Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

   (Once Upon a Dance 2022). ISBN: 978-1-955555-53-1 As a longtime creative dramatist and youth theatre specialist, I am always on the lookout for books like Frankie’s Wish , which has everything I could ask for—a celebration of imagination, interesting places to explore, adventures to physicalize, and new friends to meet—and best of all, it has the added element of a ballerina called Konora. Konora is featured at the bottom half of every right-hand page (the left-hand pages being devoted to illustrations), offering suggestions for how to physically interact with the story, whether it be a dance move, stretch, or transformation into a dinosaur or gorilla. Frankie’s Wish is the brainchild of Once Upon a Dance. It is described on the copyright page as a “Dance-it-Out Creative Movement Story.” The illustrations are by Emilia Rumińska, and the story is based on one by Eva Stone. This particular book—the latest of 19 in the series—is perfect not only for creative dramatists, bu...

  (London/New York: Routledge, 2022). ISBN: 978-0-367-74888-3 With the COVID-19 pandemic almost all but behind us (although two Broadway shows were shut down last week because of lead actors testing positive), the theatre community is trying to get back on its feet and back to work. As a playwright, script doctor, director, artistic director of a theatre company, and actor, I’ve met with the challenges, repercussions, and sometimes joys of cutting scripts for over thirty years. Audiences, while able to sit in a movie theatre for three hours to watch, for instance, this year’s The Batman , are far more impatient when it comes to the length of stage productions, which makes it especially difficult for those specializing in Shakespeare and other public domain classics of considerable length. In a perfect world—as opposed to the theatre, which thrives on imperfection—plays would always be the perfect length. After all, a playwright is a skilled technician specializing in conflict...

(artist@margaretmccarthy.com, www.margaretmccarthy.com). There’s nothing like a pandemic to adjust one’s perspective and beckon new ways of being. Since April, I’ve added a few select, exquisitely written and constructed plays to my review list. All have been solicitations from the playwrights. Having a theatre company that is indefinitely mothballed as far as presenting plays for live audiences and being a playwright myself, I have great sympathy for these works without a home, without a mechanism to reach an audience, as well as for their creators. So I am doing what I can to make a case that certain plays can offer almost as much to a reader as they can to an audience. After all, that is how good plays get produced… they are read by a dramaturg, director, or producer and, if the strength of their vision, the weight of their words, the complexity and authenticity of their characters, and the energy of their narrative are sufficiently compelling, the playwright’s work is lifted off of...

 edited by Bill Barclay and Jonah Lipsky (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2014). ISBN: 978-1-57525-893-5 If the plays in Volume One of this collection are like a sprout bursting through the soil from a carefully cultivated seed, the four plays in Volume Two are the unfolding of a complex, beautiful patch of flowers, quite unlike each other, or any other, yet recognizable all the same. I consider it a privilege to have the opportunity to share my thoughts on what is now the third book containing the works and ideas of Jon Lipsky. His Dreaming Together: Explore Your Dreams by Acting Them Out (Larson Publications), has had a considerable impact on my theatre education and play-making career, and two of the four plays in Volume Two are directly related to Lipsky’s ground-breaking dreamwork. The Introduction to this volume, written by Bill Barclay, provides answers to the questions of how Lipsky worked and why these four plays were chosen for this volume. I encourage you to rea...

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”—Anaïs Nin The relationship between dreams and our corporal existence on Earth is the meaty stuff of centuries of philosophical and theological discourse and Jon Lipsky—noted playwright, theatre professor, and leader of dream theatre workshops—has contributed a well-organized and vibrant new book to this ongoing discussion of the nature and meaning of the moving images that play on the cave walls of our sleep. Geared for both the theatre practitioner looking to use dreams to enhance the study of acting and the non-theatre dreamer wishing to better explore the layered meanings and images of his or her dreams, Dreaming Together is divided into an Overview section and four parts, dealing with, respectively: (1) solo dream enactment, (2) ensemble dream enactment, (3) dramatic dream enactment, and (4) dream enactment in daily life. Lipsky serves as a...