Recent Essays

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The Divine Comedy Theatre Festival in Kraków, Poland explored the theme of “Polish Taboo” across its thirty-two productions this year. Howard Shalwitz, who attended the festival as part of an American delegation of artists building connections between the United States and Poland, shares his experience attending the festival.

Lisa Rafferty sits down with Ukrainian documentary storyteller Alem Kent to discuss Kent’s Our Response Ability and upcoming work with ProEnglish Theatre. Through documentary and verbatim theatre practices, these productions detail experiences of Ukrainians living under siege and working as war persists around them.

Theatre artist Michael Rohd shares a lyrical call for more civic imagination, community care, and care-centric processes in the theatre field.

Gregory Moomjy and Marianna Mott Newirth share their approach to creating disability-affirmative opera productions in which disability artistry flourishes.

Theatre researcher and journalist Eduardo Campos Lima discusses Grupo Tapa’s production of Papa Highirte and explores the history of the powerful play.

Daphnie Sicre discusses the way that Latinidad, Blackness, and queerness intersect in “Marimacha,” comedic coming out story about an AfroPanamanian family on their way to a wedding.

Theatremaker and advocate Ronee Penoi shares her inspired keynote speech from the Public Theater’s 2023 Under the Radar Professional Symposium.

The International Presenting Now convening brought a collective of US-based presenters of international work together in physical space in January 2023, following almost three years of virtual conversations and events. Janice Paran details the conversations that arose around the convening’s key question: how might international presenters want to work differently?