Take the 2amt challenge. We did it last year & we’re doing it again. (We thought about calling it “The Humana Games,” but that sounds like playwrights fighting to the death in a dystopian future.)

First, download the SCVNGR app on your smartphone. Don’t worry, it’s free.

Sign in and create an account if you don’t already have one. Then, let it locate you at Actors Theatre of Louisville. You’ll see a list of four simple tasks. These are simple things like taking a picture of playwrights, checking in, etc.

One simple one: find me, Gwydion Suilebhan and/or Stephen Spotswood and take a picture with us. Find us one at a time, find us together, you can rack up points with each picture. An extra bonus: find someone else who’s part of the 2amt conversation, take their picture and surprise us.

Each of these tasks is simple, part of a “game layer” on top of the real world, as the SCVNGR folks like to say. For the theatre world, it’s a fun way to engage your audience with more specific tasks and challenges themed to your current productions or festivals. It’s also a way to drive patrons into your sponsors’ places of business–one of the tasks this year will take you across the street to the Galt House hotel for a 2amt meetup. Check in to the meetup & get points, it’s that simple.

Ideally, audiences would engage not just with the challenges and the production but with the sponsors’ business as well. Of course, tasks at sponsors’ locations can be more involved if you’d like, we’re keeping it simple this time for demonstration purposes.

Best of all, this game layer can be activated at any time–you can create “treks” filled with challenges ahead of time and let audiences complete them as their schedule permits. Our game has no set limit of points, but you can set a limit and/or goal if you want. Use challenges & treks to build awareness for upcoming shows. You can make it a real live contest, first person to X number of points wins two tickets to the next production, or the tenth person, fiftieth, etc.

Which reminds me. First person to 15 points gets a drink on me. And the grand prize winner might get some ATL swag…

See you this weekend at the Humana Festival!

As Adam Feldman pointed out this week on the Time Out New York site: “(Mike) Daisey acknowledged that he had erred in presenting his work—a hard-hitting look at the brutal Chinese labor conditions that underwrite our sleek electronic gizmos—on Ira Glass’s series because ‘the tools of theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.'”

Adam convened a panel of prominent artists and journalists to talk about veracity, ethics and artistic license in nonfiction-based or documentary theatre. The panel featured writer-director Steven Cosson of the Civilians (This Beautiful City), playwright-performers Jessica Blank (The Exonerated) and Taylor Mac (The Young Ladies of…), and critic-reporters Peter Marks (Washington Post) and Jason Zinoman (The New York Times).

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, prefaced the panel with a short statement. You can read that statement here.

The panel took place Thursday night, March 22, 2012 at the Public Theater in New York, where Daisey’s “Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” just closed. We would like to thank the Public for their generous donation of the space. We would also like to thank John Kemp, Gabriel Bennett & Arielle Edwards of the Public Theatre for providing the audio.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, for anyone at the event who wondered about the late start, it was due to Adam, the panelists and Mr. Eustis getting stuck in the elevator on their way up to the event. We don’t have audio of this, alas.

There’s an aggressive sort of experimental theatre that longs to prove not just how smart it is, but how much smarter it is than you. Or how much more grad school it went to.

Rubber Repertory is not that theatre.

Rubber Rep, made up of Matt Hislope and Josh Meyer, isn’t about telling you how it is, it’s all about sitting in the room with you and asking, “what if we…”? And you let them. The tiny riots mentioned above are the intimate moments of theatre that they long to create with you out of something as simple as a shell soaked in saltwater.

Their current project is Biography of Physical Sensations in a return engagement for Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas. Biography of Physical Sensations is a life told through the decontextualized sensations that are its building blocks and its residue; performed on the audience every night.

For more about Biography of Physical Sensations in its initial run, check out Katherine Catmull in the Austin Chronicle. If you’re curious about the reviews, then read Avimann Syam of the Austin Chronicle, Cate Blouke of the Austin American Statesman and Georgia Young & Bastion Carboni from Austinist.com

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/21604712[/vimeo]

BONUS Video of Rubber Reps last new production, Casket of Passing Fancy

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/8463476[/vimeo]

Some Offers you missed from Casket of Passing Fancy:
Offer #1
Treasure!
Untaken Offers 1
Untaken Offers 2
A Sample Night at Casket of Passing Fancy

New York One Minute Play Festival Artistic Director Dominic D’Andrea thought he was taking a quiet trip to Austin and got caught got caught in my web.

I sat down with the Johnny Appleseed of the 60-second epic and talked about the New York One Minute Play Festival, why it’s ten times better than a ten minute play, and what it would take to get in the game.

The New York One Minute Play Festival is headed into its fifth year in original location and has begun snaking its tendrils out to the rest of the country. Committed to playwrights and their communities, the Festival has thus far served up well-over 400 plays by 186 playwrights, and those dials are going to start humming as three more iterations fire off in the next couple of months.

All that work and he got NO queso…

Beth Burns is the artistic director of The Hidden Room, by her phrasing a “theatrical curiosity shop” focused on audience experience. And honestly, she’s very good at it. That skill actually is the prism that makes her current project truly fascinating.

You Wouldn’t Know Her, She Lives in London / You Wouldn’t Know Him, He Lives in Texas opens on Saturday, March 5th and takes place in Austin and London simultaneously via Skype video chat and will also be streamed live to the internet so you can join in. Working with producing partner Look Left, Look Right Productions in the UK and hosted in London by Roundhouse this look at long distance (and cross cultural) relationships this show should have something that interests you whether you get to be in the room on either continent or only join in on the stream.

The Hidden Room | Roundhouse’s Show Page

Roundhouse’s Live Stream Page

The lovers on Facebook:
Ryan Peterson | Elizabeth Watson

Follow the hashtag on Twitter: #TexasLondon

The show runs March 5 & 6 + 12 & 13, 2011, at 8 pm GMT, 2 pm CST.

In today’s podcast, we’ll hear from some of the playwrights who attended the JAW Festival at Portland Center Stage, including Rob Handel, managing director of 13P, and Jason Wells.

Then we visit the Toronto Fringe Festival with playwright Alison Broverman.

Finally, Rebecca Coleman talks with Jeremy Banks, who’s been touring across Canada by way of fringe festivals and documenting his travels at Fringetastic.com.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, please click here to open our page in iTunes.

In today’s podcast, Dave Charest (@DaveCharest) talks with Amy Wratchford (@AmyWratchford), managing director of the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA, and Broadway producer Ken Davenport (@KenDavenport) about social media and its use in theatre.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, please click here to open our page in iTunes.

This time out, Jax Steager visits the Hollywood Fringe Festival and interviews Ben Hill, producing director of the Hollywood Fringe, with snippets of interviews with Alexa Hanrahan, support director, and Nick Hill, the Fringe Central manager.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, please click here to open our page in iTunes.