Black Theatre

Using three different plays—M. Butterfly, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart, and QPH—playwright Massi Monfiletto examines theatre’s revolutionary potential.

Todd London celebrates playwright Carlyle Brown, who recently won the William Inge Theater Festival’s award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater.

Founder and executive artistic director of Dallas’s Bishop Arts Theatre Center Teresa Coleman Wash looks at the realities of running a theatre company as a woman of color.

Artistic Director Shawn Whitsell talks about the importance of Nashville, Tennessee's black theatre community.

Gab Cody reflects on the birth of The Monologue Project, an initiative that started in Pittsburgh, USA and Dallas, USA to increase the canon of audition-length monologues for women of African Descent.

Jonathan Mandell looks at several current plays that depict violence by or against African Americans, including LeKethia Dalcoe's A Small Oak Tree Runs Red, Gabriel Jason Dean's Terminus, and Althea Harris's Is God Is.

Alex Ates looks at how the Free Southern Theater established a model of artmaking and activism in the South in the '60s and considers how the New South is primed for another generation of civic action artmaking. 

Lydia K. Valentine looks at Hands Up, a series of monologues that address the killing of unarmed black men by police.

Erin Washington highlights Black women who are doing extraordinary work, and encourages others to leave shout-outs in the comments.

In this installment, scholar-artist Dominique C. Hill interviews Omi Osun Joni L. Jones about the Theatrical Jazz aesthetic, and how it intersects with academic theatre.

Sola Bamishigbin and Tia-Simone Gardner look at plays by Lorraine Hansberry and Lynn Nottage with intersecting themes, written at different times in US history.