind of masochistic need to retrace all of his steps, take him back to where he thinks that this started, these glimpses of someone that he could have once sworn was dead.

As usual, the escalator down is crowded. A sea of faces that he doesn’t look too closely at, too much conversation around him. But there’s—

There’s movement out of the corner of his eye, someone pausing on the staircase by the windows. He thinks—

It’s only the barest flicker of a smile, an invitation almost. He thinks that it might be enough, at least for now.

[willeno]

GNIT -- some thoughts (updated)

I promise that after GNIT closes forever next Sunday (It’s now closed), I will stop posting about how you should go see it. Over the past 13 or 14 years of working on this adaptation of PEER GYNT,  a grinding but real affection has grown in me for complicated Ibsen and his complicated play. So nothing has pleased me more than to hear that people who really love and know the original play feel that-- with 3 hours and 25 actors removed-- something moving, funny, clear, and actionable has finally been revealed, re-interpreted, or created, in my adaptation. I have only read the first sentence of one review, which described Gnit as "inward-looking," which is really discouraging,  as I spent so many serious years rethinking, reworking, and changing the original-- which is famously and endlessly (maybe even hopelessly) inward-looking-- in an effort to make something that is raucously, honestly, and yearningly OUTWARD LOOKING. The all-caps means I really believe I have done this. I know for sure the beautiful production and cast is OUTWARD LOOKING. The all-caps means I love the cast and production. And I feel the play is looking out for you and I hope you will go see it and I will almost promise that, after next Sunday, I will not mention it again, except in occasional and everlasting thanks to the people and souls who helped it happen and are presently performing it, at www.tfana.org. (Here I am doing that. Thank you! I would not change a second of these last months.) This last week of posts might seem braggadocios, and maybe it has been, but I am also writing this in the most ragged and plain humility. A play that many wonderful people have put and are putting so much time and heart into, and that I think is a kind of a culmination in my thinking about theatre and life, is currently playing to very small houses in a small beautiful theater and will close in one week. Kind of a sad ending to this long post. Please don't go see GNIT in pity. Please go see it in all of your finest and most outgoing curiosity, your Sunday-best vulnerability, and your irrepressible and New Yorky fun-loving-ness. Also, I know we are still in the middle of strange and difficult times and that while everything is probably more meaningful, it is also more logistically difficult. So you might not make it. That's of course okay. Thank you for reading this. Please share it, if you like. I would appreciate that. (November 24, 2021. Thank you for reading. I know it’s not coal-mining, and I am very grateful for my life, but it’s hard to write a play, which by definition, by real definition, is something painstakingly conceived and created and realized that sometimes results in something magical and fleeting that occurs in real time, one time (over and over), in a room filled with the very specific and real people who were there that night, and whose totality is all the words and feelings and thoughts that are in the air and light, and that very specific transaction that occurs between the play and the cast and those real people’s feelings and thoughts and understanding and futures. And then a reviewer comes along and throws some words at all that. It has meant the world to me to hear from people who really know and have engaged with Ibsen’s play over the years and who have said they finally understand it and are grateful for Gnit’s outward-looking and loving stance. Or that, having seen many Peer Gynts, with real hope and desire and interest, they no longer need to see another, or, are excited to see another, with their new sympathy and understanding. It is so exciting to write a play. To try to engage with your heart and your mind across decades and centuries with this scraggly, super-spreader art form that is so punished and punishing. To try to get the timelessness of things into something that happens from 8-10 PM. And to try to see and feel and reflect the world you live in right this second. I am so grateful to the perfect cast of living humans and to Oliver and TFANA and to all the people who came to see the play. Thank you for reading all this way. I hope you are having a good day. Eat your greens and get some sun and exercise.  Will)

https://twitter.com/6_second.../status/1458927082621313032

https://twitter.com/BenjBrantley/status/1460995402296086530

[theaterpizzazzstuff]

Review by JK Clarke. Doing a Julius Caesar production set in contemporary times is risky nd inevitably results in audiences drawing comparisons.

[theatreforanewaudience]

Check out our production photos from MEASURE FOR MEASURE now live on Flickr! 

