ATW - Downstage Center

Sarah Ruhl (#273) - June, 2010


Listen Later

Playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose "Passion Play" made its New York City debut with the Epic Theater Center, talks about the roots of that play during her graduate work at Brown University, what initially got her musing on the story of the people who appear in passion plays, and why she wrote a third act for its production at Arena Stage more than a decade after its debut in Trinity Rep's New Play Festival. She also talks about growing up in a household that was intellectually and theatrically oriented; her days at the Piven Theater Workshop while in her teens; why she thinks that everyone has an "opera inside"; the visual images that become the starting point for her plays, and whether starting a play, "Dead Man's Cell Phone", in which the title character is deceased at the start, was a handicap; the impact of receiving a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" on her life and career; the unorthodox gift that gave rise to "In The Next Room or the vibrator play" and why she chose to subtitle the play; and she responds to the suggestion that as her career has progressed, her plays have contained their flights of fancy more with each successive work. Original air date - June 16, 2010.
...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

ATW - Downstage CenterBy American Theatre Wing

  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9

4.9

46 ratings


More shows like ATW - Downstage Center

View all
The New Yorker Radio Hour by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

The New Yorker Radio Hour

6,881 Listeners

Humanitas - Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge by Oxford University

Humanitas - Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge

15 Listeners

The Rest Is History by Goalhanger

The Rest Is History

15,506 Listeners