Recent Essays

"California: The Tempest" is performing in ten communities around the state. Ten is a lot of towns: ten unique environments, climates, venues, population demographics, and ten previous relationships with the company. Cornerstone is inherently responsive to the unique needs of the communities we collaborate with; even though we know how some things will go, we are always adjusting.

Many Polish theaters seek to explore Poland's diverse heritage or to connect with other cultures in Europe, but lack immediate access to a large multiethnic pool of actors. Despite the obstacle of recent history, many contemporary Polish theaters present and honor different forms of diversity onstage.

It was clear from the first gathering on September 30, 2013 that this was not going to be your typical playwriting class. It was not about process, but ontology. It was specifically designed to demystify the writing process by encouraging everyone’s personal creativity.

"All Our Tragic," adapted and directed by Sean Graney and produced by The Hypocrites at the Den Theatre in Chicago, features all thirty-two surviving Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides compiled into a single twelve-hour epic. It includes seven intermissions of varying lengths and a vegan feast of Mediterranean food is served throughout. The result is rather like a contemporary version of a Dionysian festival.

Producer Jane Jung offers compelling insight on the history and necessity of Asian American Theatre as a form of activism and expression to combat exotification and other-ing.

I was inspired to believe in the power of the arts to mobilize people and sway emotions and opinions and build community in ways that petitions and protests couldn’t. I decided that I could use my skills to pro-actively organize through and for the arts, and became an intern at the Painted Bride and have been with Asian Arts Initiative since then as it has grown into an independent multi-disciplinary community arts center.

Home is not a shared skin tone, language, religion, location, orientation, or political sensibility, though those all play a small role. It’s a sense of history, of being known thoroughly, not just for who you are, but for who you were and who you will be; not just the good, but also the occasionally ugly. It’s the place where people want the best for me, even as I sometimes drive them crazy. It’s the place where I'm not thinking about you or about me, but about us, the house, the whole thing.

Brighde Mullins writes about Andrei Belgrader's production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, and then zooms out to discuss the sucess of Beckett's work in post-Katrina New Orleans and San Quentin prison.

In this installment, Mike Lew discusses the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the fraught practice of yellow face, and what equity for people of color actually looks like.

Victor Maog examines the efforts of Asian American theatremakers to create spaces and push out meaningful narratives.