Recent Essays

Bertie Ferdman reviews Mallory Catlett's adaption of Uncle Vanya featuring actors in their sixties and seventies.

In this installment of the Disability in Theatre series, Kevin Becerra interviews Adina Tal, Founder and Artisitc Director of  Nalaga’at Center in Tel Aviv, on her production of Not by Bread Alone. 

The Wheelock Family Theatre, Boston was started by four people: Andrea Genser, Susan Kosoff, Jane Staab, and Tony Hancock. The mission of the theatre was to make a professional theater that would be accessible to everyone, with a multicultural cast, with black, yellow, white, green people. When you start defining people by color, just pull in green and blue and orange, like the Muppets. We just want to widen our embrace. The priority was to be affordable, but from the start, we would always have a show that was interpreted. That was in 1981, and we worked with a lot of people to make that happen. Audio description started around 1990 at Imagination Stage, and Wheelock Family Theatre was drawn to it, as we wanted to cast a wider net, and include blind people.

Bess Rowen interviews Christopher Andrew Loar of the New York Neo-Futurists, creator/director of The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill.

Not only is the portrayal of disability by a non-disabled actor equivalent to blackface—what we in the disability community derisively call “cripping up” (pretending to have a disability)—universally accepted as a technical skill tucked away in an actor’s bag of tricks, it is always applauded and more often than not, rewarded. 16 percent of Academy Award winners have received the coveted statue for playing a character with a disability; just two of those winners were disabled actors. If you think this phenomenon exists only in Hollywood, consider the 2013-14 New York theater season.

The Weekly Howl is a peer produced, open access discussion about theater culture and contemporary performance that happens in real-time on Twitter using the hashtag #newplay.* This week's conversation topic is "How Do Theatremakers Find Collaborators" and will be moderated by Ray Nelson @justraynelson—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 10 on hashtag #newplay at 11am PDT (Vancouver) / 1pm CDT (Austin) / 2pm EDT (New York) / 18:00 GMT / 7pm BST (London). On Thursday, get heard in the conversation by searching for #newplay in Twitter (sort by “all”) and by putting “#newplay” somewhere in your messages. Spread the word!

Ariel Baker-Gibbs sheds light on the accessibility of theatre to a deaf audience.

HowlRound is working with playwright residency sites around the country to track the impact of what it means to have a playwright on staff. At each of the fourteen theaters we have a Commons Producer—a theater practitioner from the local community working with the theater and the playwright to tell the story of each residency and make the learning from this experiment accessible as it's happening. Periodically we will post these residency updates on HowlRound in the hopes that it will be useful to field-wide learning on the question of what it means to employ playwrights inside of theaters.

Over the course of my freelance directing and teaching career, I have observed a troubling trend. The professional actors I direct, and the undergraduates I teach, are having an increasingly difficult time remembering their lines. Some, alarmingly so. When I encountered this initially, I sloughed it off as something particular to that actor, style of material, or time constraints. I made lots of excuses. But with each occurrence, over many years, actors’ inability to memorize has become harder and harder to ignore.

Jonathan Mandell looks at reocurring devices and techniques of spectacle in Broadway productions.