Theatre Communications Group and The Greene Space at WNYC & WQXR Announce 'In Conversation with Anne Bogart,' 3/5

Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theatre, and The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC and WQXR, announce the third event in the series, TCG Playwrights in Conversation: Discussions and Readings – In Conversation with Anne Bogart. 

In celebration of TCG's 50th anniversary, four events featuring conversations with TCG authors and featured artists are being presented at The Greene Space, WNYC and WQXR's innovative broadcast studio and performance venue.  

On Monday, March 5 at 7pm, the series continues with In Conversation with Anne Bogart. As Artistic Director of Siti Company, Anne Bogart has conducted a series of intimate interviews with major artists and cultural thinkers in front of a live audience at Siti Company's New York rehearsal studio. In these extraordinary conversations, Bogart and her guests have discussed such free-ranging topics as the driving forces in their work, the paths their lives have taken and their visions for the future of the field.  Bogart will be in conversation with playwrights Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive, The Baltimore Waltz, The Mineola Twins) and two-time Pulitzer Prize-finalist and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House, Eurydice, Dead Man's Cell Phone), who studied under Vogel at Brown University. The evening will conclude with all three playwrights signing copies of their work. The event will be available online as a live video webcast at http://www.tcg.org/fifty/playwrights.cfm and at www.thegreenespace.org. 

"TCG is dedicated to raising public awareness of important voices in theatre, and TCG Playwrights in Conversation gives us the opportunity to hear directly from the playwrights themselves. Our collaboration with The Greene Space allows us to share this conversation with a wider audience," said Teresa Eyring, Executive Director of TCG. "From Anne Bogart's work with Viewpoints to Paula Vogel's playwriting bake-offs to Sarah Ruhl's convention-bending stage directions, these three seminal artists have expanded the creative possibilities of American theatre."

"The Greene Space was built on the ethos of a kind of hothouse to engage audiences from around the corner and around the world with great artists and thinkers, such as Anne Bogart, Paul Vogel and Sarah Ruhl," said Indira Etwaroo, Executive Producer, The Greene Space. "We are delighted to celebrate TCG's 50th Anniversary with them by presenting this dynamic and exciting conversation series."  

This event also marks the launch of Conversations with Anne, a new book that captures Anne Bogart's conversations withartists and thinkers like JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer; Ben Cameron, Martha Clarke, Oskar Eustis, Zelda Fichandler; Richard Foreman, André Gregory, Bill T. Jones, Tina Landau, Elizabeth LeCompte, Eduardo Machado, Charles L. Mee, Jr., Joseph V. Melillo, Meredith Monk, Mary Overlie, Peter Sellars, Molly Smith, Elizabeth Streb, Julie Taymor, RoBert Woodruff and Mary Zimmerman. The book will be available for purchase at the event, and Anne Bogart will be signing copies.

For more information, videos of past events and to purchase tickets for In Conversation with Anne Bogart on Monday, March 5, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. at The Greene Space (44 Charlton Street, New York, NY 10014), visit: http://www.tcg.org/fifty/playwrights.cfm. Tickets are $15.

Anne Bogart is the Artistic Director of Siti Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is also a Professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program. Recent works with SITI include Trojan Women (at the Getty Villa), Antigone, American Document (with the Martha Graham Dance Company), Under Construction, Freshwater, Who Do You Think You Are, Radio Macbeth, Hotel Cassiopeia, Intimations for Saxophone, Death and the Ploughman, A Midsummer Night's Dream, La Dispute, Score, bobrauschenbergamerica, Room, War of the Worlds, Cabin Pressure, The Radio Play, Alice's Adventures, Culture of Desire, Bob, Going, Going, Gone, Small Lives/Big Dreams, The Medium, Noel Coward's Hayfever and Private Lives, August Strindberg's Miss Julie, and Charles Mee's Orestes. She is the author of a book of essays entitled A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater, And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World and the co-author with Tina Landau of The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. Upcoming productions include: Cafe Variations to premiere at Arts Emerson in Boston and Meditations on the Rite of Spring (a joint project with the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company) to premiere at Carolina Performing Arts inChapel Hill.   

