This is the first time since 1991 that the Public Theater has mounted plays in repertory in the park, and it's a system that affords welcome pleasures.
They went to New York anyway, saved up money from bartending and mounted plays written with impressive speed by Mr. Ahonen, whose current goal is to create two new plays every year.
He mounted plays with enough credibility to draw serious theatregoers, as he appealed to the general public's guilty thrill at seeing stars of a certain pedigree join the footlight parade.
Stoking what seems to be a growing contemporary interest in Classical and Classically inspired art, the Metropolitan Museum has mounted "Playing With Fire: European Terra-Cotta Models, 1740-1840," a show teeming with treasures that the Met cites as the first major museum exhibition devoted to neo-Classical terra-cotta sculpture.
The theater chiefly mounts play revivals, such as its recent production of "The Cherry Orchard" (which was its highest-grossing show ever) and a forthcoming "Midsummer Night's Dream" starring Bebe Neuwirth.
One director, Sir Frank Benson, began by mounting plays in the realistic style of Sir Henry Irving but by 1900 had started to simplify his staging.
At the moment, playwrights and artistic directors seem especially keen to mount plays that deal with political life, and audiences keen to absorb them.
While the board had hired an executive director, Les Edwards, last July, it was unthinkable to mount plays without an artistic director.
SINGAPORE — The theater company W ld Rice has always tried to push the Singapore theater scene's boundaries by mounting plays that tackle — often humorously — themes regarded as sensitive in the local context, such as homosexuality, religion and politics.
Michael Grandage, who won the 2010 Tony Award for best director of a play for "Red," announced on Thursday evening that he would step down as artistic director of Donmar Warehouse in London in late 2011 to concentrate on mounting plays and musicals, like a Broadway revival of "Evita" planned for the spring of 2012.
The company has specialized in mounting plays by edgy, risk-taking writers such as Stephen Adly Guirgis, Brett C. Leonard and many others.
