Recent Essays

Donny Repsher argues that racial justice needs a new inclusion paradigm and offers a proposal for predominantly white arts institutions and their white leadership to reflect on this historic opportunity to finally pursue real and lasting change.

HowlRound Theatre Commons shares their thoughts around the 2020 election in the United States.

Ramona Rose King shares learnings from five years of working on the National Playwright Residency Program (NPRP) and argues that if we want to reinvigorate our art form and come back from this lull with vibrant, groundbreaking work, we need to invest in the artists who are making it.

Amanda L. Andrei discusses learning Romanian—her father’s native tongue—for her play Lena Passes By and shares methodology for dealing with translations, identifies unique issues of heritage language learners who are also writers, and reflects on the pain of being separated from language.

Jeff Bouthiette notes that the pandemic has provided an opportunity to reevaluate and rethink everything about the way theatre is created in America, argues that this work has to include fat people, and offers suggestions for a way forward.

Susan Booth, artistic director of Atlanta’s the Alliance Theatre, talks about how we are currently living in what is referred to as “the carnival” and shares ideas of how artistic organizations ought to react during this time.

Jack Reuler, artistic director of Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre, reflects on how the pandemic might just be the great equalizer in the American theatre and how it’s time for theatre to move from being something nice to being something necessary.

Tamilla Woodard, co–artistic director of Working Theater in New York, talks about why she makes theatre and offers several “what if” thoughts about how the field should move forward.

Earlier this year, Mark Valdez, hungering for public discourse around the future of the American theatre field, prompted three arts leaders with the question, “What is our purpose now?” This piece kicks off the series of responses.