Black Theatre

PhD candidate Daphnie Sicre writes about her experience presenting at the Black Theatre Conference.

Geoffrey Kershner, AD of the resident theatre company at Sweet Briar College, considers the complicated intersection of art and our racial history and the responsibility of the artist.

Sydney Chatman is the creator and director of The Tofu Chitlin’ Circuit, a community and youth ensemble training collective based in Chicago’s South Side. Before creating TCC, Chatman worked on productions from Chicago to Broadway, while also teaching at the University of Chicago Charter School. When students she once taught as kindergarteners came to her as teens and said, “Can you train and teach me?” she said, “Yes.”

Rebecca Stevens interviews playwright-poet Marcus Gardley on his impacts on the national performing arts community. 

In his autobiography, Amiri Baraka, born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934, describes a stunned moment of self-discovery after reading a poem in the New Yorker. Baraka, then a 22-year-old aspiring poet, is confronted with a vast gulf between his reality and the sentiments and aesthetics of the poem, not to mention that of the New Yorker itself.

Before I was a mother, I was a mini-revolutionary. I say was, because I currently feel as if my politics are lost in a world of Elmo and potty-training... That is another story for another post, but after the loss of such a great writer in early January, I have been trying to form the most appropriate words to honor a man whose work encouraged my own in the theater and a man who later encouraged me personally, Amiri Baraka.

Amiri Baraka’s work taught me that as an artist you could be brash, political, irreverent, and even obnoxious if you liked. Baraka’s words could take the audience by the throat, pour gasoline down their gullet, and laugh while striking a match. "Dutchman" is raw, violent, earth shattering, controversial, and politically arresting.

The following is a conversation with playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury for the Boston production of "We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915" which is a current co-production between Company One and ArtsEmerson.

Patrick Maley examines the 2013 readings of August Wilson's American Century Cycle, presented by The Greene Space at WNYC and WQXR in New York.

Michael Moore talks about finding the spirit of Free Southern Theatre in Junebug Productions, and his awaking of the urgency found in the community for socially activated theater.  

Desi P. Shelton looks at how she ending back at home in Camden, NJ challenged her to start her own theatre company to illuminate the experiences around her.

Keith Josef Adkins recounts the verdict of Mark Zimmerman's trial, discussing how New Black Fest commissioned playwrights across the country to write ten-minute plays addressing race and privilege.