Silk Road Theatre Project

As a Literary Manager, I write many letters that go something like this “Thanks for your interest in Silk Road Theatre Project.  Your play, XXXXX, doesn’t fit our current programming, but we appreciate you sharing your work.”  The letters are longer, of course, and hopefully less generic, but at root the conversation about literary management and season planning always has to do with a given theatre’s mission and aesthetic and audience.

The conversations we have at SRTP are mostly conversations about diaspora–about how culture translates from one place to another, or how people and ideas translate from one culture to another. 

This week, a playwright who received one of my letters wrote back, asking me if I would be willing to recommend some Chicago plays to him, for theatres in Korea.  To translate, into Korean.  The resulting exchange of emails involved questions of what is “too American” to translate–or what is already “too Korean” to be interesting as an American play.

So, I throw it out to you, our blog readers: what IS a “Chicago” play?  What’s an “American” play?  What makes a play specific to our time and place?  And, conversely, what conversations do you want to hear, that you aren’t hearing?  Or aren’t hearing enough of?