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Performing the Peace
Police and Former Prisoners Use Playback Theatre to Build Trust in their Community. Originally published by Southern Theatre Magazine Fall 2021. At a time when George Floyd has become a household name and police-community relations are strained across the country, a program in Memphis called Performing the Peace – which uses theatre to bridge the…
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Forget the Times: Stream This Feminist Playwright’s New Work Now
Originally published by Ms. Magazine on March 22, 2021 Editor’s note: Lauren Gunderson’s new play The Catatrophist (now streaming) is a one-person show about her husband, a virologist. A major publication recently ran a scathing review of the play. The review was perceived to be sexist by many in the theater industry. While this piece intentionally does not link…
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Using Critical Fabulation in History-Based Playwriting
Originally published by HowlRound on March 3, 2021 When the pandemic hit last March, the University of Memphis, as with most theatres and universities, went online for the rest of the semester, and our spring musical—one week into rehearsal—was canceled. Our chair, feeling deeply the loss to our students, wanted to provide them with a…
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The Art and Craft of Intimacy Direction
Originally published on HowlRound on January 30, 2020. In case you haven’t noticed, we are experiencing a revolution in the way artists and entertainers rehearse and perform intimacy. The seeds were planted at least ten years ago, when a few highly trained movement specialists started noticing that they were often called upon to handle scenes…
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The Ms. Q&A: Why Holland Taylor Wanted to Act Like Ann Richards
Originally published by Ms. Magazine on September 16, 2019. I’ve always looked forward to being old enough to play Ann Richards in a one-woman show—so imagine what happened when I saw that Holland Taylor’s Ann was on Broadway HD and running at Arena Stage, with Jayne Atkinson in the starring role. I was eager to talk to…
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#MeToo and the Method
Originally published by HowlRound on June 13, 2019. #MeToo has raised many questions about what kinds of intimacy are created in rehearsal rooms and classrooms, and to what end. As I’ve listened to the stories of survivors, I’ve been struck by the fact that the abusers in these cases, mostly men, weren’t doing anything that…
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Storytelling for Social Change: Inside the #HealMeToo Festival
Originally published by Ms. Magazine on April 15, 2019. Hope Singsen had done very little producing before she began putting together The #HealMeToo Festival, which just wrapped in New York City. She started with a plan to find a space to produce Skin, her solo show about the road and obstacles to healing and reclaiming intimacy after…
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#MeToo Power, Complicity, and Collective Responsibility
Originally published on HowlRound on April 11, 2018. My #metoo theatre story is from high school. Our theatre department consisted of five women and whatever hapless guys we could convince to come play a part so that we weren’t limited to just doing Steel Magnolias over and over. The women referred to our teacher as the Dirty…
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Manahatta’s Gender Flip: Equity in Action
Originally published by HowlRound on April 2, 2018. As an advocate for creating equity in the American theatre through consciously changing whom we choose to represent on stage, I am often told, “but that would interfere with the creative process.” The playwright’s vision, some argue, would be compromised by any effort to pursue casting quotas.…
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A Feminist Retelling of Sovereignty
Originally published by Ms. Magazine Blog on January 10, 2018 As a student at Tulane Law School, activist, writer and lawyer Mary Kathryn Nagle once persuaded her Critical Race Theory professor to let her write a play as her final paper that was based on Worcester v. Georgia, an 1832 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that tribal…
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Holly L. Derr 