News And Blogs

From Appalachia to Hollywood, drama to comedy, A Play Is a Poem is a cross-country cross-section of American theatrical history. Consisting of five short plays of disparate settings and genres, the fundamental connection these pieces share doesn’t begin onstage. Rather, it all starts with over a decade’s worth of collaboration between playwrigh...

Collaboration, Cast, and Poetry: What Makes a Play?

He’s regularly called a virtuoso, a master of his craft, and even a genius (per the MacArthur Foundation) and a clown prince (by no less than PBS). You’ve seen him in everything from TV shows like CSI and Sesame Street to his Tony Award®-winning stints in plays like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Fool Moon (roles he reprised with Center...

Bill Irwin Makes Beckett Pure Pleasure

Ian Barford—who plays the central character of Wheeler in Linda Vista—told us in a recent interview, “Having done second productions on several occasions, I must say that this one does not feel like a remount. It feels like a new production altogether.”...

Meet the Actors ‘Fearlessly Exploring the Human Condition’ with Tracy Letts

In a 2018 Q&A with Slate, Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts said, I lie in all these interviews.

A Mostly Candid Tracy Letts on His Career Wins and Woes

Ian Barford has originated four roles in Tracy Letts’ canon of plays: Little Charles in August: Osage County (which he continued on Broadway), Ray in Mary Page Marlowe, Mr. Carp in The Minutes, and Wheeler in Linda Vista, which he steps back into at the Taper January 9 – February 17, 2019....

A Q&A with Ian Barford

In a time when anything from personal musings on social media to surreptitiously documented misconduct can be disseminated instantly across the world, we’re no longer surprised to find formerly beloved celebrities in the cross-hairs of hyper-public scandals.

Career Misery Has Company