joshua chamberlain

Category: theater

  • hoarding

    I’m a hoarder, but probably not the way you think. I don’t hoard clothes or magazines or collectibles or senseless junk. I hoard the things I create. Let me explain. A few years back, while working at a theater company, the Artistic Director told me about a critical inflection point…

  • Screen Craft Finalist

    My full-length play, All Stations Distress, was recently selected as a finalist in this year’s Screen Craft Stage Play Competition. A tremendous thank you to the team of directors, producers, actors, and collaborators over the years who have helped me develop this transformative piece of work.

  • tell the story

    A while back, I wrote a play. I was in conversations with a theater company about producing this play when the world shut down. A lot of things happened after that. You know what I’m talking about. Now, theaters wants to produce plays with a message, plays that say something…

  • don’t dream it, be it…

    For three years in college, I played Brad Majors in an annual production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The production, mounted in a seedy bar on the edge of campus, featured full-scale musical numbers and played host to a slew of University of Dayton-specific callbacks, Easter eggs, and references.…

  • head down. mouth shut. (or “discretion if the better part of valor”)

    I’ve never liked how I worded number three on my list of rules to live by. When taken by itself, the phrase “head down, mouth shut” seems to imply looking the other way in the face of atrocity (much like the German baker in Band of Brothers, who claims not…

  • finding the medium

    I’m currently working on a novel high school kids in revolt and a play about comic book writers building a universe–two different stories with different characters, engaging with completely different worlds. A friend asked this week, “how do you determine which stories are books, which ones are plays, and which…

  • be findable

    Over two years ago now, I hosted a reading of a play. For obvious reasons, that play never went into production. I spent two years twiddling my thumbs, telling myself my play would get produced “as soon as all this ended,” and taking solace in the wisdom of George S.…

  • for moments of catastrophic failure

    I’ve been working on a new play for the last year or so. This past weekend, I assembled a cast of actors to sit and read the script for the first time. It was awful. While the feedback I received was invaluable, the consensus from those in the room was…

  • lessons from Mike Nichols

    I finally finished reading Mark Harris’s biography, Mike Nichols: A Life. A few takeaways: “I passionately believe that in art, certainly in theater, there are only two questions…The first question is: ‘What is this, really, when it happens in life?’ not what is the accepted convention…but what is it really…

  • we wear the mask

    It’s both chilling and appropriate that Facebook announced its name change and shift in business the week of Halloween. ‘Tis the season for all the mischief that accompanies wearing a mask. And Facebook has always been in the business of mask-making. It’s fair to say that most of us on…