• Moe Angeles in Sontag: Reborn.

The Builders Association's new show Sontag: Reborn (in the Under the Radar Festival through January 15), depicts, in a rich polyphonic production, the ways in which the young Susan Sontag attempted to build a regulated self, despite the messy, confounding, nonconformist and indomitable elements within her.

• Photo by TA Smith

How long have you had the theater in Park Slope?
We will soon celebrate the 22nd year in our present location, although we have been based in Park Slope a bit longer, and appeared at BAM in concert with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1983 and 1984.

• Future home of St. Ann's Warehouse at 29 Jay Street.

Back when its plan to take over the Tobacco Warehouse across the street fell through, we assumed that spelled doom for top-shelf experimental performance venue St. Ann's Warehouse's prospects of staying in DUMBO, but happily we were wrong, and yesterday received news that after its current season ends in May to make way for a condo development that will require the razing of its 11-year home at 38 Water Street, St. Ann's will move six blocks east.

• Kevin Spacey reprimanding a noisy spectator with his laser pointer. (Artist's rendering.)

BAM's fall season may be drawing to a dramatic, somewhat morbid close with Krapp's Last Tape and the next-to-penultimate performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, but the winter season will launch with a bang when Kevin Spacey takes the stage next month as the title character in Richard III. Or, rather, with a "zap!" Spacey has been breaking character to reprimand noisy audience members during recent performances of the production, currently running in Sydney, Australia, even shining a laser pointer at some restless spectators.

• Now this fucking guy has his own section?

Here's a horrible idea that's gaining traction with theaters across the country in spite of said horribleness: over the last two years more and more theater companies and producers have been setting aside a number of seats in their performance spaces where rules of appropriate theater behavior are suspended, and audience members are invited to type away on their smart phones during the entire performance. They're called tweet seats, and they're coming to New York.

• Tony Kushner, greeting anti-CUNY board of trustees protesters back in May.

You may recall that Angels in America (and Lincoln!) scribe Tony Kushner had a bit of a run-in with the City University of New York last semester, when the school's board awarded, rescinded and then reinstated an honorary degree for the Pulitzer-winning playwright after one of its members, Jeff Wiesenfeld, accused him of having made anti-Israel comments. Well Kushner appears to have buried the hatchet: yesterday, receiving a $100,000 "Creative Citizenship" Award bestowed by The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, he announced he would donate the entire sum to CUNY, joking: "I thought of calling it The Jeff Wiesenfeld Fellowship."

• Spider-Man wants Tonys.

Exactly eight months after news of her departure from the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark broke, and another eight months from the next Tony Awards ceremony, we learn that the show's co-creator and original director Julie Taymor (and not her replacement Philip William McKinley) is eligible to be nominated in the "Best Direction of a Musical" category despite leaving before the show was rewritten, substantially tweaked and shortened. It still features about 25 percent of her original script, over which she's now suing the musical's producers for unpaid royalties.

On Sunday, October 16th, 4th Street between Second and Third Avenue in Manhattan was named Ellen Stewart Way, and this street naming was the culmination of a block party in honor of the founder of La MaMa, a theater that has presented innovative work for fifty years. Stewart, its founder, La MaMa herself, died on January 13th, 2011, at age 91. She made a point of saving everything, so the La MaMa space on 4th Street now has a large wing devoted to its own history, the costumes, the masks, the programs that made it such a truly living theater. I took the tour of the La MaMa archive with about a dozen people, one of whom was Diane Lane, who had acted at La MaMa.

• The basement of 94 St. Mark's Place will remain a theater.

Back in March news that Under St. Marks, the tiny basement 45-seat theater at 94 St. Mark's Place might be sold, along with the whole building, and consequently cease to be a pillar of the Downtown theater scene caused the resident company Horse Trade Theater Group to launch a capital campaign to raise the $5.75 million to buy the building and ensure the performance space's survival. While that remains the long-term plan, Horse Trade just secured the venue's short-term viability by signing a seven-year lease on the space.