A new production honors the late Lanford Wilson

When Carl Forsman, artistic director of Keen Company, was about 11 years old, his parents took him to see his first Broadway show— Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July. “I’m not sure I got all of it, but it was a momentous experience for me,” he says. It launched a lifelong love of Wilson’s writing.

Since founding Keen in 2000, Forsman has wanted to produce a Wilson play. He introduced Lemon Sky to resident director Jonathan Silverstein several years ago, and as Silverstein recalls, “I just fell in love with this plays instantly, and for years I’ve been talking to Carl and saying we have to do Lemon Sky.” But the play is challenging, and Forsman didn’t want to rush into it before they were ready as individual artists or as a company.

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How director Lisa Peterson molds the pieces of “Motherhood Out Loud”

Motherhood Out Loud sounds simple enough: It’s a series of vignettes about the highs and lows of being a mom. But the show involves four actors, 14 playwrights, and close to 50 characters. How do you transform those elements into a coherent show?

That was the challenge for director Lisa Peterson. “What drew me to it was the idea of trying to help figure out how to make one thing out of so many pieces,” she says

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How Off Broadway shows are thriving with limited performances

Ed Gaynes manages the St. Luke’s Theatre, currently shared by five shows, and the Actors Temple Theatre, currently shared by two shows. He also produces four of the productions that run in those spaces. Why, one might wonder, would anyone take on so many projects at once?

“It had gotten out of control doing the regular eight-show-a-week scheduling,” Gaynes says. “The contracts and the rents and everything were so ridiculous that it was costing $300,000–500,000 to do a small play and a lot more to do a large play. It was very hard to recoup that money if you could even raise it in the first place. Now, by sharing space, we’ve cut the budgets not just in half, but literally by 75% because there are all different agreements with the unions and all the costs are less and you maximize your audience.”

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Director Michael Greif revisits the musical for its New York revival

When Rent opened in 1996, AIDS was very much in the public eye. Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” was AIDS researcher David Ho, and new drug treatments were helping AIDS patients live longer. Those milestones underscored the musical’s message that someone could live with (and not just die from) the disease, and that message helped the musical become such a culturally relevant phenomenon.

Fifteen years later, Rent‘s legacy includes 5,124 performances at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre, where it ran until 2008; four Tony awards; a Pulitzer Prize for composer Jonathan Larson; and even a dedicated fan base known as Rent-heads.

But can the phenomenon continue? Can Rent mean something in New York City in 2011, when issues like gay marriage have taken center stage and AIDS, though still uncured, no longer dominates the public conversation?

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After 14 years, “Death Takes a Holiday” hits the stage

Shortly after the musical Titanic opened on Broadway in 1997, its composer-lyricist Maury Yeston and bookwriter Peter Stone were looking for their next project together. “We really felt that having done the complete blow-out, no-question-about-it, 36-people-in-the-cast, 26-people-in-the-orchestra, massive grand epic musical, we really wanted to do a chamber piece—something really small,” Yeston says. Stone suggested the 1928 Italian play by Alberto Casella, Death Takes a Holiday. In the show, Death takes human form and vacations to an Italian villa where he falls in love.

At first, Yeston needed persuading:”I said, ‘Look. I don’t want to write this. It’s death death death.’ And [Peter] said, ‘No no no. To me it’s holiday holiday holiday,’”

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