OR now that the show’s done, where do i put my feelings? By Christie Vela I don’t like talk-backs. I should amend that. I don’t like staying after the last show of the week, when I am exhausted and really want to go home, relax and watch my stories just to answer the inevitable “How did you learn all those lines” question. That’s like staying after your root-canal to ask your dentist how they knew which tooth to work on. They better know which tooth! It’s the very least thing to expect from your dentist, and it’s the same with your local actor. You paid for your ticket! We should know our line ..read more

Some Notes on an Attempt at Translating F. García Lorca by Dante Flores, the translator/adaptor of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell   I Richard Zenith, reflecting on his experience translating the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, wrote that “the translator of a poem…will never be able to say ‘This is it. I’ve arrived at a definite version in my own language.’ We arrive at a version that seems to us possible, acceptable, publishable.” I like Zenith’s idea of the “acceptable version.” It frames the work of translation as a dialogue: the translator puts forward an idea – what they believe the orig ..read more

Buy Tickets to Big Scary Animals or I’m Going to Go Crazy (or Come Fart into Our Cushions) Hi, I’m playwright, Matt Lyle. When my play Cedar Springs or Big Scary Animals premiered at Theatre Three (in Theatre Too) in 2017, it played most nights to a full capacity audience. The energy of a full house with that show was truly electric. The laughter was overwhelming and the tension was… overwhelming. But this isn’t 2017. The world is different now and the way we take in entertainment is SO different. Therefore, in order to ensure big crowds in the larger main space this time around, I’ve made som ..read more

You have some homework to do before reading this blog! August Wilson’s legendary speech The Ground on Which I Stand, delivered to the TCG conference in 1996, and the resulting DEBATE between Wilson and Robert Brustein, the former Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. If you are not familiar with these, get ready. “For what?”, you ask. Well, you’ll just have to clink on the links! Then, let’s grab a drink sometime and talk about how little or how far we’ve come.Jonathan Norton first performed at T3 in Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone&n ..read more

There’s a line in the show “Adventure Time.” Something about magic, madness, and sadness being in a closed circuit with each other. I think about that line a lot, because the less you know about how anything works, the more magical it seems, but the more you study a particular thing, the more likely you are to get lost in the madness and sadness of it. My partner likes to heap compliments on me whenever I write a new song, saying something like, “I just don’t understand how you’re able to craft music out of NOTHING,” and I often reply with something like, “it’s STILL NOT GOOD ENOUGH,” and this ..read more

This blog comes from local playwright, actress, and our Soloshoe account manager (our marketing firm), Nicole Neely. …… A blog for a pandemic… what could I write that hasn’t already been written?   I considered writing a blog about the difficulty of creating during this time of isolation or perhaps about the fear of regression in the theatre. Maybe a sentence or two about the difficulties theatres are facing. If that’s the blog you’re looking for, please read one of the most-produced playwrights in the US, Kate Hamill’s blog here. I think she speaks to this subject perfectly. Perhaps you ..read more

An Artist’s Guide To Appreciating Other People’s Art by Matt Lyle If you go see a show in DFW chances are you will sit beside an artist from the community. All of us see a lot of theater. In some ways, it’s our CE (continuing education). We also go to support our fellow artists, check out the competition and simply because we like to see theater. Though, it’s hard to turn off our critical eye and just enjoy a show. We’re all chasing perfection and want to be the first to catch it. There’s recent development in DFW that I couldn’t be more thrilled about. Work by local playwrights is being produ ..read more