Recent Essays

Alice Stanley Jr. writes about an event she attended, responding to the suspension of an Arizona high school drama teacher that included Albee's who in his curriculum.

ArtsEmerson Artisitic Director David Dower questions the competitive culture of theatre and advocates for a commitment to truth seeking and resource sharing.

Founder Rick Dildine tells the story of Shake38, a city-wide Shakespeare interpretation and performance festival.

Jonathan Mandell overviews five eclectic works by Texas playwright Kirk Lynn.

Sara Guerrero shares the process and successes behind South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project, a bilingual theatre project to gather and tell the stories of the Santa Ana Latino community.

Playwrights Julie Marie Myatt and José Cruz González discuss South Coast Repertory's Dialogue/Diálogos project, which features the stories of more than 700 residents of the Santa Ana community.

This week's conversation topic is "How do you translate theater into other languages and into other cultures?" and will be moderated by Playwrights Foundation @pwfoundation—who like all of our moderators, authors, and content producers—self-selected to peer-produce on this commons-based platform! This hour-long Howl will take place on Thursday, April 24 on hashtag #newplay at 11am PDT (San Francisco) / 1pm CDT (Austin) / 2pm EDT (Toronto) / 18:00 GMT / 7pm BST (London).

Kelly Miller offers insight on how the South Coast Repertory has supported and engaged with playwrights to develop compelling theatre in Orange County. 

The neglect of playwriting as a genre in what I’ll lovingly call the creative writing industrial machine—poetry, fiction, and non-fiction/memoir are the ruling three—hasn’t escaped conference organizers. They actively encourage pitches for playwriting panels, which are typically in short supply. This year, this poet and part-time playwriting instructor made a point of attending as many theater-related panels as possible. It was an incredibly heartening experience, mainly due to the emphasis placed on the benefits of incorporating playwriting into creative writing and literature classrooms.

We cannot be preoccupied before or during a show with differences of race, class, sexuality, etc., and assume because of these differences the lives of those we see before us are foreign territory. When we do that, we rob ourselves of what might be a beautiful and transformative experience if only we give it a chance. Instead we should keep an open mind and find the human connecting points. When we do that, we’ll find that deep down, we are more alike than we are different.