Theater links
I split this page off from my original links page because it was growing to dominate the file. Click "Links" in the pane at right to find links to translators and translators' organizations; search engines and utilities, including some that I use in theater work; unclassifiable links, including some to French Foreign Legion sites (look, I don't explain this stuff, I just write up the list).
My theater links come with claims but no guarantees. I do try to check every so often to sort out the dead ones and update the accounts. Click a category in the list below to jump to the section you want.
- Pages created by my family and intimate friends
- Some links to playwrights, actors and others who've left Athens
- A list of script publishers and rights houses (you can find other theater publications here too)
- Sources for scripts of Shakespeare's plays
- Broadway and Off Broadway
- A script search engine!
- Some training and producing organizations in North Georgia
- Vendors—an informal list of companies that fabricate and sell theatrical equipment and supplies such as draperies and costumes
- Lila Ralston gave me this one, which just doesn't fit anywhere else: a highly informative illustrated page about what stagehands do. Over 18 only, please.
- For about 12 years I've worked with Town & Gown Players of Athens, Georgia. Their site has a pretty fair links page, too. Many of their 1991-2004 productions are featured in other pages of mine.
- For a great set of links to knowledge (offered by institutions, theater designers, scholars and many others), visit Fran's site.
- The Amateur Theater Division has a number of possibly useful pages here: how to build scenery, a list of gifts your community theater company would thank you for, a feature on Scaleboy® and Scalemaid®, and lots besides.
- The Division also sponsors the Unsolemn Theater Dictionary, which may surprise you.
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Quite a few former Athenians are working in theater. Here are links to some of them (and I'd welcome news of the others):
- Katherine Sanderlin has done some directing projects, including Before the Fire at the 2002 New York Fringe Festival, with Rachel Mewbron and Vanessa Shealy (see their links below). Katherine writes, "In addition, this past summer, Johnny Belle Productions took another of Catherine Trieschmann's plays to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Shelly Stover, another UGA alum, garnered major attention in her role, for which she was nominated as a contender for the 'Best Actress of the Fest' award. The show was directed by UGA PhD alum Elena Hartwell, and Vanessa Shealy also acted in it. The costumes were coordinated by Donald B. Sanders, who received his MFA in Costume Design at UGA. It was stage managed by Emily Paige Ballou, another UGA alum."
- In addition to her triumph in Edinburgh, Shelly Stover has been doing commercial work and performing at UCB Theater.
- Playwright Daniel Guyton won prizes while he was in graduate school and is beginning to get produced in the city. Cities--his I'm Not Gay has had a held-over run in . . . wait for it . . . Reykjavik.
- Actress Liz McGeever earned a pretty good string of credits while at the university.
- M.F.A. actress Christy Arington has fetched up in Chicago, where she's with Seanachaí Theater. She is or was also heading the theater department at Trinity High School, a Dominican girls' prep school in River Forest, Ill.
- Playwright Catherine Trieschmann began establishing a reputation for good plotting and dialog writing while here, and she continues to get produced. Her new play Crooked went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2004, as Katherine Sanderlin noted above.
- You can't really say Harold M. Leaver has left, because he teaches at a minimum of three colleges (including Emory University and the U. of Georgia) and directs around the region. Most of his ink relates to an Atlanta seasonal staple, The Santaland Diaries.
- Playwright Catherine Grimmell Mew is now a faculty member at Shorter College in Rome. Her Another Perfect Day in East Hampton was a Town & Gown success a few years ago.
- Ellen Stines pretty much ran through the Paula Vogel canon while she was here. As I write this she's in New York working with Dan Guyton.
- Jake Dogias graduated from the university and is now a graduate student at UC Irvine.
- Melanie Julian is, or recently was, in Pittsburgh.
- It's strange that Peggy Tunick, noted for her play Brooklyn, is now with Manhattan Theatresource.
- After giving fine performances in Before the Fire and other properties here, Rachel Mewbron has appeared in Atlanta as well as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
- That Fringe production also featured Irene Ryan award-winner Vanessa Shealy, who's also impressed New York audiences.
- Looking for information on the 1957 musical Shinbone Alley (now retitled Archy & Mehitabel)? Visit the Internet Broadway Database. You can search by title, season, performers and other criteria. A FABULOUS resource.
- The Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York has created an official web site for Off-Broadway productions: Off Broadway Online. I have not explored the site fully, but it has a search engine for shows currently up in not-for-profit venues. You can subscribe to receive email notices about new productions and even donate to help fund the site.
- The Lortel Archives, also known as the Internet Off-Broadway Database or IOBDB, seeks to provide historical information about this key center of American theater. The site explains it's a work in progress, so don't expect perfect coverage, but this could be a remarkably useful resource. As I write this, the database includes 3100 productions dating back to 1954!
- Thanks to Brian Little for this one: Playscripts.com indexes over 13,000 plays and will connect you to the source for any listed script. Quite an amazing service.
- See the Artslynx site for a long, deep list of links to resources of all kinds.
- Click here for another very thorough theater links site, including publishers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
- Play Bureau NZ Ltd runs an online bookstore in a geologically and theatrically active region.
