Recent Essays

Zak Berkman offers insight into implementing diversity and inclusion as the Producing Director at People's Light.

What I imagine the greatest impact of the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere was to "End Days" was the buzz, publicity, approval it got before it even started. I do think it's a play with broad appeal, but I can't flatter myself that it would have had over fifty productions world-wide without that kind of launch.

When it was founded in 1969, Free Street Theater (FST) was one of Chicago’s first racially integrated ensembles and since its inception has taken its art and activism to the streets, making theater for, with, and by the people. When I asked about the art they’d like to create, Patches summed it up: “We’re already making it.”

Georgina Escobar writes about traveling from New York to New Mexico to see Cascarones at Teatro Paraguas, and the affirmation this production brought after she waited to see it staged.

I feel fairly confident that if some sort of census was to be taken from the last decade of American theatermaking, counting up the total number of productions by playwrights who are dead versus playwrights who are alive, The Zombies would outnumber those of us with pulses by a large margin. Which sincerely begs to question: Do artistic directors have a bias against playwrights who are alive? Are they “Life-ist?” “Pulse-Phobic?” Do they hate my heartbeat?

Todd London on playwright Kia Cothron on winning the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize from Yale University.

There is so much that we, the new Latina/o playwrights, can learn from those who came before us. And if we as a cultural community are to keep working at diversifying the American stage, we need to be looking behind us as often as looking ahead. Mentorship is about paying it forward.

Marcina Zaccaria looks at The Bolshoi Theatre production of Don Quixote performed at the 2014 Lincoln Center Festival.

I wrote this summer, but all channeled through the Lorca lens. Translating when you are sad, I can say, is a very good thing to do. You can experience wild creativity within very safe margins. It’s Lorca’s play. But I get to stand in his skin, and pretend. I get to leave the sad couch of my mind, and go somewhere else. Lorca is my Virgil.

While "Hortensia's" sibling protagonists remain displaced, frozen in time, their limbo is markedly different than is typical for exiles. The characters share a peculiar “aging disorder;” like Peter Pan, they never grew up. The script calls for actors much younger than the characters they are portraying, a visual metaphor for the exiles’s lost years, to concretize the feeling of subtracted youth. Exile manifests psycho-physiologically, from the mind to the flesh, as displacement is visibly dramatized.