Aesthetics

Elizabeth Doud addresses the emergency of climate change and the need for a poetics to shift consciousness.

The author on three musicals that have opened on Broadway this season, all descended from movie musicals that the MGM movie studio made in the Technicolor era. 

Chantal Bilodeau kicks off the series Theatre in the Age of Climate Change with an account of her trip to the Canadian Arctic and how that changed how she wanted to write plays.

Jody Christopherson shares the piece she has been devising about Clove Galilee—what it was like for her to grow up around Mabou Mines, and the legacy of women generating work.

Lighting designer Megan Reilly outlines the process of designing for production with twelve possible iterations.

Emma Weisberg considers the complexities of language and summarizes conversations with fourteen women playwrights discussing the question “How do you define gender parity?”

Romanian playwright Peca Ştefan discusses a project to research and engage with residents to tell the stories of towns throughout Romania.

Cecilia Copeland explores what her play R Culture brought up for her as a playwright, as well as what a play about “rape culture” means for her community at large.

Scholar and theater practitioner Erin Mee, considers how by giving time-space to the sensoria, immersive, and interactive productions are inherently rasic.

There is a sense that this piece somehow transcends theatre even as it embodies it—or, as Hamilton puts it: “This is not a moment, it’s a movement.”

Martha Steketee speaks with playwright Sean Cunningham about Here’s Hoover! The Historic Herbert Hoover 2014 Comeback Special, which recently concluded a brief run in New York City. Herbert Hoover’s return, replete with leather, works like gangbusters.

Dreams on the open sea are part of a larger narrative as Natasha Lee Martin, an actress, director, and teacher, performs in Confessions of a Synesthetic Sailor at TheaterLab in New York City.

Ty Defoe explores what his many identities make him, what it is to be two-spirit, and the kind of art it has inspired him to make.

MJ Kaufman begins a new blog series, exploring questions of gender and parity in the world of performance. In this installment, he looks at how transpeople talk.

David Copelin, self-identified member of the “cottontop demographic,” considers how his privilege might affect his artistic choices and his responsibility to that privilege.

Avant-garde performer and director Paul Zimet offers a brief overview of his role in Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and his forty-year history with Talking Band.

Jonathan Mandell looks at the questions raised by stage-to-screen adaptations, and wonders what theatre can learn from these successes.

Could the theater offer to both theater artists and theatergoers a kind of substitute for the awe they felt as children towards a religion that they no longer can as readily accept intellectually or morally?

What conditions make life unlivable? Kate Kremer explores this question looking at performances by Forced Entertainment and Tehching Hsieh, ranging from six hours to one year.

Carol Kearns writes about Zoetrope: Part 1, a drama set in 1951 Puerto Rico, looking at its multimedia aesthetic, bilingual presentation, and political themes.

In his essay, Director Evan Caccioppoli explores the future of sex in American theatre.

Shakespearean Actor Samuel Taylor shares his insight on how to make Shakespeare theatre more attractive to a contemporary and millennial audience.

The 2014 Latinx Theatre Commons Second National Convening at Los Angeles Theatre Center's Encuentro 2014 runs November 6-9, 2014 and is open to all theatermakers, artists, scholars, administrators, and advocates with an interest in Latina/o theater (or the New American Theater). If you plan to come to any Convening events, please RSVP here no later than November 1, 2014.