Criticism

Theater J, whose mission is to produce plays that are politically engaged and thought provoking, as well as personal, passionate, and entertaining, could not have selected a better play for the current moment.

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.

Boston is a sports city. It also is an arts city. Allison Vanouse takes a look at the similarities including how both mediums and how they share time and space principles.

Josh Sobel investigates the relationship between critics and Chicago's theatre community.

Daniel Sack continues his reflection on the 2013 Avignon Festival with a look at South African director Brett Bailey's installation-performance on colonial injusticies.

The world has gone dark, and no one will ever watch The Simpsons again. This is where Anne Washburn begins Mr. Burns: a post-electric play.

Chris Garza visits The Visit staged in rural Minnesota, and reflects on how immersive theater invites audiences complicity in a play about mob psychology, vengance, and greed.

Allison Vanouse reviews Lucy Watson's Re-Present Me, a performance art piece meditating on the artist's relationship with the supernatural.

Dani Snyder-Young reviews Janine Nabers' Annie Bosh is Missing at Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

Chris Garza covers the 2013 Minnesota Fringe Festival and reports back on its selection lottery, aesthetics, and discusses some of the 42 performances he saw.

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.

Allison Vanouse writes about DEAD ART STAR at Bathaus, and how social media documentation interacts and intersects with performance art and its goals.

Bertie Ferdman writes about the use of immersion in Roadskill and La Ruta, and how this trend in storytelling can help us create political theater that creates empathy and action.

Byron Woods writes about Vogue Men's Fashions, and the controversial idea that white men are being isolated and alienated from greater society.

Daniel Sack writes through the one-night-only performance of Romeo Catellucci's Schwanengesang D744 at the 2013 Avignon Festival, and how it turned its gaze back on the spectator.

Allison Vanouse examines Shakespeare & Company's start to their history cycle: Richard II. She argues that Shakespeare's history plays work best when they speak to our contemporary concerns.

Andrew Alexander offers tools for appreciating the art and value of live performance while reflecting on gloATL's 2013 public art project, Liquid Culture.

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.

A look into how director Mary Zimmerman brought The Jungle Book, steeped in racial contexts of British Colonization and 1960s America, to today’s conversation of what has and hasn’t changed.

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.

Space 55’s lack of censorship and reminder of the “free-speech” aesthetic of the show promotes a spirit of liberation while providing an insurance policy for the theater company.

Allison Vanousewrites about the premiere production of Adam Roberts' Giver of Light, an opera based on the life of the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi.

Jonathan Mandell writes about the inclusion of off-Broadway theaters in the Regional Theater Tony Award, and why we should end the rhetoric of us vs. New York.