Rob Weinert-Kendt

New York

Editor-in-chief, https://t.co/GM9D1d7KGD, now back in print. Music minister @gpointchurch. https://t.co/zHVRMOiB49. Not the building but the beam.

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Articles

‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ gives us a ‘Crucible’ for a post-#MeToo world

1 week ago | americamagazine.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

Loading... Click here if you don’t see subscription options“John Proctor Is the Villain” depicts a quintet of teenage girls with remarkable acuity and clear-eyed sympathy. (Photo courtesy of DKC O&M). The #MeToo movement that burst into wide public currency in 2017 gave a name, and a hashtag, to the old and pervasive crimes of sexual assault and harassment, particularly of women and girls by men in positions of social power.
Men behaving badly (on Broadway): Starry new productions of ‘Othello’ and ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’

3 weeks ago | americamagazine.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

Men are increasingly in crisis, the social scientists tell us, and certainly the statistics can be furnished: plunging life expectancy and educational attainment, rising rates of depression and domestic violence.
How the 2 Sides of Lisa D’Amour Are Fused in ‘Frozen Section’

4 weeks ago | americantheatre.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

In one of the first few scenes of Lisa D’Amour’s wild new play Frozen Section, a nonbinary grocery clerk named Sage chats about their gender nonconformity with a customer who’s more concerned that she may be overcharged at the register. For a moment as I read the play, I thought: trans rights and inflation, check—two issues that supposedly influenced last year’s presidential election outcome.
Editor’s Note: Our Still-Unfolding Story

1 month ago | americantheatre.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

This magazine launched in the spring of 1984, amid the reelection campaign of incumbent President Ronald Reagan and the Democratic primary to pick his challenger, Walter Mondale, who would later that year go down to a crushing 525-to-13 electoral college defeat (Mondale won only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia). Among other things, that election resoundingly confirmed the nation’s rightward turn after decades of New Deal and Great Society liberalism.
a.k. payne’s ‘Furlough’s Paradise’ Wins Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

1 month ago | americantheatre.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

NEW YORK CITY/LONDON: Tonight the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize announced that the 2025 award has been given to U.S. playwright a.k. payne for their play Furlough’s Paradise. Awarded annually since 1978, the prestigious international Prize is the largest and oldest award recognizing women+ who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre.
Jack O’Brien and André Bishop’s Final Duet at Lincoln Center Theater

1 month ago | americantheatre.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

“I was in school with Aeschylus,” quipped director Jack O’Brien in a recent joint interview with André Bishop in the latter’s book-lined office at Lincoln Center Theater, the three-theatre powerhouse that Bishop is about to relinquish after 33 years as LCT’s artistic director (the last 10 with the title producing artistic director).
New NEA Guidelines Require Compliance With Trump’s Anti-DEI, Anti-Trans Orders

2 months ago | americantheatre.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

Last week American artists and arts organizations learned that they won’t be spared from President Trump’s attempts to reshape the federal government in his image, which has roiled agencies all over Washington, D.C., and raised several legal and constitutional alarms since his inauguration last month.
Jordan Harrison’s Emotional Sci-Fi

2 months ago | americantheatre.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

Jordan Harrison is a playwright, no doubt, but I also think of him as a kind of archivist of human behavior. I don’t mean that his plays are usually, or only, set in earlier eras; even when they have historic settings, there are contemporary intrusions, parallel plots, telling anachronisms. But in depicting relationships among people that span distances of time or memory, Harrison counterposes unlikely details and periods with a curatorial care.
Maya Choldin Named Managing Director of New York Theatre Workshop

Jan 13, 2025 | americantheatre.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

NEW YORK CITY: New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) has announced that Maya Choldin will succeed Jeremy Blocker as the company’s managing director, following a dedicated search led by the Tom O’Connor Consulting Group. Choldin will assume the role beginning Feb. 1. Raised in Alberta, a graduate of Mount Allison University, Choldin joins NYTW from Theatre Calgary, where she served as executive director.
Can one performance reinvent a classic musical? Audra McDonald does it in ‘Gypsy.’

Dec 19, 2024 | americamagazine.org | Rob Weinert-Kendt

Can a single performance change the meaning of a classic play or musical? This question occurred to me as I watched Audra McDonald, our greatest living musical theater actor, seem to transform the role of Momma Rose, the terrifyingly driven stage mother, in the stunning new revival of “Gypsy.”It is not merely the fact that McDonald is the first Black actor to play the role on Broadway that makes this Rose seem like someone new—someone both real and larger than life.