Recent Essays

Kyle A. Thomas offers a reflective overview of his concerns around pursuing a PhD in theatre.

Allison Vanouse writes about the work of Shen Wei, and the modern semiotics of the lift in dance.

Pearl Cleage writes about color-conscious casting in productions of A Christmas Carol, and the importance of representation during the holidays and beyond.

A. Nora Long examines our culture's fascination with the starving artist, scrambling to make ends meet... and calls for a movement to dismantle our thoughts about how we make a life in the theater.

Ezra LeBank reimagines how theatres at universites should interact with their audiences. 

In my life as a farmer and as a playwright,  there really is a time to plan, to sow, to weed, and a time to reap. Talent is great. But endurance and luck are really what it takes.

Lauren Gunderson offers advice on dealing with threatending situations at talkbacks, and how theaters can better protect their artists during audience engagement.

Damien Atkins, Paul Dunn, and Andrew Kushnir explore gay heritage while questioning whether such a thing can actually exist resulting in a living archive in a play structure.

But what interested me in that scene, besides the actual incredible fact that in a Romanian city somebody had decided to build, in 2011, a wall between “white people” and “gypsies,” was the current Romanian political discourse. And I was interested in whom I was addressing too. I realized that I was speaking, just like the current political discourse, to a middle-class of which I was a part.