This section collects all HowlRound content that takes the form of an interview between two or more theatremakers. Interested in contributing your own interview? Here are our interview guidelines and best practices!
The Latest
Podcast
Vampires, Cowboys, and Sapphic Camp with 11th Hour Productions
by Nicolas Shannon Savard, Ciara Hannon, Saylor Lake
2 June 2026
Podcast
The Trans History Project: A Cohort of Playwrights and Theatres
by Nicolas Shannon Savard, Bo Frazier
19 May 2026
Podcast
The Trans History Project: Ten Plays in Development
Jordan and Leticia interview actress, performance artist, and cultural worker Danielle Deadwyler and discuss the importance of care in the representation of Black life.
Jordan and Leticia interview Canadian playwright, director, and educator Djanet Sears, hearing about her unique approach to dramaturgy and an in-depth look at Black theatre in Canada.
As part of the LINKAGES: Ukraine program, Ukrainian and US American playwrights come together to discuss their work, methods, worries, and strategies for living and writing in difficult times.
In this episode, Leticia and Jordan interview Whitney White about her journey in theatre, her artistic craft, and the potentials and possibilities of Black theatre.
Host Tjaša Ferme chats with playwright Chisa Hutchinson about her play, Bleeding Class. Chisa was aiming to write a wacky satire about a global pandemic, but then everything came true. She says she’s not clairvoyant, but has always been just a bit before her time!
HowlRound Theatre Commons is committed to amplifying the voices and perspectives of theatremakers around the world. This piece, like everything on our platform, represents the work and views of the author(s) and not those of Emerson College, where HowlRound is based.
Host Tjaša Ferme chats with David Cote and Hai-Ting Chinn about their opera, Meltdown. This is an adventurous episode about arctic expeditions, drilling ice cores, what monodrama really means, and creating unique experiences mixing operatic tragedy with funny ukulele songs about pee bottles.
Host Tjaša Ferme talks to multimedia artist Sister Sylvester about Drinking Brecht/Good Genes, which cautions how simplistic readings of genetics have always led to fascism. Join a label-defying conversation about the absence of authority in theatre and becoming an amateur geneticist to read the DNA on Brecht’s hat.
Playwright Jennifer Barclay co-founded the Not Beckett International Rolling World Premiere Festival, inspired by National New Play Network (NNPN)’s Rolling World Premiere program. She sat down with NNPN executive director Nan Barnett to discuss the inception of the program and how it inspired the new festival.
Creative director and choreographer Brandon Powers takes host Tjaša Ferme on a deep exploration of the merging of extended reality (XR) with theatre. He explains how theatremakers’ knowledge as spatial creatures is exactly what the virtual reality (VR) world is looking for.
Host Tjaša Ferme has a lighthearted chat with director, choreographer, and filmmaker Mary John Frank about the climate, virtual reality (VR) musicals, why VR works better in “one take,” and how and why to make theatre in VR at all.
In their individual and collective artistic practices, Annalisa Dias and Applied Mechanics model more just and accessible futures for theatre. Their MicroCosmos encounter explores immersive theatremaking, collaborative leadership, and a desire to end the obsession with artistic “vision.”
Interdisciplinary artists and producers Jennie Hahn and Sharon Mansur are connecting performance and community through their work in Indigenous-settler relations and Arab American artist communities, respectively. In this MicroCosmos encounter, they consider the practices and experiments at the heart of their work.
Host Tjaša Ferme and media artist Ellen Pearlman discuss Ellen’s projects Language is Leaving Me and Noor: A Brain Opera. They go on a deep, granular dive into the loab: the psychic, unconscious, dark side of artificial intelligence rendering; the future of language depositories; and why all this matters seismically!
Liza Bielby and paris cyan cian are in Detroit and New Orleans, respectively, building the worlds they want to be in. They discuss their work in performance collectives, connections to community, and the places and relationships that undergird their work.
kara lynch and Seema Sueko use their own artistry as a jumping off point for a conversation about methodologies for creation informed by consensus, alternative economies, community organizing, and more.
In this artistic encounter between Sharon Bridgforth and Sharon Day, creative response leads the two artists to parse connections between nature, family, performance, and language.
In this conversation with Kat Mustatea we chat about her project, BodyMouth, that is also a new instrument where a dancer’s movements prompt a speech synthesizer. For an extra twist, we ponder if we could use this instrument to reverse and decode the messages behind Tai Chi or the magical gestures of Carlos Castaneda.
The MicroCosmos project convenes artists who venture into the inner dimensions of artistic practice to be in dialogue and right relation with the outer context in which we live. In this introductory encounter, the project's co-curators surface the micro in their own practice.
Fareeda Pasha wrote The Last Word based on Michael Levin's research on the first robots from living cells. We had a lighthearted conversation about spooky action at a distance in playwriting, equal-opportunity inspiration, and how plays on science can change the world of business, art, and medicine.
In this conversation with director Coral Cohen and sound and video designer Ettie Pin, we discuss the process of making a gamified play, Third Law. Insights from the makers take us through game theory, and how the audience had the unique opportunity to shape the world of the play and the trajectory of the characters.
Monk Parrots recently produced Gates Leonard’s Pearls for Spurs, a new play about a dysfunctional family. The play was inspired by Gates’s own life and directed by her father, Luke. Jennifer Skura Boutell interviews the father-daughter duo about what it was like to work together on the personal, traumatic material in this play.
Theatre Advocay Project (TAP) offers a wealth of tools to create safer and more equitable working conditions for all theatre professionals. Amelia Parenteau discusses the organization with co-founders Caylin Waller and Colette Gregory, who are now TAP’s executive director and director of programs, respectively.
There are so many cool Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) performance artists out there! Since this performance art season only had ten episodes to talk to artists directly, this last episode wraps up the season and goes through a whole bunch of other contemporary artists that hosts Marina Johnson and Nabra Nelson are excited about.
You on the Moors Now was the first foray by Jaclyn Backhaus into committing the improvisations and musings of an ensemble to the page while developing her own style. She joins the cast of the show at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee to talk about the genesis of the play and iterations over time.
