U.S. by State

Latinx theatremakers Jorge Piña and Christin Eve Cato sit down for a conversation about their paths through the theatre field and their advice for future generations looking to sustain this work while caring for themselves and each other.

Jan Cohen-Cruz delves into the process of bringing The Most Beautiful Home… Maybe, a multi-city project that aims to use art to influence how people think about housing, to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Through this process, Jan saw how theatre can bring together housing advocates from different walks of life to find their commonalities and collectively imagine a world with equitable housing for all.

Alberto Justiniano and Milta Ortiz, artistic leaders at Teatro del Pueblo and Borderlands Theater, respectively, have to balance organizational leadership and prioritizing their art. They discuss this work and the ways they engage their Latine communities while providing them with avenues to reflect on social justice issues. 

Amelia Parenteau details the devising process of Intramural Theater, sharing how the company creates a safe and supportive container for artists to tap into their wildest expressions and devise theatre that is wacky, surreal, and layered.

When Ty Defoe and Larissa FastHorse’s For the People premiered at the Guthrie Theater this fall, it became the theatre’s first mainstage production by Indigenous authors. Robert Hubbard reviews the play, lauding its comedy, spectacle, and commitment to the Native community of the Twin Cities.

Carl(os) Roa and Rula(s) A. Muñoz share a multi-vocal, non-linear account of their group’s work at the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) Designer and Director Colaboratorio. Through both text and images, they document their group’s explorations of non-hierarchical generative process, as well as the challenges they faced.

Dolissa Medina details her group’s expansive design process at the Latinx Theatre Commons Designer and Director Colaboratorio. Engaging with a variety of spaces and art forms opened the group’s creative floodgates, allowing them to reach new perspectives on their work and their ways of relating to one another.

Macy E. Kunke shares the practical steps she took to cultivate more sustainable stage management practices for a recent production of Men on Boats. By utilizing a variety of digital tools instead of more traditional printed paper methods, the stage management team created only a fraction of typical paper waste and found that their work that was cheaper, simpler, and more collaborative than typical stage management processes.

Mateo Hernandez acknowledges collaboration and artmaking as two distinct processes that inform each other in the theatrical process, an observation rooted in their group’s experience of intentionally reexamining the collaborative process at the Latinx Theatre Commons Director and Designer Colaboratorio.

The Latinx Theatre Commons Designer and Director Colaboratorio gathered dozens of Latinx theatremakers to approach collaboration from a place of inquiry, play, and exploration. Carla Della Gatta writes about this event as an alternate story of what is happening—and what could be happening—in US theatre right now.

David Howse and Ronee Penoi, co-leaders of ArtsEmerson, introduce the Black and Indigenous Futures Series with an essay that discusses their commitment to a shared leadership approach that foregrounds solidarity between Black and Indigenous communities.

After three decades of working together as playwright and director, collaborators and friends Carlyle Brown and Noel Raymond are trying something new: co-creating a theatrical work and performing in it. They sit down to discuss the project’s genesis in their friendship and the research, questions, and experiences that are shaping their generative process.

Maia Novi’s testimonial play Invasive Species tells the story of one Argentinean immigrant’s experience constructing her sense of self in the United States in the face of the limitations on her identity that she encounters in her new home. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas, a Peruvian living in the United States, reviews the production with an eye toward the way that Invasive Species embraces complexity, humanity, power imbalances, and even humor.

Lauren Halvorsen reports on the origins, development, and learnings of the Artistic Caucus, a collaborative initiative between four regional theatres. By employing a racially and geographically diverse collective of freelance artists to identify new work, scout projects, and facilitate relationships on behalf of all four theatres, the Artistic Caucus seeks to disrupt traditional curatorial practices.

Robert Hubbard reviews Larissa FastHorse’s Wicoun, a transformative story of a teen finding power through gender and cultural identity—with the support of some Lakota superheroes.

Genevieve Schroder-Arce discusses her experience attending—and co-creating—Teatro Vivo’s Las Pastorela 2022, which invited audience members to construct the piece and perform it for one another as a way of modeling collaboration among community members.

Genevieve Simon reflects on the process of writing Bloom Bloom Pow, a play that makes space for collective grief by staging small-town chaos against a backdrop of the harmful algal bloom crisis in the Great Lakes region.