Recent Essays

Responding to the From Scarcity to Abundance Convening, Jim Lasko questions the deeper problems of elitism and relevance theatres face today.

Jonathon Moscone, an American theatre director, examines the question of what purpose do theatres serve, and advocates for the abandoning of fear in governing theatrical choices, and the embracement of unease, so that we can create theatre that takes the real time to listen to the current of our lives.

Theresa Rebeck, playwright, interviews Micheal Ritchie, the Artistic director of the Center Theater Group about the delima between programming a theater season for subscibers and programing a theater to attract new audiences.

Hal Brooks interviews playwright Annie Baker about her recent work and playwriting process.

Tracing the family she's created artistically and socially, Virginia Grise writes about art-making as a process of survival, self-actualization, and community building.

The playwright James Still mueses on creativity, the role of the inner and outer creativity, and finding happiness in unlikely places in the journey of creating new work for his keynote adress at the Cohen New Works Festival at the University of Texas at Austin on March 28th, 2011.

Part one of Michael Rohd's look at "How does the work we do impact, intersect with and contribute to a healthy, functional democracy?"

David Dower, the Co- Artistic Director of ArtsEmerson, responds to P. Carl's article about finding one's creative voice in theater with charting how he, Dower, became the "creative" person he is, and how that lead him to dramatugy.

P. Carl narrates his evolution of finding his place in the creative field of theater, and the way the nature and expression of creativity in theatre is tied into the nature of philosophical argument.

Puppetry is the bastard nephew of so-called legitimate theater. Yet puppetry stubbornly persists, even flourishes, in our digital age as an intentionally Luddite approach to an emphatically live art.