Greetings from Alison Carey, director of American Revolutions.
Over the next ten years, American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle will create up to 37 new plays sprung from a moment of change, inspiration or conflict in United States history. We are at a time of great change as a nation, and have a lot of choices to make about the future. We hope these plays will ask questions and inspire conversations that will help light the way to our best directions.
We just announced our first round of commissions on June 13th, 2008. You can read the press release here, or listen to the press announcement here.
But even before we roll out our first ideas, we’d love to know what you think. What moments in history should we examine? What are the most pressing questions we face as a country that a history-based play might ask?
Please send your thoughts to alisonc@osfashland.org. Please forgive us if we don’t answer right back—things are pretty busy here. But we promise everything you send will get read and a version of it saved as a reference for the artists and historians who will be creating the plays.
And if you’re wondering "Why 37?" it’s because one of our inspirations for the project was Shakespeare’s own cycle of history plays. Of course, he only wrote ten histories, and that didn’t seem like enough plays to capture what we hope to capture. So 37 is a salute to his full canon of plays, and even led us to consider naming the cycle "37 Plays About the Comedy, Tragedy and Romance of United States History." (But we didn’t...)
Coming soon: information on our plan for a Chautauqua 150 in 2009!
Listen to an interview with Alison Carey
Find out more about Alison Carey