For a television star like Kirsten Vangsness (above left), who’s currently seen on the CBS drama Criminal Minds, the theatre can offer a chance to go wild, to say and do things that just aren’t possible on a major network.

Recently, our friends at LA STAGE Times spoke to Vangsness about the challenges and rewards of playing an amateur porn star in Figure 8, Phinneas Kiyomura’s new play about “ordinary sinners doing sinfully ordinary things.” We’re delighted to share the following excerpt from the story. To read the rest, just go here.

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How “The Navigator” got nurtured into success

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Welcome to the first installment of From Page to Stage, a column that explores how new plays make it to their first productions.

If a new play is going to thrive, then it needs to be nurtured from its initial draft through its first production. Playwrights need resources every step of the way to know if their script is actually working in real time with real actors and designers, but often, financial realities mean that support can be very difficult to get.

The WorkShop Theater, however, is part of a forward-looking subculture of New York City companies that offers a complete array of programs to follow a play from baby steps to graduation. Their current show, The Navigator, is what Artistic Director Scott Sickles describes as “an ideal illustration of that process.”

Eddie Antar’s play, an 80-minute surreal car ride with a man and his frighteningly knowledgeable GPS system, had a three-week run last year as part of WorkShop’s Play-in-Progress (PIP) program. With a mere $300 budget, it was nonetheless nominated for eight New York Innovative Theatre Awards and won two, for director Leslie Kincaid Burby and lighting designer Duane Pagano. Now, Burby is reprising her work with a (slightly) larger budget at WorkShop’s 60-seat mainstage theatre in midtown.

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles.

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How’s this for a paradox? The puppets in War Horse ground Seth Numrich in reality.

Numrich stars in this Broadway fable, now at Lincoln Center, as Albert Narracott, a young British boy whose life changes when his beloved horse Joey is sold as an officer’s mount in World War I. Albert joins the army to look for his animal friend, and we see both of them maneuver the horror of French battlefields.

The play, which is based on a young adult novel by Michael Morpurgo, can’t work unless Joey and several other animals feel like flesh-and-blood characters. To bring them to life, the creative team has devised remarkable, life-size puppets. Operated by small teams of puppeteers, the creatures seem strikingly real. They don’t just walk around: They breathe and sigh and occasionally shake their heads, just like actual horses.

Numrich loves those tiny gestures. “For us human actors in the play, breathing is not a conscious activity; it just happens,” he says. “But if you’re aware of your breathing, it can bring you into the present moment, which is what we’re always striving to do. And because [the puppeteers] always have to be thinking about breathing and physically making that animal breathe, there’s a presence they attain in their performance that’s awe-inspiring.

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On October 23, Victoria Bailey, TDF’s Executive Director, gave the keynote speech at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s (NAMT) fall conference. Under the title “Outrageous Fortune — the Musical!”, the conference investigated the state of new play and musical development in the United States. Below, we are please to present the full text of Bailey’s address.

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So why Outrageous Fortune? Why did Theatre Development Fund, an organization that if you know us at all, you for our TKTS booths,and maybe our
membership program, why did TDF commission Outrageous Fortune?

The idea came from a founder, our first Board President, John Booth. TDF was started in 1968 in response to a concern on the part of some folks at the Twentieth Century Fund that it
was getting more and more difficult for Broadway to sustain serious plays, plays that were meritorious. TDF was started to help stimulate the production of those plays. We did it with our ticketing programs, which have gone on to bring millions of people to theatre who wouldn’t otherwise have gone. We did it with our subsidy program, and we did it with the TKTS booths.

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The four-time Tony winner plays a frustrated son in Driving Miss Daisy.

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles.

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There’s a particular challenge in playing Boolie Werthan, the concerned son who hires an African-American chauffeur for his elderly white mother in Driving Miss Daisy. Just ask Boyd Gaines, who’s tackling the role in the current Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

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