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The Origin Story
The BlueForms Theatre Group officially began after Matt Slaybaugh got a good talking to from Anne Bogart in Oxford, Ohio in May of 2002. "Do it or don't do it," she said. And, "It takes a lot of courage." Matt invited a number of his favorite theatre artists and good friends in Columbus and around the country to form a new group that would emphasize working towards new forms of theatre a new ways of creating art. New rhymes with Blue. Columbus got its first view of the BlueForms in their debut holiday presentation of T.S. Eliot's The WasteLand. BFTG presented its postmodern staging of Eliot's "international anthem of emptiness" for one night only at MadLab. The first full-length BFTG production, A/ThePostModernLoveStory, was cited as Best New Work in the 10th Annual Central Ohio Theatre Critics Circle Poll for Seasonal Theatre Acheivement. Jay Weitz, in the Columbus Alive, wrote, "For anyone interested in theatre that's as enlightening as it is entertaining, BlueForms offers some of the most exciting new stuff Columbus has seen in ages." BlueForms continues to offer regular presentations of original works that ask important questions about our culture and society - including The Pursuit of Happiness, and A Lonely Crowd, the first two parts of our How to Stay Human series. In 2004, we produced our first previously-presented plays, beginning with [sic], by Melissa James Gibson, and continuing with Greg Owens' The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild. 2005 brought more exciting developments as BlueForms revisited T.S.Eliot in These Fragments, remixed A/ThePostModernLoveStory for a couple of Fringe Festivals, and continued to do the kind of work that inspired American Theatre magazine to call us one of "the hippest, hottest, and most innovative theatre troupes in the U.S."
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