Recent Essays

Theatre departments now face steady, targeted closures and downsizing nationwide. Jacqueline E. Lawton and Rachel Pollock speak to professors impacted by these cuts and lay out actions to preserve theatre education at the university level. 

Through a Wallace Foundation grant, scholars from the Latinx Theatre Commons co-authored a concept paper comprised of histories, strategies, and suggestions for archiving Latine theatre in all its forms and technologies. Carla Della Gatta introduces the paper with an executive summary and highlights from the report.

In the summertime, the city of Berlin is alight with artistic festivals of all kinds. German theatre scholar Thomas Schmidt reflects on some of the theatre festivals of this past summer and posits what makes the Berlin theatre scene so special.

Through experimental dramaturgy that privileged sound over visuals, Neo Muyanga created the Visual Radio Plays project at the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa. In this essay, Tonderai Chiyindiko explores the histories, theories, and personal connections that inspired the project.
 

Carmen Salvador shares about Fundación Quien Cuenta Eres Tú’s Children’s Participative Theatre program in Chile and the way they used Playback Theatre to facilitate a space for under-resourced children’s creativity and reflection on their experiences.   

Lane Michael Stanley offers a toolkit of questions to consider for those who seek to have a community-embedded artistic practice, based on his own experience in recovery housing and his time developing plays with unhoused people.

Kristin Idaszak shares about Dolores Díaz’s new play Black Sunday that connects the environmental racism during the 1935 Dust Bowl to contemporary migration crises in Chicago.

In another installment of A Lover’s Guide to American Playwrights, Todd London celebrates the work of Migdalia Cruz, a writer whose plays have been deemed “impossible.” 

Playwright and performer Liam Monaghan details the process behind writing Strange/Familiar, his autofictional play on the themes of adoption and queer belonging. He explores the way contemporary autofictions hold up a mirror to ourselves and our world, reflecting both uncertainty and meaning.