| re: Thoughts on Carole Rothman and the NYT piece? | |
| Posted by: Amiens 09:43 pm EDT 09/02/24 | |
| In reply to: Thoughts on Carole Rothman and the NYT piece? - portenopete 05:27 pm EDT 09/02/24 | |
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| Interesting. I had an opposite reaction to most of what you seemed to find objectionable in this interview. I've worked at 2nd Stage a few times over many years (going all the way back to the mid-1980s), including once with Carole directing. While I never perceived her to be a warm or especially affable person, I always admired and appreciated her intelligence, fairness and passion. She is definitely blunt. She speaks her mind, and I thought this interview really captured her as an artist and producer. It actually made me wish we'd had more chats back then so I might have gotten to know her better. I think when she talks about founding 2nd Stage to provide work for herself and defining the theater with those negatives you quote, she's being truthful but perhaps comes off as flip. As she states, when she began her career, young women were rarely being hired to direct, and Carole certainly changed that by example in her theater. And she and co-founder Robyn Goodman really came up with a novel gimmick (producing neglected/dismissed, yet interesting, American plays) to quickly put 2nd Stage on the map. I don't know that she or Robyn brought much money of their own to the theater, but they were very well-connected, even back then, to dozens of hot (mostly) young actors, directors and designers, who helped pave a path to success. I'm sad that she was "negotiated" out, as she puts it. Though 2nd Stage, like all the NY non-profits, has had uneven seasons, their last few have been extraordinarily impressive. I feel the same admiration for Lynne Meadow at MTC, who has also braved out all the massive cultural and societal changes theater has recently endured, yet I think Lynne has a more powerful hold over her board and is not going anywhere soon. On the other hand, in my opinion, change at LCT and Roundabout, and eventually The Public cannot happen sooner. |
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| Previous: | re: Thoughts on Carole Rothman and the NYT piece? - Thom915 09:51 pm EDT 09/02/24 |
| Next: | re: Thoughts on Carole Rothman and the NYT piece? - portenopete 08:42 am EDT 09/03/24 |
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