Kpfa - Bay Area Theater

Nicky Silver, in conversation by phone from New York, live on the air, with host Richard Wolinsky and director John Dixon in the studio, recorded April 27, 2007. Nicky Silver is the author of several successful plays, including “The Lyons,” which premiered on Broadway in 2012, “Beautiful Child” and “Pterodactyls.” At the time of the interview, his play ‘Past Perfect” was making its world premiere at San Francisco’s Theatre Rhino, directed by John Dixon. Since that time, Nicky Silver has moved to London and has continued to write. His most recent play to premiere off-Broadway was “This Day Forward,” in 2016. His play “Fat Men in Skirts” was filmed in German in 1998.   The post Playwright Interview: Nicky Silver, 2007 appeared first on KPFA.

Acclaimed novelist Colm Toibin discussing his play “The Testament of Mary” which ran at ACT’s Geary Theatre in October and November, 2014, and also discussing his novel “Nora Webster,” which was published in October 2014. The interview with host Richard Wolinsky was recorded in the KPFA studios the afternoon of October 27, 2014. Colm Toibin is the author of nine novels, the most recent of which is “House of Names” in 2017. His novel, “Brooklyn” became an acclaimed film in 2015. Colm Toibin’s novels have been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. 2017 interview, “House of Names.”   The post Playwright Interview: Colm Toibin, 2014 appeared first on KPFA.

Mfoniso Udofia is one of America’s fastest rising playwrights. A second-generation Nigerian-American, plays in her Ufot family cycle have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where two of those works saw producers. “Her Portmaneau” was seen at ACT’s Strand Theatre in February and March, 2019, and the world premiere production of “In Old Age” at the Magic Theatre began in April, 2019. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky. Originally posted March 18, 2019. The post Playwright Interview: Mfoniso Udofia appeared first on KPFA.

Suzanne Bradbeer, whose comedy “Shakespeare in Vegas” will be streamed as a Zoom reading with Broadway stars Karen Ziemba and Patrick Page, July 23, 6 pm -July 27, 2020, 6 pm on the TheatreWorks website, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky. Suzanne Bradbeer is the author of several plays, including “Confederates,” which played at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley during the 2016-2017 season, “The God Game,” and “The House That Jack Built.” She is a member of the Ensemble Theatre, a contributing writer at Speakeasy at Joe’d Pub (The Public Theatre) in New York, and a librettist for two musicals, “Cocus and Doot” from the Virtual Theatre Company and “Max and the Truffle Pig.” “Shakespeare in Vegas” is the story of an out of work classically trained actress who is brought to Las Vegas by a shady impresario to offer Shakespearean plays to a somewhat unusual audience, and hijinks ensue. Both photos: Jeff McMorrough The post Playwright Interview: Suzanne Bradbeer, “Shakespeare in Vegas” appeared first on KPFA.

Mary Zimmerman is a playwright, director and producer, whose works are sui generis. Her focus is on adaptations and re-adaptations of classical and pre-classical works, as well as librettos for operas and reorganizing films into stage plays. She was interviewed by Richard Wolinsky for the “Open Book” radio program in late 2012 for a production of “The White Snake” at Berkeley Rep. Sne won a 2002 Tony Award for her direction of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” on Broadway. More recently she wrote a stage version of Disney’s “Tarzan” and directed the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, at the Los Angeles Opera in February 2020. The post Playwright Interview: Mary Zimmerman, 2012 appeared first on KPFA.

Arthur Laurents (1917-2011), interviewed on April 7, 2000 by Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, during the tour for his memoir, Original Story By … Arthur Laurents was one of the giants of American culture. A playwright, librettist and director, he was one of the collaborators on two of the greatest musicals in the history of Broadway, West Side Story and Gypsy. In Hollywood, he was best known for the screenplays to The Way We Were and The Turning Point. He spent most of World II in New York, working on propaganda films under George Cukor, A playwright with a huge hit after the war, The Time of the Cuckoo (which became the Katharine Hepbutn film Summertime), Laurents then moved to Hollywood where his career as a screenwriter was interrupted by the blacklist. He went to Europe but returned to write the screenplay for the Ingrid Bergman film, Anastasia. Coming back to New York, he collaborated with Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim on West Side Story, then with Sondheim and Jule Styne

In honor of Pride: Richard Wolinsky, Charles Busch. Selfie: Charles Busch. Legendary playwright, cabaret performer, actor, and drag superstar Charles Busch in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in New York’s Greenwich Village in late July, 2018 Charles Busch, as a playwright, was nominated for the Tony Award for “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.” Among his other works are “Red Scare on Sunset,” which had a production at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre in the fall of 2018, “The Divine Sister,” “The Lady in Question” and the long-running off-Broadway hit, “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” From his website: He wrote and starred in the film versions of his plays, Psycho Beach Party and Die Mommie Die, the latter of which won him the Best Performance Award at the Sundance Film Festival. For two seasons, he appeared as Nat Ginzburg on the HBO series OZ and is the author of the auto-biographical novel Whores of Lost Atlantis. He has directed two films; the Showtime short subject, Personal Assistant,

