I Just Launched a Newsletter on Substack!

Since the autumn of 2021, I've been writing on Medium and Vocal. Both platforms have been great for showcasing my creative writing, with my focus slightly different for each platform.

On Medium, I write a lot of memoir and nostalgia pieces about music, TV, and film. On Vocal, I have expanded my writing to more poetry and fiction writing. I've also had success with entering my writing in Vocal Challenges. I enjoy all the different prompts which have helped me develop my creative writing!

I've recently discovered Substack, a platform for subscription newsletters delivered to readers' email inboxes. After months of researching Substack, I think it will be a good fit for a new project I'm starting: an exploration of American regional theatre, including its history and current state as well as play reviews and interviews of those involved in it.

Why?

Theatre is my third parent. It’s provided my dad with a career and my family with all the things we needed. When I grew up and left them, I couldn’t stay away from theatre long. I began writing for it.

Well, my dad would say I was writing against it, at first, as I became the theatre and film critic of my small college newspaper. I mostly liked every college production I saw. I knew these were students still learning, so I wasn’t too critical of their performances. The meanest I got was when I didn’t like the script of a new farcical sex comedy that I don’t think would run on any college campus today.

Eventually, I would start writing plays, beginning as work for a playwriting class at the regional theatre for which my dad was Artistic Director at the time. Regional theatre is often more than playhouses. Many of these theatres have extensive outreach and education programs for children and adults. I benefited from one of these programs by taking the class from a working playwright.

After I became a parent, my theatre-going days grew fewer and fewer until almost non-existent. I continued to write, but mostly memoir and parts of plays I never finished.

By that time, my dad had stepped down from the third regional theatre under his artistic direction in his career and began to travel the nation and the world directing plays, some of which he wrote. It was difficult for me to keep up with where in the world he was, let alone what he was doing theatrically most of the time.

So, here I now find myself, with my two children now adults, and more free time to explore a world of theatre I have been kept away from for decades.

I don’t mean Broadway Theatre. I did go to that occasionally with my kids. I mean to write about regional theatre, the small stages with yearly seasons filled with different types of plays written by new voices as well as classic older ones. I’m ready to hear them again. I’m ready to be a part of the audience.

Notice the word “audience” has “aud” in it, as in “audio” and “auditory”. It’s why larger places we go to see live entertainment are called auditoriums. It seems to me that lately, Broadway theatre (not all of it) has become more about the visual and less about the auditory experience of theatre. I’m ready to leave Disney spectaculars behind to hear some powerful dialogues performed by captivating actors.

I hope my new Substack newsletter, The Stage Down the Street, will capture my experience of rediscovering regional theatre as I research its rich history, interview the people producing it now, and occasionally review a performance, as I once did in college. Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll be kind.

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This story was originally published on Medium.com.