The Commonplace Blog of Jeffrey M. Jones

Tina Satter's House of Dance presents itself as such an amiable, loose-limbed, unassuming piece that it's easy to miss how complicated and tricky it really is. Some background: There are severa...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2013/11/what-i-learned-in-theatre-tina-satters.html

My friend Barbara Cassidy invited me to a production of her play, The Anthropology of a Book Club. Afterward, we had an e-mail exchange about its structure. FROM: Barbara Cassidy TO: Jeffrey...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-exchange-with-barbara-cassidy.html

If you admire the plays of Wally Shawn--and if you don't, you're wrong--this is the one you've been waiting for: The Fever quite literally raised to the power of three. There are all the familiar...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2013/07/dispatches-from-front-designated.html

Note: this essay is a companion piece to "How Theatre Works, " from November, 2008 You are driving late at night through open country. Other than stars and the beams of your headlights, you’re...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-film-television-work.html

This piece--originally written as a program supplement for Young Jean Lee's Lear (SoHo Rep, February, 2010) was occasioned by a review which described the play as "an intermittently funny but mos...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2010/02/twelve-thought-experiments-on-gauging.html

Let’s face it—theatre is weird. On the one hand, it's totally, often painfully, fake (as in "stagy", “histrionic,” “melodramatic”), yet we still expect it to be deeply moving and comp...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-theatre-works.html

NOTE: This essay was written as an introduction to the "catalog" created for the Soho Rep premiere by The Program, a joint venture with David Cote and Helen Shaw of Time Out New York. > “Blas...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2008/10/when-bad-things-happen-to-horrible.html

>>>   ROSETTA BROOKS: For some reason, I've always thought that your >>>   Combines came about because you had a habit of walking round the >>>   block before the ...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2008/06/objets-trouvs-in-memoriam-milton.html

> This piece was created for the Vineyard Theatre production of God's > Ear as part of THE PROGRAM, a joint effort with Helen Shaw and David > Cote of Time Out New ...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2008/05/poetics-of-grief-listening-to-pattern.html

"I fill my notebooks with stuff that grabs me, and I basically spend the rest of my process desperately trying to figure out how these things all go together…" --Getting Cosmic with Kelly Coppe...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2008/01/abstract-theatre-behavior-in-no-dice.html

One underlying thesis of this blog is that the play structure—as we commonly understand it—is an advanced, highly-specialized cultural artifact. Like the torque wrench or the toaster, it has ...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/11/alternate-structures-assemblies.html

NOTE: THIS ESSAY ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE OCTOBER, 2005 ISSUE OF AMERICAN THEATRE. "He's the kind of character who really deserves to be in his own play, but we've denied him one." The actor...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/10/thinking-about-writing-about-thinking.html

BACK ROW (L-R): Ann Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Scott Adkins, Karinne Keithley, Normandy Sherwood; FRONT ROW (L-R): Me, Mac Wellman, Gary Winter, Madelyn Kent; ONSTAGE: Kate Benson, Daniel Manley; ...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/10/snapshot.html

When a drama critic dismisses a show by saying they don't understand it, why isn't this taken as evidence of incompetence?

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/10/modest-question.html

BROOKLYN RAIL (TRISH HARNETIAUX): Too often we, as viewers and critics, get bogged down in all that "coherence of story" nonsense. How have you dealt with the evil word of STRUCTURE in your adapt...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/06/uses-of-story.html

For reasons that must await a subsequent post, theatre is thought to require an establishing frame of reference as precondition to the presentation of action. This frame of reference establishes ...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-i-learned-in-theatre-lisa-damour.html

You always go hoping for the best, but in the nature of true experiment, the event this time served as one more reminder (if such were needed) that viable—i.e. "interesting"—alternatives to t...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-i-learned-in-theatre-experimental.html

If you go to the theatre often enough, you'll eventually see a heavy-hitter connecting with profound and interesting material. If you're lucky, they'll even knock something out of the park for yo...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-i-learned-in-theatre-church-by.html

> "Plays are partly a sequence of ambushes of one kind or another; and > I think that the trick of it is a lot to do with the way that you > allow the information...

http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2007/03/play-considered-as-information-engine_31.html