Recent Essays

Carmen Salvador shares about Fundación Quien Cuenta Eres Tú’s Children’s Participative Theatre program in Chile and the way they used Playback Theatre to facilitate a space for under-resourced children’s creativity and reflection on their experiences.   

Lane Michael Stanley offers a toolkit of questions to consider for those who seek to have a community-embedded artistic practice, based on his own experience in recovery housing and his time developing plays with unhoused people.

Kristin Idaszak shares about Dolores Díaz’s new play Black Sunday that connects the environmental racism during the 1935 Dust Bowl to contemporary migration crises in Chicago.

In another installment of A Lover’s Guide to American Playwrights, Todd London celebrates the work of Migdalia Cruz, a writer whose plays have been deemed “impossible.” 

Playwright and performer Liam Monaghan details the process behind writing Strange/Familiar, his autofictional play on the themes of adoption and queer belonging. He explores the way contemporary autofictions hold up a mirror to ourselves and our world, reflecting both uncertainty and meaning.

Robert Duffley, dramaturg for the We Hear You—A Climate Archive series, details the process of creating 77 Messages to the Future, an offering that amplifies and preserves youth perspectives on the climate emergency from around the world. He shares how this work counters dominant media narratives that exclude the voices of youth and illustrate the climate crisis as something yet to come.

In Plexus Polaire’s Moby Dick, the line between the performers and the puppets they control sometimes blurs. Lucy Haskell explores the way that the shifting animacy of humans and objects on stage disrupts the audience’s expectations of where life resides.

Al Heartley believes that executive search process should leave an organization better than it was before. This, he writes, is one way to address the fieldwide issues facing theatre leadership. 

Playwright Betty Shamieh advocates for playwrights continuously applying for opportunities even after repeated rejections, and highlights why doing so is especially important for playwrights from marginalized communities.

How would our view of Othello change if we knew he were a Muslim? Abdul-Rehman Malik reflects on this question, which became a central point of exploration for his work on the English Touring Theatre production of Othello.