Recent Essays

At this historic moment in which it is still quite dangerous to be a black man in the United States, Native Son offers an important provocation. For all the world has changed since 1939, the production asks us to take a good hard look at what has not.

In addition to new works by Belarusian playwrights, writers as far-flung as Europe and the United States, Australia and New Zealand, ended up making excellent contributions. The Belarusian Dream Theater project linked playwrights with more than a dozen independent presenting groups in Europe and North America, who donated their time and talents to assemble the collaborators necessary to present as many of the twenty-five new plays as each group wanted.

Professor Jorge Huerta gives a short overview about the precedents that led to the historic and revolutionizing event, focusing on the growth of Chicano/a theatre festivals since 1970. 

Lou Harry offers insight on balancing the careers of a playwright and arts journalist. 

Yet after reading about staged readings and their role in play development, I hit a roadblock. I couldn’t come up with a definition that addressed every possible scenario. More vexingly, I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate concrete meanings for words like “minimal” and “basic” that are often used when discussing staged reading elements. Despite the many points of agreement found when looking at various discussions, there are too many differences in definition to develop a clear picture of what exactly a staged reading is or how it should look.

The Carnaval endeavors to increase the visibility of work by Latina/o playwrights and to encourage the production of that work in the nation’s theaters. The event will include eight readings of new work representing the four geographical regions of the United States; three pieces by master Latina/o directors devised with DePaul Theatre School students; and conversations between producers and the Latina/o theatermaking community.

With no assistance from outside their group, several student performance groups devise their own work as a solution to the posted problem. The problem is a mix of text and images arranged on a page. The text and graphic elements are precise, and often not obviously meaningful beyond their ordinary appearance, but after a close read the details of the page may be seen as suggestive toward a response, provocation, or a call for investigation. This is what students must solve through performance.

Over the past seven years, the Post Natyam Collective’s creative practice has transitioned from in-person collaboration to web-based collaboration. Often our process is deeply informed by scholarly engagement, including feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and subaltern histories of Indian classical dance forms. Collective members often develop promising seeds from our shared processes into diverse products: dance-for-camera pieces, art installations, lecture-demonstrations, performance works, and scholarly papers.

Emma Wiseman writes about the YOLO! Productions revival of John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.

The painful step, though, is realizing that to exorcise those demons is to perhaps challenge the very notion of an identity. Perhaps the solution is to do away with trying to consistently define ourselves as Latina/o theater, and merely say we are Latinas/os or Latin Americans who make work.