Welcome to the Green Room’s newest series, What We’re Reading, in which we’ll share with you some of our favorite articles about theater and performance from all around the internet this week. 

“YouTubesicals” by Suzy Evans for American Theatre is very relevant to your interests, I promise. Evans spoke with writers and other theater professionals, including Pasek & Paul, Joe Iconis, and Kerrigan-Lowdermilk, about how YouTube has changed the landscape and business of contemporary musical theater. It’s a great look into one of the many ways that technology has affected the industry.

“Coney’s no island: could streamed theatre let audiences call the shots?” by Andrew Haydon for The Guardian explores the experience of digitally watching an event originally (or simultaneously) performed live. We’ve talked about aspects of this before on The Green Room and it’s a subject that endlessly fascinates me. Most interesting to me was the way Haydon draws parallels between this method of viewing and the genre of immersive theater.

“Bloodlines/Song Lines” by Caridad Svich for HowlRound is a beautiful piece about writing for the theater. She examines the writing process in the context of broader theatrical and political legacies; she investigates the place of theater in today’s society. I wanted to quote basically every passage for you so I hope you like this snippet:

At its best, at its greatest, theater upends our insides. It disturbs our existence in light ways or darker ones. It sticks us with thorns and asks us to bleed roses. Theater is a beast. A wily monster that charges us with the task of opening ourselves up to action: to thought in motion, to things we would rather not see or things we could only imagine in dreams.

It speaks for itself, I think. Highly recommended.

Have an article you think we should check out? Leave it in the comments below! 

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