Recent Essays

Playwright Javaad Alipoor’s trilogy of plays interrogates how technology, global politics, and fracturing identities are changing our world. He reflects on how technological adaptations and new political circumstances of the past decade have changed the context of the work and what the trilogy might be if written today.

The HowlRound team reflects on 2024 and what’s to come in the new year.

Theatre Advocay Project (TAP) offers a wealth of tools to create safer and more equitable working conditions for all theatre professionals. Amelia Parenteau discusses the organization with co-founders Caylin Waller and Colette Gregory, who are now TAP’s executive director and director of programs, respectively.

Philip Arnoult was one of the diplomats of the theatrical profession—those who made it their life’s work not to make the work but to make connections between people who make the work, crossing the invisible boundaries of countries and politics. Reflecting on Philip’s life and legacy, Susan Stroupe asks how we can continue his work. 

The premise of the immensely popular solo show ha ha ha ha ha ha ha is simple: Julia Masli will seriously solve the audience’s problems through comedy. Melissa Lin Sturges discusses the production’s roots in Masli’s clowning background and the collectivist, interventionist energy the production engenders in its audience.

Performing artist and teacher Emily Kitchens highlights the discrimination against fat people within theatre and discusses the need to advocate for fat acceptance by literally expanding our spaces.  

Access for disabled theatre artists within the theatre industry is lacking, and pathways for those in production disciplines to enter the industry are particularly neglected. Alexis Wilner highlights the inaccessibility of common pathways and offers ideas to increase access. 

Citlali Pizarro draws on her own experience working with incarcerated poets, and learnings from the film Sing Sing about Sing Sing Correctional Facility’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, to explore how common narratives about creating theatre in prison fall short, and what theatremakers must understand instead.

How do you insist on hope in the face of crisis? Can Miami restructure itself to avoid climate peril? And what might anti-Zionist Jewish theatre look like? Playwright Talia Rodriguez considers these questions and more in this essay on her play Pitbull’s Party at the End.