Recent Essays

I had become exhausted from fighting the trafficking fights... The result has been policies that do more harm than good, and wide scale media misrepresentations of the problem. Those of us doing the actual on the ground fieldwork—talking to survivors, working with people who have experienced the harrowing challenges of exploitation—have been writing against the wave.

In About Face Youth Theatre’s rehearsal space, there is a cluster of post-it notes on the wall titled “Where I Started.” The ensemble’s first impressions range from “not being satisfied” to “ready to just do something” to “oblivion.” These notes relate to the process of AFYT’s current play, Checking Boxes.

In his essay, Josh Sobel investigates interactive theatre.

There is a prevailing sense that the millennial avant-garde is not creating political, activist theatre to the same extent as the avant-garde of the ’60s and ’70s. I don’t think this is true. But I do think that the challenge has changed.

I have been terrified to even put down the word 幽玄. I had to ask Google to write these characters for me. According to Google Translate, yugen means “subtle and profound.” Looking at the unfamiliar characters, I would have guessed “ghostly.” For the first time in decades, I looked for the Japanese dictionary that I brought with me when I left Japan alone at age sixteen.

Our modern military and Shakespeare's plays are both infused with honor—a powerful tool in recruiting and building camaraderie. But what exactly is honor?

The three-year occupation of Teatro Valle in Rome is now legendary: a spontaneous response to the failures of conventional government in supporting a venerated public theater, and the conversion of the theater into a commons by countless ordinary citizens. Now the mayor of Rome is threatening to end the occupation, evict the commoners, and privatize the management of the facility.

Allison Vanouse writes about Sleeping Weazel's 2014 festival of plays, trans cabaret, and solo performance coinciding with Boston Pride Week.

In this installment, Maya Malan-Gonzalez details her experience attending the 2014 TCG Conference as a millenial and coming to terms with her mixed racial identity.