California

Holly Derr writes about the Latino Theater Company and their role operating the Los Angeles Theatre Center, presenting multi-cultural work through partnerships with other organizaitons, and engaging local communities.

Lily Janiak reviews the Repurposed Theatre production of Rachel Luann Strayer’s Drowning Ophelia.

Holly L. Derr reports from The Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers's panel on diversity, and examines why diversity is such a huge talking point but still so lacking in action

Holly L. Derr writes about The Antaeus Company and the evolution of their "partner casting" practice, where each role is cast with two actors.

Jay Scheib's adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Platnov titled Platonov, or The Disinherited merges with grunge culture-drugs, sex, and alcohol to take a look at values and viewpoints. 

Acting is a physical function. It starts with the body. The body is the instrument. A theater without actors is not a theater; yet theater without words exists the world over.

Lily Janiak reviews Buried Child at the Magic Theater, and writes about the ways in which living in a world where the nuclear family has imploded sets new stakes for this play about familiar dysfunction.

Holly L. Derr covers Radar L.A. 2013, an interdisciplinary and internationally focused theater festival in Los Angeles theater

According to the LA Stage Alliance, there are about 25 female artistic directors in the greater-Los Angeles area. Though I was initially cheered, that number, it turns out, represents only about 8 percent of Los Angeles' artistic directors.

Holly L. Derr writes about different all-female productions of Shakespeare's plays and how this opens up further opportunities for discussion about gender, relationships, and the timelessness of the stories.

Is ensemble a group of people working together over a long duration? Is it a non-hierarchical organizational structure? A way of being and working together with a shared sense of priorities?

I think about paradoxical needs this experience embodies—for community and solitude; structures and flexibility; stability and change—and the need for all of it, simultaneously, in our lives, our practices, our field.

In the following Around the Teapot series, three writers reflect on “Adventuring Together: Ensembles, Collectives, Laboratories & Networks,” a weekend-long gathering of performance artists and scholars, from across the U.S. and Europe, held in Los Angeles. 

Lily Janiak writes about Terminus at San Francisco's Magic Theatre, and how the tale of a night in Dublin centered around a construction crane, reverberates with the construction boom in the Bay Area.

A look at the idea of killer nerds: cautionary tales twice over.  First, these stories show the consequences of marginalization and then secondly probe the power of advancing technology.

Even though Los Angeles has a fifteen percent Asian population, the question is still up in the air about the representation of these artists and their stories in mainstream media channels. 

Holly L. Derr questions if the Hollywood Fringe Festival’s “open access” producing training is at the expense of diversity considering the inherent privilege in the model of producing.