Recent Essays

In Plexus Polaire’s Moby Dick, the line between the performers and the puppets they control sometimes blurs. Lucy Haskell explores the way that the shifting animacy of humans and objects on stage disrupts the audience’s expectations of where life resides.

Al Heartley believes that executive search process should leave an organization better than it was before. This, he writes, is one way to address the fieldwide issues facing theatre leadership. 

Playwright Betty Shamieh advocates for playwrights continuously applying for opportunities even after repeated rejections, and highlights why doing so is especially important for playwrights from marginalized communities.

How would our view of Othello change if we knew he were a Muslim? Abdul-Rehman Malik reflects on this question, which became a central point of exploration for his work on the English Touring Theatre production of Othello.

Ifrah Mansour creates performance art that explores joy and healing while connecting communities. In this essay, she illuminates the connections between her work and her experiences as a Somali American, a refugee, and a Muslim woman.

Nasima Bee discusses the creation of take back my body, which was informed by a series of workshops in which groups of Muslim women connect and share experiences on the topics of belonging, identity, and home.

Asif Majid introduces the Transatlantic Muslim Voices series with an essay that traces histories of oral performance and migration away from oppression that continue to inform experiences of Muslimness in today’s world and theatre landscape.

In the spirit of decentering directors as the sole owners of a production’s concept, Daphnie Sicre proposes a two-day pre-production gathering, or dalliance, for the creative team. The format of this dalliance is inspired by her group’s work at the Latinx Theatre Commons Designer and Director Colaboratorio.

Ten years after writing The Gun Show, playwright Ellen Lewis looks back at the play that tasks an actor with the delivery of a series of gun stories from Lewis’s life—typically with Ellen among the audience. Lewis sits down with Nate Cohen, who worked on the show for several runs that totaled more than one hundred performances, to reflect on the ways the play, its playwright, and the world have changed over ten years of productions.

J Emilio Bencosme-Zayas shares the experience of participating in the Festival del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba as part of Open Channels/Canales Abiertos. In reflecting on the festival, he discusses what Open Channels has achieved so far, and imagines what else could happen in the future.