[shakespearenews]

As I watched the play I was struck anew by the frozen statue of Hermione…Why would a woman get frozen for over a decade, and somehow unfreeze? This question, of course, felt personal to me, as I was still grappling with these questions: When should one simply accept a diagnosis, rather than trying to get better? What is the difference between acceptance and resignation? Is acceptance saying, I take my life, my body as they are? Where, how, does grace enter in? And I wondered, as I watched The Winter’s Tale: is Hermione meant to be a real woman or just a metaphor for art? Is it significant that the daughter gazes upon “the statue of her mother”? It is not the husband who wakes the wife, but the woman’s friend, Paulina...

Sarah Ruhl on watching The Winter’s Tale at TFANA. From Smile: the Story of a Face, p. 177. 

[simperingshopgirls]

Has anyone watched the TFANA* Mad Forest?

[fyeahbroadway]

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder at Theatre for a New Auduence. Photos by Gerry Goodstein and Henry Grossman.

[etoilesbian]

amelia workman and helen cespedes in FEFU AND HER FRIENDS by maría irene fornés, dir. lileana blain-cruz, 2019

[kamilaslawinski]

The Emperor

I was in my teens when I first laid my hands on a copy of Ryszard Kapuściński’s seminal book The Emperor, a reportage volume chronicling the aftermath of the fall of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie. Like most people of that day and age at the place in my home country of Poland, I have been deciphering as an allegory of the corrupted system we’ve been living under. But there was something else about the book, something truly Shakespearean in scope, chilling and universal: like no other I have ever read before, it was a book about power and what it does to people. Over forty years about its publication, this is what gives Kapuściński’s account its staying power. Now, this highly un-theatrical text has landed on stage, in a most riveting adaptation, written for the stage by Colin Teevan, directed by Walter Meierjohann and in the tour-de-force performance by the phenomenal Kathryn Hunter, aided in her many stage transformations by an Ethiopian musician Temesgen Zekee. The result is nothing short of stunning.

Why do people follow insane leaders? Why don’t they question the disgusting abuses of the few that brings on harm and disaster on many? What kind of madness makes the underlings complicit in the most abhorrent misappropriation of power and privilege, the most outrageous excess of it? The many servants of the His Most Puissant Majesty do not offer an answer to these questions. Neither in the book nor in this amazing piece of theater that left me breathless and crushed on one level but strangely uplifted on another. Crushed – because never in the million years did I expect that Kapuściński’s cautionary tale, set in exotic (and often overly exoticized) setting will be so relevant in the 2018 America. Uplifted - because scary as it is, this piece shows in the most amazing ways the gullibility of human nature but also the inevitability of change. In her chameleon-like transformations from one character to another, Hunter shows not only her characters’ folly - she also does justice to their most human need to believe in something, however bizarre, the need to identify with something larger and better than ourselves. In her portrayal, the servants of the tyrannical monster are not only grotesque; they are also deserving of a moment of reflection on what makes us all yearn for submission. This is the kind of theater I grew up with - political, urgent, uncomfortable and upsetting. Not even a few technical glitches during the performance were able to take away of from its awesome power.

One note to the non-Polish speaking reader: the adaptation, based on the great translation by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, makes the text so flowing that one might forget that the original was written in a language that by its nature is not very economical. Polish often requires a lot of sound to deliver a little meaning, and what makes Kapuściński’s writing great is the elegant leanness of his style. This comes out great in this staging. No word is obsolete. Every adjective makes a devastating point, every pause is loaded with meaning. The few embellishments that were made by the adaptor make perfect sense: they liven up the story and bring out the points that otherwise would be lost outside the written page.

“Power requires the suspension of disbelief,” writes Teevan in the program notes (in which he also writes a few unkind words about Kapuściński I don’t fully agree with, but that’s another story.) What a pointed statement in the era we live in, the world where people’s decisions are so obviously and so harmfully driven not by logic but the need to believe. For me, the message of the show at the end is clear: however foolish our nature makes us, however slow the rise of inevitable outrage, this cannot hold, this will not hold. In the country where no one seems to be principled enough to yell that the emperor has no clothes, it sounds like a hopeful reminder. The show is still on at the Theater for a New Audience thru September 30. Do not miss it: it’s a must-see.