Playing With Canons: Explosive New Works from Great Literature by America's Indie Playwrights

by Martin Denton (Editor), Editor

Playing With Canons brings together 18 plays by some of indie theatre s most exciting playwrights into a single volume celebrating the enduring power and spirit of classic literature and drama. These remarkable plays reshape familiar material in challenging, innovative, and unexpected fashion, pushing these timeless works into the 21st century in resoundingly resonant high style.

592 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2006

About the author

For 20 years, from the late 1990s through the mid-2010s, I was executive director of NYTE, a nonprofit organization dedicated to NYC theater, especially the indie theater sector. I ran a popular listings and review website (nytheatre[dot]com) where I reviewed thousands of shows. Our company also published annual anthologies of new plays (the Plays and Playwrights series, which ran for eleven years), along with several other volumes of new plays.

We also created the first regularly scheduled podcast series dedicated to NYC theater. I created and edited Indie Theater Now, a digital platform for discovery of contemporary American drama.

As the initiator and host of two widely attended convocations in 2005 and 2008, I helped define and brand the indie theater movement in New York City. I served on the boards of the League of Independent Theater (of which I was a co-founder) and The Present Company (producer of the New York International Fringe Festival).

Reviews

[Matthew Freeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

My play, Genesis, appears here. It's an interesting collection, a nice big tome of a book, and very old-school in that respect. Give it a read if you want to check out some oddball, downtown flavored work.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buy the book that has my play BALD DIVA!: The Ionesco Parody Your Mother Warned You About