IN HONOR OF PRIDE Mart Crowley, author of “The Boys in the Band” and its sequel, “The Men from the Boys,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky on October 31, 2002. Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, which deals with the lives of gay men in the 1960s burst upon the off-Broadway scene in 1968 and ran for a thousand performances, becoming a film directed by William Friedkin two years later. In 2002, he wrote a sequel titled The Men from the Boys, which took place 35 years later, after Stonewall and after the AIDS epidemic. It premiered at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre on November 9, 2002. This past year, Broadway saw a revival of The Boys in the Band, featuring Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannels and Jim Parsons. Several members of that cast, including Mario Cantone and Denis O’Hare return to their roles for a live stream of The Men From the Boys, directed by Zachary Quinto, airs through June 29, 2020 at playbill.com/prideplays Mart Crowley died of a heart attack on March 7, 2020 at the

This week’s podcast is a June, 2011 interview with Anna Deavere Smith, while she was in the Bay Area discussing her then latest project, Let Me Down Easy, which was running at Berkeley Rep into early September of that year. Anna Deavere Smith has written and performed in several one-woman plays similar in style to Let Me Down Easy, including Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which consist of short monologues in the voices and characters of individuals she interviewed. Prior to the interview, she’d appeared as an actress in several movies, and as a regular on both The West Wing and Nurse Jackie. She returned to Berkeley Rep three years later with another show, Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, which was filmed in 2018 and can be seen on HBO and HBO Max. Since 2011 she has been a regular on the TV shows Blackish and For The People, and is listed in the cast of an upcoming Netflix series, Inventing Anna. She was also seen in the film Can You Ever Forgive Me. The post Playwright In

Tarell Alvin McCraney, playwright, actor and screenwriter, recorded in 2014 as he had two plays produced in the Bay Area, Head of Passes at Berkeley Rep, and Choir Boy at Marin Theatre Company. Both plays eventually made it to New York to excellent reviews. Since the interview, he won the Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay of the film Moonlight, based on one of his plays, and wrote the screenplay for the Netflix film High Flying Bird. Tarell Alvin McCraney is also the author of the acclaimed Brother Sister Plays Trilogy, and most recently, created the TV series David Makes Man, which aired on the OWN network and can be seen now on DirectTV. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky. The post Playwright Interview: Tarell Alvin McCraney, 2014 appeared first on KPFA.

Laurel Ollstein, whose latest play, “Pandora,” will be streaming on the theatreworks.org website, is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky. Laurel Ollstein is also the author of “They Promised Her the Moon,” which was produced at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley and shut down prematurely due to the pandemic. She has been a theatre and television actress, short story writer and director over the course of her career, and worked with Tim Robbins’ Actors Gang in Los Angeles for fifteen years. This latest project is a theatrical retelling of the myth of Pandora, the first human woman in Greek Mythology, who was said to have opened a box which allowed all the ills of the world to escape. The production, recorded in Zoom toward the end of May, 2020, is a workshop reading featuring actors from the Bay Area and beyond, and is directed by Giovanna Sardelli, is free on-line as a benefit for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Originally scheduled for the first weekend in June, it has been postponed to a later date. Special thanks t

Eve Ensler is one of America’s best known playwrights. She is the author of several plays, including Vagina Monologues, The Good Body, Here. Necessary Targets, a memoir, Insecure at Last, and co-editor of an anthology A Memory, A Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer. Richard Wolinsky interviewed Eve Ensler in early June 2012 in the offices of Berkeley Rep, where she was preparing “Emotional Creature,” a theatrical adaptation of her book, I Am an Emotional Creature. Since 2012, Eve Ensler has published a memoir, In the Body of the World, and in 2019 The Apology, in which she exorcised the demons left by her father’s abuse, and in wishing to no longer carry her father’s name, has invited people to call her V instead.   B&W photo: Creative Commons. Color photo: Richard Wolinsky, copyright 2012. The post Playwright Interview: Eve Ensler, 2012 appeared first on KPFA.

This week’s playwright podcast hosted by Richard Wolinsky is with Simon McBurney as he discusses The Encounter, which ran at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre in April and May 2017. The Encounter is streaming on-line for free through May 22, 2020, 2 pm Pacific on You Tube or through the sfcurran.com website. If you plan on watching, the best experience is through headphones. Richard Wolinsky and Simon McBurney. Simon McBurney is the director and performer of “The Encounter,” a theatrical piece inspired by the Book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, that played at the Curran in San Francisco in spring, 2017. Simon McBurney is the artistic director of Complicite, a London based theatrical company. He’s directed several plays and operas over the years, and acted in such films as The Theory of Everything, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, and other films, as well as the TV series The Borgias and The Casual Vacancy. “The Encounter” came to San Francisco after a successful run in London and Ne

