Gender

Director and theatre professor Holly Derr gives advice on how to identify whether your theatre department might be ripe for sexual harrassment, and offers tangible steps for professors to change the culture of their departments.

Adriana Gaviria speaks on how entertainment industry unions and institutions in the US can step up to better advocate for parent artists.

Performer Stephanie Hayes reflects on how motherhood helped her reinvent her relationship to her own creativity.

Continuing the series on parent-artists, Ineke Ceder and Catherine Mueller Melwani discuss how research can play a role in creating a bridge between the parent-artist experiencing isolation and the solutions recommended for equity and parity.

Stage manager Carmelita Becnel reflects on the need to support mothers, women of color, and stage managers as creative collaborators in the rehearsal room.

Devon Berkshire lays out some tangible steps for decision-makers on creating a more family-friendly work environment.

Rachel Spencer Hewitt, PAAL founder, kicks off the parent advocacy in the arts series with an overview of the history of PAAL and a rationale for family-friendly practices in the theatre.

Christine Wright, member of the Northeast Ohio community theatre community, analyzes gender parity in recent Northeast Ohio community theatre seasons.

Thirty years after M. Butterfly opened on Broadway, Jen Gushue interviews playwright David Henry Hwang about the 2017 revival.

Talya Kingston reports on the BIRTH project, a UK-based initiative that features plays about reproductive justice written by an international group of women.

What are female acting students learning in the classroom? Educator and director Katherine McGerr discusses how gender parity in theatre starts in the classroom.

K. Woodzick talks about creating The Non-Binary Monologues Project, and the need for more resources for non-binary theatremakers.

Theatre journalist Jim O’Quinn writes about eighty-three year old Yvonne Bechet, whose life and work inspired a new play about policing and racial justice in her hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Is sexual assault a daring subject for satire? Cassidy Dawn Graves considers Michael Yates Crowley’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B. Matthias and how satire may be the perfect tone to portray the empowerment of the disempowered.

Playwright Lisa Biggs and director Kristin Horton discuss the process of developing After/Life, a new play about the 1967 Rebellion in Detroit, Michigan with Detroit community members.

Following the success of The Wolves, Helen Schultz looks at why are there so few dramas about teenage girls on stage and compiles a short list of plays about teenage girls by women playwrights.

Marci McMahon reflects on how Diane Rodriguez’s The Sweetheart Deal breaks gendered stereotypes about the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. 

Michael Wright discusses how his playwriting residency program WomenWorks is helping tackle the underrepresentation of female playwrights in the US. 

Alej Bustillos, Jr. discusses documenting and translating his lived experience in the field of theatre arts and performance studies by referencing scholars in the field and his own ethnographic scholarship methodologies.

Women musical theatre writers may exist but do they apply for funding opportunities? EllaRose Chary addresses this question and looks at how that information can be used by institutions to create solutions to support emerging musical theatre writers.

Massimo Monfiletto questions the representation of trans women in a commercial theatrical setting.