Criticism

Mrichchakatikam (The Little Clay Cart) is known globally, but it had never been performed in Koodiyattam until this year. Shereen Saif reflects on G. Venu’s adaptation of the classic play, which radically condensed the original and took creative liberties with plot, casting, and tradition.

Since 2020, the BIPOC Critics Lab has trained dozens of emerging critics in craft of criticism. In this reflection on the joy, labor, and creativity that goes into running the program, José Solis surfaces lessons from the lab’s path thus far.

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.

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.

Several characters are played by one performer in I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan. In an analysis that spans from ancient Greece to contemporary Russia, Arseniy Fariatiev argues that the play does the opposite for the director, splitting directorial labor across several production roles.

For almost forty years, Real Women Have Curves has pulled audiences in with its story of Latine women in a sewing factory taking charge of their own destinies. Carlos Morton traces the story’s path from play to film to Broadway musical, affirming the power at its core.

How can a life be organized? What authority should an archive hold? Dani Lamorte explores questions like these that propel B Kleymeyer’s As Others Have Before, an account of a sculptor’s life and the claims the living have on the stories of the dead.

“If your body is a portal, where does it lead?” This question led the creation of Paradise Portals, an immersive performance and dance party featuring Baltimore-area trans and queer artists. Laura Grothaus captures some of these artists’ answers, which span the celebration, transformation, ecology, and even escape.

Parrots at the Pagoda imagines an afterworld where parrots guide Puerto Rican drag performer Johnny Rodriguez through memories of his life. In this journey, Citlali Pizarro writes, the transformation of death and life into memory illuminates a queer Latinx theatricality that celebrates itself against erasure.

Teatru Malta’s 1881 infused immersive theatre with game design, all in a dark, castle-like setting. After witnessing 1881 and other Maltese performances, critic Jonathan Mandell is left questioning the evolving forms and definitions of immersive theatre.

“Add Theater to Taste” was the recent theme of the annual Iloilo Theater Festival in the Philippines. Heritage language learner Amanda L. Andrei shares how the shows used food to explore deeper social issues and how her experience in the audience connected her more deeply to her roots.

Ann Liv Young’s Marie Antoinette at Under the Radar sparked a lot of controversy, namely for its treatment of the performers. Carmi recounts the theatrical experience that was unlike any they’ve had before—which was also true for the performers.

The La MaMa Puppet Festival, which brought three weeks of puppet performances to New York City. The productions, writes Lucy Haskell, moved the material world to help us reconsider our own relationships to the worlds inside and around us.

In Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, a mumps outbreak draws private school parents into heated debates about vaccination requirements. Dr. Nisha Sajnani, co-director of the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, positions the play as a much-needed salve to one of the most polarizing public health issues of our time.

Josephine Lee discusses the casting and performance choices of the 2024 Gypsy revival—from Audra McDonald’s Rose to a Chinese waitress in yellowface—to consider what they signal about the complex histories of racial performance that continue to influence theatre today.

How do you write a union play that doesn’t end in everyone yelling “Strike!”? Abby Schoering explores one answer to this question offered by Gwen Kingston’s Café Utopia, which engaged Notch Theatre’s community-responsive methods, verbatim interludes, and enough juicery puns to keep the laughs coming.

In ProyectoTEATRO’s Cabarex 2: RevoLUZiones, history is funnier, sexier, and messier than a textbook ever could be. Khristián Méndez Aguirre writes about the production’s queer, devised cabaret take on Latinx culture and history.

Ghost Forest grapples with the climate crisis playing out through sea level rise that impacts forests of the Eastern Bay in Maryland. Taylor Leigh Lamb discusses the way the play’s ecological approach extended into new play development process that supported the art, the artists, and the surrounding community.

Citlali Pizarro draws on her own experience working with incarcerated poets, and learnings from the film Sing Sing about Sing Sing Correctional Facility’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, to explore how common narratives about creating theatre in prison fall short, and what theatremakers must understand instead.

Amanda L. Andrei uses an understanding of hapa identity to explore the liminal and voluminous identities at play in David Johann Kim’s Pang Spa—both onstage and off.