Song: The Impossible Plays of Bess Wohl
The playwright Bess Wohl is constantly pursuing a crazy idea — and she has discovered that instead of scaring her away collaborators, it merely makes them more excited.
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“I began my career thinking, oh, I will only write a drama that is really simple to accomplish,” Wohl said on the most recent episode of Stagecraft, Variety’s theater podcast. “I will do two personalities, it is going to be one place, it is going to be quite produce-able. What I have discovered is that all theatre is actually challenging — even two personalities on a single set is actually tough to pull away! Why not do the crazy thing that is on your creativity? I have also learned that individuals [I work with] are excited about that struggle, and it kind of lifts up everybody to fulfill it.”
Wohl — who has written everything out of a mostly-wordless play place at a quiet escape (“Small Mouth Sounds”) into a puzzle that, for the first half, celebrities just kid celebrities (“Make Believe”) — is making her Broadway debut with the Second Stage Theater production of”Grand Horizons,” a new comedy with a starry cast led by Jane Alexander and James Cromwell. The series centers around a married couple which believes obtaining a divorce later 50 years of union, and includes a startling staging surprise which feels much like one of these crazy thoughts that Wohl discovers ways to place onstage.
“I am always curious about what sounds hopeless,” she clarified. “Doing things which have not been before, I have not seen before, which I think will result in something quite interesting or a entire tragedy and I am not really certain which. Often it feels like an urge I can not eliminate. Just a tiny itch that I actually must scratch”
COPYRIGHT_BP: Published on https://bingepost.com/listen-the-impossible-plays-of-bess-wohl/9081/ by Cecilia Jones on 2020-01-21T18:49:30.000Z
Wohl was a celebrity before she turned to writing, also on Stagecraft she reminisced about the way acting a laboratory technician on”CSI:NY” made her realize that acting was not for her and revealed the lasting effect that Sandy Duncan had on her life and livelihood.
New episodes of Stagecraft can be found every Tuesday. Download and subscribe to Stagecraft on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and anyplace that finer podcasts have been dispensed. Find past episodes and on Apple Podcasts.
