Recent Essays

Amiri Baraka’s work taught me that as an artist you could be brash, political, irreverent, and even obnoxious if you liked. Baraka’s words could take the audience by the throat, pour gasoline down their gullet, and laugh while striking a match. "Dutchman" is raw, violent, earth shattering, controversial, and politically arresting.

By showing that Othello has similar content to her poetry, and Emilia bears multiple resemblances to Amelia Bassano herself, "Writing Othello" makes the case that the "dark lady" had a hand in crafting this play. It translates academic research into practical performance on stage.

This week's conversation topic is "Raising a Family While in the Arts" and will be moderated by Garlia Cornelia @garliacornelia on Thursday, February 13 on hashtag #newplay at 11am PST – 12pm PST (Vancouver) / 1pm CST – 2pm CST (Austin) / 2pm EST – 3pm EST (New York) / 19:00 GMT – 20:00 GMT (London) / 8pm CET - 9pm CET (Berlin).

In this interview, Director Marianne Weems talk aesthetics, pedagogy, The Builders Association, and her two current plays on tour.

Our US union regulations and laws require us to take breaks of a certain time, at a certain time. But nothing requires us to take *exactly* and *only* 5 minutes every hour or 10 minutes every 90. Why not, as an experiment, give them more? Why not make one break longer, and looser? An ongoing series of reports from rehearsal rooms and interviews with theater people in Poland; how US artists can modify or adapt Polish techniques for their own rehearsal kitchens.

Theater artists (and institutions) in the U.S. today constantly grapple with this messy duality: caught between a belief in this idealized vision of infinite potential to explore anything and everything; and the very real world in which everything tells us we cannot cross boundaries, where divisions in class and race are pervasive, where substantive engagement about divisive issues is hard, scary, and infrequent.

Jonathan Mandell writes about the NYC-based ReGroup Theater, and their exploration of the Group Theatre, founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg

By allowing only a European/Western perspective to lead the artistic presentation of stories about class, race, and gender, are we continuing to allow those narratives to be appropriated, assimilated, or turned into the universal, etc. to the point of irrelevance? Perhaps in the attempt to distill a story to its essence there is a dilution that takes place at the hands of the dominant culture?

In this installation, playwright and artistic dirctor Jamil Khoury reflects on the controversey spurred over the adaptation of The Jungle Book, which opened this summer in Chicago.

To say that someone, anyone, is categorically unable to understand something about the human condition because it isn’t part of their own experience or heredity is ludicrous. It would be the end of art as we know it. And it is as unreasonable to say someone from middle America couldn’t possibly understand the experience of someone from India as it is to say that I, as a contemporary Indian American raised in the States, couldn’t possibly understand and therefore have no right to play the role of Lady Macbeth.