Sarah Ruhl's most recent play Stage Kiss had its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2011. Sarah Ruhl's plays include In The Next Room, or the Vibrator Play (Glickman Prize, finalist for Pulitzer Prize, 2010, Tony Nomination Best Play), The Clean House (Susan Smith Blackburn award, 2004, finalist for Pulitzer Prize, 2005), Dead Man's Cell Phone, (Helen Hayes award for best new play), Demeter in the City (nominated for 9 NAACP awards), Eurydice, Melancholy Play, Orlando, a new version of Chekhov's Three Sisters, and Passion Play (Kennedy Center Fourth Forum Freedom Award).  Her plays have premiered at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway, produced by Lincoln Center Theater; off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights' Horizons, and Second Stage; and regionally at Berkeley Repertory Theater, Yale Repertory Theater, the Goodman Theater, Cornerstone Theater, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth, Cincinnati Playhouse, and the Piven Theater Workshop in Chicago, as well being produced at many other theaters across the country. Her plays have also been performed in England, Poland, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia, and have been translated into Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, Korean and Arabic.  Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel, and is originally from Chicago. In 2003, she was the recipient of a Helen Merrill award and a Whiting Writers' award, a PEN/Laura Pels award, and in 2006 was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Her work is published by TCG and Samuel French, and she is a member of New Dramatists and 13P. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family. 

Paula Vogel's play, How I Learned to Drive, received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, as well as winning her second OBIE. It has been produced all over the world. Other plays include The Long Christmas Ride Home, The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Hot'N'Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, The Oldest Profession and A Civil War Christmas.  In 2004-5 she was the playwright in residence at The Signature Theatre in New York which produced three of her works.  She is currently playwright in residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre, as well as an artistic associate at Long Wharf Theatre.  Work in progress includes a commission for Yale Repertory (based on The God of Vengeance), a work in collaboration with director Rebecca Taichman, and a new play, Jitterbugging and the War Effort. TCG has published four books of her work, The Mammary Plays, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays, The Long Christmas Ride Home and A Civil War Christmas.  Most recent awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild (2011) 2010 William Inge Festival Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre Award.  She was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in April.  Last year, she was awarded the Stephen and Christine Schwarzman Legacy Award for Excellence in Theatre for lifetime achievement and excellence in teaching.  Ms. Vogel won the 2004 Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Paula Vogel is the Eugene O'Neill Professor (adjunct) of Playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. 

In addition to its radio and online programming, WNYC and WQXR engage audiences in person at The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, the station's street-level, state-of-the-art broadcast studio and performance venue. The Greene Space is host to an exciting and wide ranging line-up, including live broadcasts and tapings of WNYC programs, concerts and festivals from WQXR, audio theater, literary readings, art exhibits, political debates, symposia, and town hall meetings. For more information and a schedule, please visit www.thegreenespace.org.

For 50 years, Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for the American theatre, has existed to strengthen, nurture and promote the professional not-for-profit American theatre. TCG's constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to nearly 700 member theatres and affiliate organizations and more than 12,000 individuals nationwide. TCG offers its members networking and knowledge-building opportunities through conferences, events, research and communications; awards grants, approximately $2 million per year, to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and serves as the US Center of the InterNational Theatre Institute, connecting its constituents to the global theatre community. TCG is North America's largest independent publisher of dramatic literature, with 11 Pulitzer Prizes for Best Play on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning AMERICAN THEATRE magazine and ARTSEARCH®, the essential source for a career in the arts. In all of its endeavors, TCG seeks to increase the organizational efficiency of its member theatres, cultivate and celebrate the artistic talent and achievements of the field and promote a larger public understanding of, and appreciation for, the theatre. For more information, visit www.tcg.org.