The term “living your best life” is an identity concept which seems rampant on social media—this idea that whatever we might be doing with ourselves, living one’s “best life” is completely in our own hands; it is a readily available utopia should we choose to live it. For Tien, this play came from the process of seeing this concept of a “best life” against the backdrop of the “real racial and economic divides” which were being heavily reported in the media while she was writing.

My first week landed right at the start of The Lark’s Playwrights’s Week festival, and the first event I attended was a public reading of Gardley’s Dance of the Holy Ghosts, a memory play. I still hold vividly that moment when the final stage directions were read, and the audience just sat in breathless silence, as I believe so many of us were just blown away by this new voice.

I first met the intriguing Susan Soon He Stanton in the development phase of her career—initially, through her time as an inaugural Van Lier Fellow at The Lark in 2011, and then the following year though Rising Circle’s PlayRise play development program.

In the past year, our days have been filled with controversial changes in policy, irrational polarization between political parties, and widening evidence of government corruption. As such, many of us are on constant alert and in continual political dialogues both on and offline.

I distinctly remember walking into a screening room lobby at the Sundance Resort in the mountains of Utah for the final workshop presentation of Christopher Chen’s Caught, a piece Chen had spent the past three weeks rigorously developing as part of the 2014 Sundance Theater Lab.

I was fortunate to spend two years (2008 – 2010) in the Mabou Mines/SUITE Resident Artist Program where I was mentored by co-Artistic Directors Ruth Maleczech and Terry O’Reilly.

I was fortunate to spend two years (2008 – 2010) in the Mabou Mines/SUITE Resident Artist Program where I was mentored by co-Artistic Directors Ruth Maleczech and Terry O’Reilly. It was a transformative time in my life, so in 2013, shortly after Ruth’s passing, I added an epilogue

When we think of Taylor Mac, what do we see? An immediate rush of beautiful colors and wild theatrics, creations grand in both presentation and content. From A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, in which he engages the audience in exploring how communities are built (“through dire circumstances”) while performing a concert revue of our last twenty-four decades of music, to The Lily’s Revenge, a five-act, five-hour piece with a cast of forty with each act directed by a different director, Taylor approaches theater with absolute abandon.

I met one of my closest friends in graduate school. We were both aspiring playwrights; I, however had the strangely distinct luck to be from a poor background and of minority descent, while he was from plentiful means and Caucasian.

I first met Dominique Morisseau through the Lark Play Development Center—as a fantastically skilled actress who, for me, originated the role of Camae in Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop. Fast forward several years: again at the Lark, now I am on the final selection committee for Playwrights’ Week, when I read Detroit ’67, a play filled with a beautifully rhythmic language and a dark heart, its characters struggling to stay afloat in the middle of the 1967 Detroit Riots.

I often find myself a bit sad after the closing of a show. I miss the daily rehearsals, the continual discussions of the work and how to make it better. I miss the nervousness of audiences walking in and I miss talking with the team afterwards at the bar about what went wrong and what went right.

My mother firmly believes that you don’t really know who you are, as a person, until your mid-30s. 

In her newest work, The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, we see the remnants of a family who communicate via Twitter, via a home for troubled teens (aka the Sugar House), via the dead and buried, and via the silences we so often extend to the people we actually care about.

My mother was driving in Los Angeles with a friend, when her friend suggested that they stop off at an interesting looking bakery they had just passed. Being a native Los Angeleno, my mother said, “They’re not gonna want us in there.” To which her friend replied, “Rita, they’re a business, they want business, from whoever.” (Disclaimer: dialogue is approximate.) So they made a little bet, parked out front, then went on in.

Imagine the entire crowd at a Yankee stadium suddenly buying tickets to the theater.

We’ve all sat in the back of a cab, glimpsing the driver’s area. Squinting to get a better look at the name on the license, listening to the music playing in the background, wondering who they’re talking to on their mobile. Maybe we’ve even tried to cross the divide, after a late night in Manhattan, making intoxicated, possibly annoying, small talk.