Free theatre from Twitter!

Something cool happened to me today.

Last night, @EverymanTheatre ran a mini-contest on Twitter, giving away two tickets to their performance of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard to the first person to identify three characters from the show. I was with some friends in the library working on a presentation and just happened to glance at it. I responded for the heck of it, not thinking I'd be the first person, because the tweet had been posted about three hours before I'd seen it.

Wouldn't you know it that this morning, I'd received a reply from Everyman congratulating me and asking for information so they could send me the tickets. Pretty cool, right? Along with that, they asked me to help spread the word about their company through Twitter and other social media sites.

So it looks like I'll be seeing the show on Saturday night. Thanks, Everyman! Don't underestimate the power of Twitter; it has its advantages!

Oh, and Happy Birthday (and possibly Death-day) to the Bard himself, Mr. William Shakespeare.

--DQ

There may be something there that wasn't there before

The Fall 2009 Season for the TU Theatre Department has just been announced. Every semester, we typically put on two large Mainstage shows, and then undergraduate students in the department direct their own shows and graduate students stage their works, usually self-written. So ideally there are four or five shows running per semester.

The fall season is introducing a foreign influence. I know I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, but my last entry mentioned England's excellence in the art and the Russian project I'm involved in. Well, fancy that. William Shakespeare's classic love story, Romeo and Juliet, will be staged here in the fall. Usually the department does put on historical plays of some sort, like last fall's The Crucible (set in Puritan Salem) and The Piano Lesson (set in 1930s Pittsburgh). Performing Shakespeare is something Towson hasn't embraced in several years and it will take this department one step further into our historical endeavors as we bring Elizabethan Italy to the stage.

The second Mainstage show will be the Russian play Tanya, Tanya, translated by American translator John Freedman (seen on the left) and directed by Russian guest director Yury Urnov, both of whom have been actively involved in TU theatre for some time now. The show is still being adapted for performance, but the department is excited to debut this work on Towson's stage.

Another new Russian play called The Polar Truth will be staged in the structure of a performance workshop by one of the department's graduate students.

These relations with Russian theatre artists has had remarkable impact in the past few weeks and it's already spread like wildfire into the department, and hopefully it will continue to delve further into crossing cultural boundaries in the future.

--DQ

But I know the answers lie far from this world

When American theatre goes international, things can get quite exciting. It's no secret that other countries like England, home of the Bard himself, are truly cultured in the art. Thus, I am quite excited to share this news with you.

The theatre department here at Towson University has been involved with Russian directors and translators for a few years now, and these relations have been steadily improving. With that came the idea for a new interdisciplinary project in the structure of a class. It's called Russian Theatre and Politics, and I am currently enrolled.

Russia has had considerable political turmoil until only recently, and so they are entering a new era of freedom in the theatre. With that in mind, the premise of the class is that students from both the theatre department and the political science department (as well as a few international studies majors) have the chance to take this class together, each to learn about the discipline they know least about. It's taught by two instructors, Dr. Robyn Quick from the theatre department and Dr. Alison McCartney from the political science department. The coursework involves reading Russian plays and examining them in their contexts as part of Russian political culture. It's both a history lesson and a look into an art that is emerging as an important cultural aspect in the largest country in the world.

This also means that, as students in this experiment, we are going to be the first Americans to read new and still-in-the-works translations of some of these plays. How exciting it is that we are part of Russian theatrical history!

Because of the groundbreaking work we're doing in the class, we have been invited to attend a Russian Ambassador's speech next week at the World Trade Center in downtown Baltimore. I'll be sure to report back here after it's over. I hope to make this experiment part of a series of posts here.

Fine arts have such power to open doors and to cross cultures, and that's true now more than ever before.

I remain your Drama Queen.