Recent Essays

Plant Man is a performative forest: a full-body suit filled with living plants, created and inhabited by Marco Guagnelli. He writes about the ways this performance-based artistic research project explores embodied relationships with nature through plant-filled garments and performative actions.

The solo dance theatre piece LOAM adopts the balance, duration, and repetition of soil. Cara Hagan details the research questions and generative processes that she used to shape LOAM—and her own life.

The 2025 Theatre in the Age of Climate Change series explores solo performances that take on ecological issues. Curator Chantal Bilodeau introduces the series by using her own play, No More Harveys, to ask: how can we use theatre to hold the entire world in one body?

Mei Ann Teo reflects on Ping Chong’s departure from Ping Chong and Company, how the artistic leadership team continues to move forward, and how the questions they asked themselves can apply to theatremakers widely.

In January, hundreds of global arts leaders convened to strategize for a stronger performing arts field. Ashley Malafronte reports on this event, the 2025 Under the Radar Symposium, where participants spoke of funding challenges, politically-fueled decay, and—a bright spot—the centrality and partnership and legacy.

Four productions at the Kosovo Albania Theatre Showcase 2024 used the relationship between audience and performance space to tell stories of betrayal, corruption, loss, and large-scale disregard for life. verity healey considers the impact of these spaces on audience reception.

In this conversation from the 2024 American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference, multihyphenate artists Annalisa Dias and Madeline Sayet came together for a conversation on the conference’s themes of ecology, decomposition, and creation.

In 2023, StageSource shut down, which was a great loss to the Boston theatre community. Kitty Drexel highlights the various resources that have popped up in its wake to fill the gap.

In Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, a mumps outbreak draws private school parents into heated debates about vaccination requirements. Dr. Nisha Sajnani, co-director of the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, positions the play as a much-needed salve to one of the most polarizing public health issues of our time.

Josephine Lee discusses the casting and performance choices of the 2024 Gypsy revival—from Audra McDonald’s Rose to a Chinese waitress in yellowface—to consider what they signal about the complex histories of racial performance that continue to influence theatre today.