It’s been a busy month! We buried 2023 and 2024 is now empirically in play for the rest of us! Janna’s new sites — ASL Opera and Jannauary.com — are both now live, as is the new — Boles.ai — website that not only predicts future history but also lives in the present past; but I am most supremely pleased to announce the dramatic return of: The United Stage!
Thirty years ago, as an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, I wrote a play: A Stone’s Throw. The full-length drama was about the dilution of the human spirit forged against the willful hard-edge of moral exhumation — but my production quickly became known on campus as “That Abortion Play.” You may download an early draft of “A Stone’s Throw” on this Boles.com Prairie Voice Archive Scripts page; and here some of the reviews of the production.
Continue reading → A Stone’s Throw: “That Abortion Play” 30 Years Later
There’s an old, weary, chestnut in the theatre — that deserves to be burned alive, eaten whole, pooped out and buried in the deep blue sea and then never spoken of again — that goes a little something like this, when directors say to Playwrights: “Never Speak to the Actors!”
Brander Matthews was one of the purist theatrical geniuses we’ve had in, and around, the intellectual American Stage. Brander rightly believed a play only existed in performance and that the performance and the text must be evaluated separately. He was also one of the first professors at an American University — Columbia University in the City of New York starting in 1892 — to promote, and foster, the idea that Dramatic Literature was just as important a field of study as any historic cave wall painting or artistic sculpture or aesthetic structure. He believed in the power of the Playwright to form the world.
Continue reading → Brander Matthews: Father of Dramatic Literature
Yes, today is a Day for Fools — but there’s no joking around that I now have a brand new Boles Book for the Playwright in Society — available for purchase from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing! This Boles Book for… is a thoughtful compilation of a lot of my writing on how the Playwright derives power and structure from the fabric of belonging.
Continue reading → A Brand New Boles Book for the Playwright in Society
In my work as a script doctor at ScriptProfessor.com — I meet a lot of people with varying talent — the saddest stories belong to the abandoned and the broken-hearted, those who wished upon a star and fell back to earth without touching the moon, and melted. Showbiz tends to call those burnt souls “star fuckers” because they’ll do anything and everything to be noticed — let alone produced — while the kinder among us tend to label them “fame whores.” I just choose to try to have empathy for their plight as I work with them, but there’s also a certain queasiness involved as one feels like a dancing minstrel playing a part for money that will never be seen nor heard — all in the discriminatory want to try to help make someone’s script better for a fee.
Continue reading → Using Online Charity Auctions to Buydown Broken Dreams
There’s an old saying in some theatrical circles that a play does not exist unless and until is has been performed on a live stage in front of an audience. You can imagine the heartache that creates for the amateur, but vigilant, Playwright who writes page after page only to have the work discounted in the end analysis by some because there is no final proof of production to validate the effort. Is that a right and fair way to deal with a written Art in Performance? Does the actor exist without being staged? Does the director have a role without filling an empty space?
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