Recent Essays

Ghost Forest grapples with the climate crisis playing out through sea level rise that impacts forests of the Eastern Bay in Maryland. Taylor Leigh Lamb discusses the way the play’s ecological approach extended into new play development process that supported the art, the artists, and the surrounding community.

Georgia Evans is the writer and director of Walls: Chloe’s Story, a Forum Theatre play about people with chronic vulvovaginal pain—something she doesn’t deal with. She discusses how to create a show about other’s intimate stories in a collaborative, trustworthy way.

Appalachia is an often overlooked region within theatrical storytelling. Heather Brooke Eisenhart shares about the many new play development initiatives of Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia and how they address this gap. 

Monk Parrots recently produced Gates Leonard’s Pearls for Spurs, a new play about a dysfunctional family. The play was inspired by Gates’s own life and directed by her father, Luke. Jennifer Skura Boutell interviews the father-daughter duo about what it was like to work together on the personal, traumatic material in this play.

Although theatres depend on front-of-house workers for a smooth audience experience, these employees are often isolated from the rest of the theatre’s staff and subject to mistreatment by patrons. Taylor Hunsberger advocates for organizational changes to promote respect, dignity, and professional development for front of house.

When government agencies establish well-structured frameworks for environmental action, they enable the arts and culture sector to function as a central, active contributor to addressing the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Iphigenia Taxopoulou discusses the growing trend in these cultural policy collaborations paving the way for a sustainable transition.

Alexandria Ramos shares about her experience of Rasgos Asiaticos, a site-specific performance installation. The performance installation shines a light on entangled histories of migration, colonialism, and displacement, and it highlights the forging of a Chinese Mexican identity in the United States-Mexico borderlands.

Sandbox-style immersive theatre productions like Sleep No More and Life and Trust present unique challenges to providing accessibility measures for audience members, but it is possible and necessary to prioritize access in these spaces. Allie Marotta assesses current access practices in these productions and recommends targeted improvements.

As part of Zoukak Theatre’s Letters from the Ground initiative, Sahar Assaf asks theatre leaders who have not spoken out for Palestine a simple question: Why?