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Downstage Center
Go in-depth with the leading artists and professionals working on stage today when you go Downstage Center. Downstage Center is the American Theatre Wing's acclaimed weekly theatrical interview program that spotlights the creative talents on Broadway, Off-Broadway, across the country and around the world, with in-depth conversations that simply can't be found anywhere else. Now in its sixth year, Downstage Center, produced in association with CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, has been featured by the Associated Press and Slate.com as the place to go for theatrical talk. New editions will be available every other Wednesday from this website, where you can listen online, download the programs or subscribe to the podcast.

Sarah Ruhl
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With:
Sarah Ruhl

Playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose Passion Play made its New York City debut with the Epic Theater Center, talks about the roots of that play during her graduate work at Brown University, what initially got her musing on the story of the people who appear in passion plays, and why she wrote a third act for its production at Arena Stage more than a decade after its debut in Trinity Rep's New Play Festival. She also talks about growing up in a household that was intellectually and theatrically oriented; her days at the Piven Theater Workshop while in her teens; why she thinks that everyone has an "opera inside"; the visual images that become the starting point for her plays, and whether starting a play, Dead Man's Cell Phone, in which the title character is deceased at the start, was a handicap; the impact of receiving a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" on her life and career; the unorthodox gift that gave rise to In The Next Room or the vibrator play and why she chose to subtitle the play; and she responds to the suggestion that as her career has progressed, her plays have contained their flights of fancy more with each successive work.

Original air date - June 16, 2010
Running Time - 1:02:05



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