- Our county government operates the professionally staffed Athens Creative Theater (ACT). The company used to focus on productions for and by kids but now puts up many grownup musicals. The web site, unfortunately, pelts your browser with popup ads and plays tunes from the company's shows, which may or may not stop when you conclude your visit. In good conscience I can't give you a link to it, but here's the URL: www.athenscreativetheatre.com. Browse at your own risk.
- In the remarkable city of Watkinsville, Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation has programs in theater, music, dance, improv, juggling and other performing arts. OCAF doesn't limit itself to performing arts, though; they do ceramics shows, literary events, and a lot more. Worth checking out. Most theater classes are for children, but that is changing gradually as needs shift.
- Oconee Youth Playhouse and Oconee Youth School of Performance, founded by Terra Hannon and directed by her and her husband Shane, has been drawing big audiences, garnering fine reviews and (to the surprise of a lot of folks in Cleveland and Seattle) winning national prizes. The web site makes great entertainment. Our neighbors are doing themselves proud. (Dept. of Unasked-for Critiques: I'm not an OYP parent, so I don't possess the unbounded patience it takes to wait while the ridiculously slow home page opens. I mean 360 kilobytes of images just to see the logo?)
- Watkinsville is also home to local theater figures Bill and Nancy Akin. Bill's web site (or I should say one of his web sites) features information on his production of one-acts Laundry & Bourbon and Lone Star, which went up in the summer of the year Three.
- Farther away than Watkinsville but not so far as Atlanta, the Gainesville Theater Alliance has a busy program. They combine the resources of that medium-sized town, Brenau University and Gainesville College. As I write this GTA has announced the cast for Look Homeward, Angel (with Athens native Mary-Ruth Ralston as Mrs. Snowden).
- The Athens-Clarke County Classic Center is not a producing company but catches all kinds of touring shows as well as industrials and expositions.
- One of my favorite Athens epics is How the Morton Theater Was Saved. Aside from its historical value, the house has the loveliest acoustics in town. The first performance I attended there was a full-dress Carmina Burana; Fran and I arrived too late for downstairs seats or even center balcony ones, so we sat in the worst part of the horseshoe balcony. Every syllable and every dynamic nuance was distinct. Beautiful. And the olio curtain (fire curtain) is just astounding; painted by university students under the supervision of Joe Stell, it represents a wall plastered with bills for some of the acts that played there in the vaudeville days of the theater. You have to fiddle your mouse around and sort of guess where the links are in the photographs. Enter the building, click the door on your right, then the door farthest away from you to get a general view of the auditorium. Now find the Stage Left proscenium (your right) and click there, and at long last you'll get to see the olio curtain. It's worth the frustration.
- The University of Georgia Drama Department offers a full season of ambitious productions, including new shows and classics performed on three stages. The program has won a number of awards for production, playwriting and acting and has turned out a number of good people. (I phrased that badly; their graduates include a number of good people, who as far as I know never got turned out at all.)
- The Athens Little Playhouse (ALPS) conducts classes and puts up shows with mostly school-age casts. It's housed in what used to be a dollar movie theater on, guess what, Alps Road.
- Out in California, John Klima runs Tools for Stagecraft, an online store handling all sorts of implements and supplies. In addition to a laser pointer you can see from 3 miles away, he sells select carpentry tools, measuring instruments, director's chairs, rigging accessories, gel in sheets and rolls, accessories for your walkie-talkie, and on and on. The site's worth a visit.
- Maybe the biggest seller of fabrics for the theater is Rose Brand of New York and Hollywood. You can get cut lengths or bolts of muslin, sateen, glitter cloth, braid, whatever you like, or they will build curtains and draperies to order.
- You must visit the Gerriets International site. Sure, you can find fabrics and stuff there, but what will really grab you is the story of their 12-meter loom. They produce muslin (used for backdrops and such) in a real 40-foot width, not in the folded format with heavy warp yarns running up the middle. I just wish they told what country is home to this marvel.
- As the name suggests, Chicago Canvas and Supply specializes in fabrics, curtain hardware, that sort of thing. Somewhere I have an excellent swatch book from this vendor; the catalog includes a couple of dozen varieties of muslin, for example. You can order online, but it's nearly always better to call and talk with a human being.
- North Georgia, to my surprise, had a significant drapery loft in Georgia Stage, just outside Atlanta. (Apparently they have ceased operations. Too bad.) Loft is one of those excellent specialty words describing "where they make stuff." There's no such thing as a rope factory, for instance; you make rope in a ropewalk. Similarly a brickyard, a cotton gin, an iron foundry, a rayon spinning mill, a scene shop, a winery, a malthouse, a saltings, a smithy or forge, a bookbindery. Bet you can add half a dozen more.
- Somebody at Norcostco probably had fun slipping one of their product categories past the boss: The site includes a link titled "Santas, Easter Bunnies, Armor." Norcostco is a vast theatrical supply house, dealing in costumes and makeup, consumables such as nylon cord and flame-retardant dope, lighting equipment and controls, and on and on. They'll rent you a full costume plot for The Pirates of Penzance if you want.
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Theater links