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This month American Theatre inaugurates a new feature on theatre folks who deserve to be more well known in the field, each recommended by at least one colleague. Here we feature 20 people of all different disciplines, or "roles"; in the future we'll feature one playwright, one director, one designer, one performer, one administrator/staffer, and one freelance artist.
CLARE BARRON
Profession: Playwright
Hometown: Wenatchee, Wash.
Current Home: Brooklyn
KNOWN FOR: You-Got Older, an Obie winner and a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2014, produced by Page 73 Productions at HERE Arts Center.
WHAT'S NEXT: I'll Never Love Again, a play with music created from her high school journal (including naked drawings) at the Bushwick Starr this winter. "I wanted to make this piece because I felt like teenager-dom was way stranger than I remembered," says Barron. "And that maybe there was some forgotten wisdom in that strangeness."
WHAT MAKES HER SPECIAL: "Clare Barron is badass," says playwright and director Robert O'Hara, who met Barron after reading her play Baby Screams Miracle for consideration in the Woolly Mammoth season. "She writes with an audacity of imagination. She struck me as someone that wasn't trying to be like anybody else but herself-wholly unique and blazingly original, something we can never have enough of in the theatre."
WHAT SHE'S THINKING ABOUT NOW: "I'm thinking and writing a lot about sexual violence in relationships and how ambition operates in women," she says. "In general, I'm drawn to work that is intimate and detailed but also super-theatrical and not afraid of emotionality or huge, appalling gestures. I grew up acting in productions of The Music Man and The Wizard of Oz with casts of 100-plus kids, just loving the shit out of it, and I want to always remember that kind of wild abandon and joy and deep, deep need whenever I work on a play."
DEENA SELENOW
Profession: Director and curator for new performance
Hometown: New York City
Current Home: Los Angeles
KNOWN FOR: Directing Riot/Rebellion, produced by Watts Village Theater Company in association with the Latino Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, adapting and directing Toxicos (based on Sophocles' Philoctetes, plus Britney Spears) at L.A.'s REDCAT New Original Works Festival.
WHAT'S NEXT: She's...