Pig Iron contemplates the future. Plus other links to recent articles and websites that have interested us. 

Recent articles of interest

“A Wild, Wild West of Their Own.” Philadelphia actress (and Temple MFA graduate) Krista Apple chronicles the aesthetic trends that catapulted Philadelphia’s experimental Pig Iron theater troupe to national recognition and highlights the group’s likely future directions, including its plans to open a Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training in Philadelphia in 2011. (Krista Apple, American Theatre Magazine, February, 2010.)

Playwright’s Nurturing is the Focus of a Study: If Eugene O’Neill wrote it today, would Long Day’s Journey Into Night ever see a production? Or would uncaring corporate-minded producers and artistic directors whittle away its significance in workshops? According to the authors of Outrageous Fortune—the Theatre Development Fund’s recently released six-year study about how plays get written and produced in America— O’Neill would today face hostility from theaters, producers and audiences, and would likely have given up long before he put his pen to the page. (Patrick Healy, New York Times, Feb. 13, 2010.)

“New gay theater has more love than politics.” A new breed of plays and musicals this season is presenting gay characters in love stories, replacing the topical; and political messages of 1980s and ‘90s shows like The Normal Heart and Angels in America with more personal appeals for social progress, reports Patrick Healy in The New York Times (Feb. 23, 2010). That begs a point raised by Dan Rottenberg in BSR in 2006: “The essence of drama is conflict— and there’s ample conflict in the endless dance between the sexes but relatively little conflict in the seduction of one gay man by another.” (See “The trouble with gay theater.”). (Dan Rottenberg.)

The music of Olympic figure skating isn’t what it could be. Figure skating music must include a number of varying tempos that match the athlete’s choreography— graceful passages for artistic ice dancing, exhilarating crescendos to highlight a leap, and slower portions where a skater can catch her breath. But for audiophiles, it often sounds like a grating, disjointed mix. The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette examines the current trends Olympian’s and their coaches employ to balance the demands of skating artistry and musical purity. (Feb. 14, 2010).