Recent Essays

Nataki Garrett reflects on the May Day activation that kicked off the Doris Duke Foundation’s Creative Labor, Creative Conditions campaign. She shares how the day highlighted the essential labor of artists and poses the question: what do artists need in order to do that essential labor?

How do you expose a country’s most shameful moments on stage in a way that excites the audience, instead of alienating them? Handan Salta and Ionuţ Caras explore that while discussing 9 Shames and other scandalous scenes from Romania’s recent past, which Ionuţ directed for the Lucian Blaga National Theatre festival. 

In October 2025, eighteen artists gathered in Maine for a weekend of sharing artistic practice as part of the MicroCosmos project. JD Stokely reflects on the embodied learnings of the convening, what it meant to come together at a crossroads, and how this was only the beginning of what’s to come. 

Zora Howard’s Hang Time demands a deep contemplation of empathy. Ciaran Short discusses the way the play’s warping and flattening of time creates space to explore Black men’s capacity for gentleness, intimacy, and the mundane—even when forced into a suspended state. 

How can a director decenter themselves while still fulfilling the role of “director”? Kimberly Senior found an answer to this question in Facilitative Leadership, a practice of redistributing power that transformed her recent rehearsal process. 

The 2025 Divine Comedy festival theme was “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Representing the Center for International Theatre Development, John Vreeke attended and concluded that while barbarians were present in the disruptive plays, there were also beautiful moments of human connection and empathy. 

This month’s diarist is in rehearsals for a theatre for young audiences (TYA) show and prepping for her next freelance project. The busy work week doesn’t stop her from enjoying a winter festival with her family or hosting a fourteen-person holiday. 

On 12 April 2026, Hungarians voted by overwhelming majority to end authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s reign. Todd London celebrates the theatre kids who helped make that happen and offers ten things we can learn from the 2020 protest movement at the University of Theater and Film Arts (SZFE).

Martine Dennewald highlights the many artists retrieving ideas from the past to embed them in their artistic practices. She poses ideas that arts programmers need to be carrying forward into the future.   

Daniel Alexander Jones draws evidence from the archive as an offering to our current crossroads, sharing insights about story as a means of connection and a matter of consciousness.