Tony Kushner, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky in 2006 and in 2014. Tony Kushner is one of America’s greatest playwrights, and Angels in America is certainly one of the greatest American plays of the 20th Century. Tony Kushner is also the author of several other plays, including a Bright Room for Day, Slavs, Homebody/Kabul, and the musical Caroline or Change.Among his work as screenwriter was an adaptation of August Wilson’s play, Fences, plus original screenplays for both Munich and Lincoln, both of which earned him Oscar nominations, the HBO adaptation of Angels in America, and coming up, the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s film of West Side Story due at the end of 2020,, and after that, another Spielberg film, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. This podcast contains an interview recorded on March 17, 2006, while he was in San Francisco promoting the Library of America edition of the Collected Plays of Arthur Miller, for which he’d written an introduction. The recording was made in his hotel room. Th

This is the second in a series of playwright interviews. Suzan Lori-Parks was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for playwrighting, for Topdog/Underdog in 2001. She won Obie Awards for her play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, produced in 1989, and for Venus in 1998. Richard Wolinsky spoke with Suzan- Lori Parks when she was on tour for her only novel to date, Getting Mother’s Body, On May 20th, 2003. Since that time, she has continued to work in theatre, adapting the book of Porgy & Bess for a 2012 Broadway production, writing Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts One, Two and Three) in 2014 and won an Obie Award in 2019 for her play White Noise. Both these plays have recently been produced in the San Francisco Bay Area. She also wrote the screenplay for the 2019 film Native Son. Photos copyrright 2018 Suzan-Lori Parks. The post Playwright Interview: Suzan-Lori Parks, 2003 appeared first on KPFA.

During the COVID-19 Lockdown, the Bay Area Theater podcast will focus on playwright interviews conducted by Richard Wolinsky over the past few years which aired on Bookwaves, Arts-Waves, and Open Book. “Don’t Eat the Mangos” can be seen in a video recording through May 11, 2020. Go to the Magic Theatre website for more information. Ricardo Perez Gonzalez is a playwright of Puerto Rican ancestry, currently based in New York. His most recent play, “Don’t Eat the Mangos” had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in March, 2020 and was forced to close one week later due to the novel corona virus pandemic. His plays have been performed all across the United States, and he recently completed a stint in the writers’ room of the Netflix series Designated Survivor. Photos: Richard Wolinsky. The post Playwright Interview: Ricardo Perez Gonzalez appeared first on KPFA.

KPFA theatre critic Richard Wolinsky updates the state of Bay Area theatre and gives a listing of on-line streaming theatre, both local and national. Text of update. During times of stress, live theatre has been out front, enhancing community, relieving anxiety, and pointing the way to better futures. Now, of course, audiences are sitting in their homes, and theatres around the world are shuttered.   Cal Shakes, California Shakespeare Theatre, has cancelled its entire 2020 season The final plays from Bay Area companies of the 2019-2020 season have already been cancelled or will be cancelled as social distancing most likely continues into the summer.   But live theatre does go on, or at least recordings of live theatre, which can be seen by accessing your Roku, your Apple TV, your smart television, or your laptop, tablet or cell phone.   In the Bay Area. Berkeley Rep, Marin Theatre Company and Theatreworks Silicon Valley have all presented their most recent productions, streaming, to ticket buyers, with limite

Aired on Up Front on Thursday, March 26, 2020. The complete interview can be found as a Radio Wolinsky podcast. The post Terrence McNally: An Apprecation appeared first on KPFA.

Stephen Sondheim at 90. The legendary composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim celebrated his ninetieth birthday on March 22, 2020. Lyricist for West Side Story; composer/llyricist for Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George and other shows, he has perhaps made the greatest mark on musical theater since the days of Rodgers and Hammerstein. In this interview recorded in November 2011 at his townhouse in New York City for “Look! I Made a Hat!: the second volume of his collection of essays, he discusses his later works and his career with host Richard Wolinsky.   Photo of Stephen Sondheim by Richard Wolinsky, copyright 2010. The post Interview: Stephen Sondheim at 90, 2011 interview appeared first on KPFA.

KPFA theatre critic Richard Wolinsky discusses theatre closings, streaming plays by Bay Area theatre companies, and theatre you can watch on-line, including how to watch shows from Berkeley Rep, ACT and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Text of commentary: Live entertainment has shut down all across the Bay Area. This is particularly problematic for local theatre companies. Shows that were in the midst of their runs were forced to close early. Shows in rehearsal shut down, never to open. Shows on the schedule and in pre-production involving set, lighting and costume design, even before rehearsal have been cancelled. Free-lancers who were already reeling bedue to the collateral damage of AB 5, which affected theatre companise relying on gig economy workers, now are in bigger trouble. Actors, directors, lighting designers, set designers and other key technical staffers are all out of work. But expenses — from rent to insurance to utilities do go on, and all companies will move toward the red. The fallout will be sev