Filed under: Anne Hamilton, Maria Alexandria Beech, Season Three | Tags: Anne Hamilton, Hamilton Dramaturgy, Hamilton Dramaturgy's TheatreNow!, Maria Alexandria Beech, New work, NYC, NYC Theatre, Playwright, Season Three, Theatre, TheatreNow! Artists
Congratulations to Maria Alexandria Beech, whose new play HOMEBODIES will be read tomorrow in New York City. Alex was a guest on Season Three of TheatreNow! You can read a transcript of the interview at http://hamiltondramaturgystheatrenow.com/season-three/maria-alexandria-beech/
You’re invited to a reading of
HOMEBODIES
By Alex Beech
Directed by Michelle Bossy
The cast includes Socorro Santiago, Florencia Lozano, Cathy Curtin, Omar Koury, and Jorge Cordova
Primary Stages Studio, 307 W 38th St, #1510
Sunday, April 28th, 3pm
It’s a sort of farce. About upstairs/downstairs neighbors in a brownstone.
To rsvp, write readings@primarystages.org
Filed under: Anne Hamilton, Murielle Borst Tarrant, Season Three, TheatreNow! Artists | Tags: Anne Hamilton, Hamilton Dramaturgy's TheatreNow!, hamiltondramaturgystheatrenow.com, La MaMa ETC, Murielle Borst Tarrant, Native American Theatre, New work, NYC, NYC Theatre, Season Three, TheatreNow! Artists
Tune in to a new show directed by TheatreNow! guest Murielle Borst Tarrant. Murielle’s episode will be posted soon.
LIVE STREAM PERFORMANCE COMING TO YOU FROM LA MAMA & CULTUREHUB
“Dante’s Inferno, a journey into hell, a life in Indian show business”
Tune in on Monday April 29th at 11AM EST
Streaming to you live at http://www.culturehub.org/live1
Directed by Murielle Borst-Tarrant
Featuring Nicholson Billey, Tanis Parenteau, Josephine Tarrant and Kevin Tarrant
Watch out when Indian show business meets the “Doctrine of Discovery”. A raucous political satire loosely based on Dante’s Inferno. A comedic, hard hitting look at the marginalization of Indigenous Peoples and appropriation of Indigenous cultural property in show business. Watch this 30 minute workshop piece and join us afterward for a panel discussion with the cast on “Self-Determination and the Arts.”
With special guests:
Tonya Gonnella Frichner, ESQ ( Onondaga Nation, Snipe Clan) President and Founder American Indian Law Alliance
Karmenlara Ely Artistic Director of The Norwegian Theater Academy
And
Muriel Miguel ( Kuna, Rappahannock) Artistic Director of Spiderwoman Theater
http://www.murielleborsttarrant.com
Filed under: Maria Alexandria Beech, Season One, TheatreNow! Artists | Tags: Adaptations, Anne Hamilton, Columbia University School of the Arts, Hamilton Dramaturgy, Hamilton Dramaturgy's TheatreNow!, hamiltondramaturgystheatrenow.com, Maria Alexandria Beech, Maria Irene Fornes, Musicals, NYU, Season One, Women Theatre Artists
Profile of Maria Alexandria Beech
By Anne M. Hamilton, MFA
Maria Alexandria Beech is a playwright and librettist living in New York. She has written over fifteen full-length plays, several as a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages Theatre, which co-produced her play LITTLE MONSTERS at Brandeis Theatre Company. Her full-length musical titled CLASS, with Karl Michael Johnson, was presented in a reading in May, 2012 at NYU.
AH: Alex, I know that you hold an MFA from Columbia University. Now you have a second, this time from NYU.
MB: It’s in musical theatre writing. It is a true honor. One would think that writing a musical and writing a play are similar processes, but in fact they’re not. They each require their own craft and their own knowledge base.
AH: What is CLASS about?
MB: It’s based on a play that I wrote in the writers group at Primary Stages, about a girl who is struggling with alcoholism and she signs up for a summer school class in New Orleans in 1987. And so this girl walks into the situation, and the professor has recently learned that she doesn’t have much longer to live.
It was a real challenge to adapt as a musical, in the sense that it is very much a play as it exists. It was an homage not only to a professor that I had, who was dying of cancer and who had to face students who wanted to use her illness against her, but it was an homage to professors and teachers I had had growing up.
AH: Tell us about your reading at NYU.
One of the things that I learned is that musical theatre is still very much about that well-made musical, that traditional structure of the well-made musical, and the opening number and the closing number. One of my goals is to still honor that tradition, but kind of also do other things and explore more. [I’d like to] not look at the book or the dialogue just as a bridge between the songs. I think the songs could be little kind of poems that stand alone.
Anne Hamilton has 22 years of experience in the professional theatre in NYC, across the nation, and internationally. She is available for script consultations and career advising through hamiltonlit@hotmail.com. Season Three of Hamilton Dramaturgy’s TheatreNow! launched with an interview with Kate Valk, a leading actress with The Wooster Group.
Download the interview here: BCWJ Profile of Maria Alexandria Beech by Anne Hamilton
