Live theatre is the most responsive art form. A playwright sees a news story, feels the spark of inspiration, and sits down to write a play. A producer wants to address a particular current event and gathers together a production to do just that. A director recognizes the timelessness of a 400-year old play and researches how our world reflects one from long ago. An actor steps on stage and continues a thousand year-old tradition of storytelling, connecting with the eyes and ears and hearts of those gathered before them. Each performance crackles with the circuitous energy of the performers, the audience, and the world around them. It is alive. It is here. It is now.
In the 2018 season on Broadway, New York’s 1.8 billion dollar epicenter of commercial plays and musicals, a cataclysmic shift occurred as marginalized and independent voices broke into the mainstream like never before. The 2019 Tony Award committee, which honors the best Broadway plays and musicals of the previous year, nominated Heidi Shreck’s ripped-from-the-headlines play What the Constitution Means to Me; performance artist Taylor Mac’s bizarre Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus; director Daniel Fish’s revolutionary production of the classic American musical, Oklahoma!; and up-and-coming African-American playwright Dominique Morriseau for her book for the musical, Ain’t Too Proud: the Life and Times of the Temptations. And, for the first time ever, the committee awarded a wheelchair-bound actor, Ali Stroker, for her performance in Oklahoma!. And as you are reading this now, more developments have happened or are being planned.
When I was approached to write a digital theatre textbook, I jumped at the chance. There is no better medium than the internet to teach the extraordinary responsiveness and fluidity of theatre. As there is no print version, I am able to update freely as the art form shifts around us. And perhaps most importantly, within this publication you will find topical and current videos that will help students easily envision the kinetic and visual world of theatre—an impossibility in a traditional textbook.
Robert Cucuzza is the Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Los Angeles Mission College. His theatre directing work runs the gamut of musicals, farce, naturalistic plays, adaptations of classics, original work, and devised pieces. In the Los Angeles area, he has directed plays at REDCAT, South Coast Rep, CalArts, the Steve Allen Theatre, Son of Semele, the Lee Strasberg Institute, and at Pierce College and Occidental College. As a Creative Consultant, he has worked with Miss Prissy and her street dance company The Underground, Rosanna Gamson Worldwide, and with the Creative Entertainment division of Walt Disney Imagineering, where he has developed large scale live events. As a playwright, director and producer in New York, he spent six years as an artist-in-residence at Richard Foreman’s Ontological Theater where he mounted many highly-acclaimed original plays and was a co-founder of the Obie Award-winning Blueprint Series.
As an actor, he is a member of the Obie Award-winning company Elevator Repair Service, with whom he performed in Total Fictional Lie, Room Tone, and originated the role of Tom Buchanan in Gatz — a complete staging of the entire text of “The Great Gatsby.” With ERS and Gatz he has played Off Broadway and on the West End in London, and in major festivals and theaters in the U.S, all over Europe and across the globe. He has also performed in three plays written and directed by Richard Foreman at the legendary Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York.
As a filmmaker, he has written, directed, produced and edited the films The Invincible Ecksteins, The Blue Horizon, Speed Freaks and several shorts. His film The Armed Boy— a silent film created to accompany Karl Jenkin’s modern choral mass “The Armed Man”—was commissioned by the Rackham Symphony Choir in Detroit.
As an acting teacher he has taught at CalArts, the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, and Pierce College. In New York City, he taught at the New York Film Academy and founded ACME Acting Lab, a student-driven acting studio devoted to the creation of professionally produced original plays and films.
Originally from Bradford, PA, Cucuzza is a 1990 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University where he received a BFA in Literary and Cultural Studies with a minor in Theatre. He holds a 2011 MFA in Directing from CalArts. He was the recipient of a 1990 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for a one-year independent study of experimental theater in Europe and a 2010-11 recipient of a Beutner Family Award for Excellence in the Arts at CalArts.
Chapter 1: Theatre is Here and Now
Chapter 2: The Theatre Audience
Chapter 3: Theatre as Reflection
Chapter 4: Theatre Spaces
Chapter 5: The Playwright
Chapter 6: The Ship's Crew
Chapter 7: The Actor
Chapter 8: The Designers
Chapter 9: Theatrical Process
Chapter 10: Engaging in Theatre