Summer and Theatre, Part I

Summer and theatre go together in many parts of North America. When I lived in Pittsburgh, there was a heady (and hearty) combination of the summer Shakespeare festival at the University of Pittsburgh (with plays in the round stone castle called the Stephen Foster Memorial) and a new plays festival at Carnegie Mellon University down the street.

But the best experience I had was two weeks in Waterford, Connecticut, reporting a story on the National Playwright's festival of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. To closely observe the process of bringing together new plays by new and veteran playwrights with skilled and dedicated directors and dramaturgs, and deeply involved actors from New York, was to glimpse and even touch the special creative energy that I've witnessed only occasionally, but that confirmed what I had hoped and believed such a process could be. Lively, crazy, caring, aware, intelligent, conscious and fun.

Plus I got to hang out with the likes of '>August Wilson, Lloyd Richards, and some young playwrights who have since been responsible for theatre, movies and especially a lot of the television of the last decade, such as Law and Order and the series we're currently seeing on video,'> Six Feet Under.

This year's conference is going on right now, and features the return of playwright '>Lee Blessing, who was already a conference legend when I was there. He'd been very young on his first visit, and people remembered seeing his play there, A Walk in the Woods (dialogues between an American and a Soviet arms negotiator) on the Fourth of July.

It was more than a decade ago that I was there, but every year at around this time I think about it. If you'd like to read about that summer, I posted an expanded version of my article---just follow the bouncing link...

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