CTC update, and other news and notes.
Winter is coming
I promise you. It really is. Sure, the weather so far hasn't been too wintery, but don't let the lack of snow on the ground fool you. I assure you: it is coming.
How am I so sure? Because we're suddenly knee-deep in holiday shows. You can't swing a dead cat around the Twin Cities without hearing the dull squish of it banging up against the side of some wintery wholesomeness as we continue the American tradition of learning some heart-warming lesson that we already learned last year in an endless parade of holiday-themed shows.
Don't get me wrong. This isn't a "Bah! Humbug!" moment. Christmas is fine and all; but there are plenty of bad-ass traditions from around the globe that we continue to ignore, despite the fact that they are full of fire, explosions and alcohol, which, if Super Bowl halftime shows are to be believed, are things Americans enjoy a great deal. Yet, we continue to approach the winter season with a sense of peace, prosperity and puritan piety, when we could run screaming mad into the new year with man-eating cats, drunken giants and child-stealing demons. I'm not saying that our holiday traditions are boring, but, man, they could be a bit more bonkers, and wouldn't that be more fun?
Speaking of bonkers and fun, remember a few weeks ago when I said that Minnesota Playlist would be holding its second Winter Bash? Well, it's official, and here's your invitation. So, here's your chance to get a little nuts this winter season. Don't let me down.
CTC update
Last week on News and Notes, I had to put on my serious hat to talk about the situation at Children's Theatre Company, and now it's time to put it back on. (Don't worry, I'll put my regular writing hat back on later.)
As you know, CTC, along with its former Artistic Director, John Clark Donahue, is the target of a lawsuit over sexual misconduct with students dating back to the late 70s and early 80s. Since we last talked about this, a third defendant has been named: Jason McLean, a former teacher at CTC and current owner of the Loring Pasta Bar and the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis. (You can read the entire complaint, as filed with the district court, here)
Being a transplant to the Twin Cities area (and being only four years old when Donahue was originally arrested and tried for sexual misconduct at CTC), I had to do a lot of research last week to find out the whole sad story from the 1980s. I've since discovered that the Star Tribune did an intensive pair of articles back in 1991 covering the incidents and the aftermath. Since they come from a time when journalists still occasionally did actual journalism, they may seem rather long, but, trust me, they are worthy of a full read.
But, if this new lawsuit is to be believed, even more went on at Children's Theatre than Donahue, the company or anyone else there was ever tried for at the time. CTC, for its part, released an official response to the lawsuit, detailing some of the safeguards they have put in place since Donahue's time, abhorring what went on under Donahue's tenure, and also saying that CTC was not negligent in its actions at the time. In the battle of opinions that is social media, I've seen responses to CTC's response ranging from "sincere" to "cowardly" and everything in between.
And, as I suspected, we're starting to see the first trickle of other people coming forward with their own stories, such as this open letter to the community from another former CTC student.
Danger! Playwrights!
It appears it's a mighty dangerous time to be a playwright. Female playwrights are being scrubbed from the canon in Ireland. We're losing our best and brightest writers to television because the theater industry has made it so damn difficult for even famous playwrights to get produced. Schools might be inadvertently teaching young directors that that it's OK to chop up a writer's work without permission. And, just to make this even more viscerally terrifying, David Henry Hwang took a knife to the neck. (Though, in a testament to the writer's fortitude, he shrugged it off and walked himself to the hospital)
All of that, though, is a mere trifle compared to the next big existential threat facing the keyboard jockeys who feed us our words. Friends, say hello to the future. Say hello to the computer-generated musical. Of course, the computer still needed human writers to supply the actual dialogue, but that was just this time around. How long will it be before the great musical robot uprising? Hopefully, our robot overlords will be fabulous.
