American Theatre’s new podcast, Three on the Aisle, is now available for your listening pleasure.
The first episode features drama critics Peter Marks, Terry Teachout, and Elisabeth Vincentelli, Three on the Aisle is a podcast from New York about theatre in America.
Three on the Aisle joins Offscript, American Theatre’s podcast on all things theatrical, and can be heard and downloaded from posts on americantheatre.org as well as via iTunes and Stitchr. American Theatre is a publication of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for U.S. not-for-profit theatres.
“This is a great, exciting, scary time to look at and think about theatre in America, and what it tells us about the world we live in,” says Vincentelli, a contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsday, and The Village Voice, and a regular guest on the TV show Theater Talk. “The three of us have different backgrounds, different tastes, different opinions. Let a thousand spirited discussions bloom!”
“Elisabeth, Terry and I all love the theatre—you can’t do our job if you don’t—but our tastes don’t always coincide,” says Marks, chief drama critic for the Washington Post, a position he’s held since 2002, after spending a decade at The New York Times and co-authoring the business book Good for the Money. “That’s what made the idea of a regular get-together to talk out our differences, passionately but civilly, so attractive.”
“This isn’t going to be a show about three critics sitting in a room, swapping here’s-what-I-saw-last-week chatter,” adds Teachout, drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, critic-at-large for Commentary, and the author of biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, Duke Ellington, and H.L. Mencken. “There’ll be some of that, but we’re even more interested in engaging with the issues that are shaping the American theatre scene right now.”
In the first episode, Peter, Terry, and Elisabeth talk about their theatrical tastes, discuss the state of political theatre in the Age of Trump, and pick the shows they’re most excited about seeing in the first half of the 2017-18 season. Future episodes will feature guest panelists from around the country and will touch on such topics as the problem of earning a living in regional theatre, the fast-growing prominence of female stage directors, the growing dominance of small-cast plays, and the challenges and rewards of solo shows.
For over 50 years, Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for U.S. theatre, has existed to strengthen, nurture, and promote the professional not-for-profit theatre. TCG’s constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to over 700 member theatres and affiliate organizations and more than 12,000 individuals nationwide. TCG offers its members networking and knowledge-building opportunities through conferences, events, research, and communications; awards grants, approximately $2 million per year, to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG’s partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. TCG is North America’s largest independent publisher of dramatic literature, with 15 Pulitzer Prizes for Best Play on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning American Theatre magazine and ARTSEARCH®, the essential source for a career in the arts. In all of its endeavors, TCG seeks to increase the organizational efficiency of its Member Theatres, cultivate and celebrate the artistic talent and achievements of the field, and promote a larger public understanding of, and appreciation for, the theatre. www.tcg.org
