Gender

Sam Williams dives into several of the productions at Finland’s Tampere Theatre Festival, which ran between August 5 and 11 and which was curated based on the theme of bravery.

Linda Parris-Bailey and Diane Rodriguez talk about their own leadership transitions and what’s next, gender, race, and economic barriers; documenting work; and more.

Melisa Pereyra talks about how suffering goes hand in hand with being a woman of color actor, how trauma is held in the body, and how audiences react when stories lack grief.

Juan Recondo looks at Luis Alfaro’s reimaging of Euripides’s Medea, in which the title character is a Mexican undocumented immigrant who arrived in New York after facing the horrors of the border.

Michaela Goldhaber, current artistic director of Wry Crips, talks to the founding and early members of the disabled women’s theatre group about their history.

Dave White dives into the programming at this year’s Nová Dráma Festival in Slovakia, where women were front and center.

Amy Steiger reflects on some of the classic acting texts—which are overwhelmingly written by cis white men and use colonialist, binary, and patriarchal language and narratives—and how teachers should be approaching them today.

Professor Christin Essin talks about problematic staging of gendered violence at a production she recently brought her students to and the importance of content warnings and taking care of survivors in theatrical works.

Sharanya shares her thoughts on restaging gendered violence, including how the representation of sexual violence has the power to be scripted and also to script, the importance of de-spectacling violence, and more.

Charlene V. Smith talks about asking hard questions around the interpretation of early modern English classics, Brave Spirits Theatre’s production of The Changeling, and five tips for dealing with sexual assault in art responsibly.

Emer McHugh and Jess R. Pfeffer discuss Hamlet’s nunnery scene, how gendered violence onstage is often about the perpetrator’s character development, problematic assaults on TV, and more.

Rebecca Benzie Fraser uses Her Naked Skin as an example in the exploration of the different decisions made when it comes to staging violence by women and staging violence against women.

Nora J. Williams launches the staging gendered violence series, talks about the importance of creating responsible cultural representations of assault, and introduces the contributors of the series.

Catherine M. Young discusses the recent Broadway production of Oklahoma!, which she believes, despite inclusive casting and adventurous aesthetics, asks audiences to pay more attention to white men than anyone else.

Roxanna Myhrum looks at the history of the iconic puppet show Punch and Judy and Sarah Nolen’s feminist adaptation of it, Judy Save the Day.

Holly L. Derr looks at the history of the Method, where it deviates from Stanislavsky’s System, and the connection between the Method and the behavior called out by #MeToo.

Howard Shalwitz, Karen Houppert, and Yury Urnov reflect on the productions they saw at this year’s Golden Mask Theatre Festival in Moscow, Russia.

Toronto performers Maev Beaty and Bahia Watson discuss being women in theatre, covering everything from the differences between male-led rooms and female-led ones, being a pawn in a director’s work, creating safe environments, and more.