Recent Essays

Maridee Slater invites theatremakers to think beyond graduate school credentials and gatekeepers to preserve the embodied practices that allow us to see each other and collaborate across difference. Let’s circle up.

The creators of After, There Will Be Flowers want to shift the narratives of intimate partner violence from perpetration to healing. Lizzie Rajchel, the project’s co-creator, describes some of the dramaturgical and practical moves the production made to center healing and care.

Pub theatres bring theatre to communities in the United Kingdom through the combined business model of a performance venue and pub. Sophie Pell, who both makes and watches pub theatre, details the considerable benefits of this performance model.

This is a call for diversity, equity, and inclusion in pit orchestra hiring. Joe LaRocca surfaces inequities embedded in the current contractor system of pit musician hiring, as well as some steps companies can take to remedy these issues.

The Commonweal Theatre Company acts as a model for thriving theatre in a rural setting. Robert Hubbard details the ways the company’s resident ensemble operates, highlighting their artist/administrator doubling, artistic excellence, and embeddedness in the surrounding community.

Since her arrival at a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, Jayme Kilburn has grown its theatre program into a valued local cultural institution. By positioning theatre as a social service, she writes, she has cultivated a community that wants to show up.

In Ryan “Oki” Naka’s hands The Golden Girls are reinvented as “The Golden Gays”: four queer Hawaiians navigating middle age in Waikiki Beach. Through love, friendship, and resistance, Nguyễn Minh Tiến writes, the characters in Ryan Okinaka's The Golden Gays overcome their challenges together.

Xhloe and Natasha made Edinburgh Festival Fringe history with three consecutive award-winning shows, but even the most successful Fringe acts struggle to break even. Jonathan Mandell sits down with the clown duo to discuss the energy, strategy, and effort required to take the world’s largest arts festival by storm.

Lass uns die Welt vergessen: Volksoper 1938 stages Austria’s fascist past, reckoning with the ghosts of Nazism and their legacies. For Jordan Schildcrout, the docudrama-metamusical becomes an opportunity to interrogate Austria’s history—and to imagine the future of the United States.