Recent Essays

After three decades of working together as playwright and director, collaborators and friends Carlyle Brown and Noel Raymond are trying something new: co-creating a theatrical work and performing in it. They sit down to discuss the project’s genesis in their friendship and the research, questions, and experiences that are shaping their generative process.

Eseovwe Emakunu and Dennis U. Obire, co-founders of the Shanty Theatre, chronicle their work in the Adagbabiri Community in Bayelsa State, which is one of the most educationally deprived states in Nigeria. Using a theatre for development model, the group worked with local children to create a performance that demonstrated the importance of education in the social development of a community and nation.

Maia Novi’s testimonial play Invasive Species tells the story of one Argentinean immigrant’s experience constructing her sense of self in the United States in the face of the limitations on her identity that she encounters in her new home. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas, a Peruvian living in the United States, reviews the production with an eye toward the way that Invasive Species embraces complexity, humanity, power imbalances, and even humor.

What does it mean to teach acting at the college level? Gregory Jones and Adrianne Krstansky discuss the changing environment of university acting training, from students’ desires for purposeful and justice-oriented education to university expectations of market-driven “deliverables” from classes in the arts.

After Russian courts found that Svetlana Petriychuk’s documentary theatre piece Finist the Brave Falcon “justified terrorism” due to its feminist aims, Petriychuk and director Zhenya Berkovich were jailed. Viktor Vilisov discusses the production, clarifying the production’s aims to amplify the experiences of Russian women whose attempts to flea Russian patriarchy has landed them in oppressive marriages to Syrian ISIS fighters.

Through a combination of testimony and reenactment, Milo Rau’s Hate Radio stages a broadcast from a notorious media operation that spread racist propaganda during the Rwandan genocide. Joseph Dunne-Howrie discusses the way that Rau’s work, when produced in 2023, reveals a contemporary parallel in the rightwing radicalization that is facilitated by networks like Fox News and GB News.

Amelia Parenteau chronicles the process of translating Eva Doumbia’s Autophagies from French to English and producing its tour in the United States, a project that unfolded across four years.

Lauren Halvorsen reports on the origins, development, and learnings of the Artistic Caucus, a collaborative initiative between four regional theatres. By employing a racially and geographically diverse collective of freelance artists to identify new work, scout projects, and facilitate relationships on behalf of all four theatres, the Artistic Caucus seeks to disrupt traditional curatorial practices.

Robert Hubbard reviews Larissa FastHorse’s Wicoun, a transformative story of a teen finding power through gender and cultural identity—with the support of some Lakota superheroes.