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Does Your Theatre Department Have a Patriarchy Problem?
Originally published by HowlRound on December 17, 2017. A little over a year ago, America elected a president who bragged on tape about committing sexual assault. What a difference a year makes. Today, charges being made against men in entertainment and politics for abusing their colleagues, with a few prominent exceptions, are believed and action is…
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Addressing Environmental Topics in Theatre Using Greenturgy
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed By the imprisoning of unruly wind Within her womb, which, for enlargement striving, Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down Steeples and moss-grown towers.—Henry IV Part 1 III.i.25-31 Originally published by HowlRound on…
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Ethnodrama and Her Opponent: The Drama in the Data
Originally published on HowlRound on May 26, 2017 Johnny Saldaña, author and Professor Emeritus of Theatre in the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts’ School of Film, Dance, and Theatre at Arizona State University (ASU), began his plenary speech on the second day of the NYU Steinhardt Program in Educational Theatre’s Forum on Ethnodrama by asking…
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Gender-Flipped Debate Shows That Sexism Influenced the Election
In the aftermath of the presidential election, economist and political science professor Maria Guadalupe of INSEAD wondered, like so many people, whether Clinton would have lost if she were man and whether Trump could have won had he been a woman. Hypothesizing that in a gender-flipped race, Clinton would have come out the winner, she…
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Truthful Intelligence: A Play about Power and Politics
Originally published by HowlRound on February 24, 2017. Exactly eight days after Donald Trump was elected president, Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth”—defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”—as 2016’s international word of the year, citing a 2000 percent…
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PINK FLAG: WHAT MESSAGE DO “PUSSY HATS” REALLY SEND?
Originally published by Bitch Media on January 17, 2017 a The fast-approaching Women’s March on Washington is shaping up to be a massive event, with 130 organizational partners, from the Arab American Association of New York to the Feminist Majority Foundation to V-Day, as well as more than 150,000 individuals signed up on Facebook…
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Roe and the American Revolutions Cycle at OSF: Dramatic, Present, and Human
Originally published on HowlRound on September 10, 2016 The original idea behind Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle was to commission a new play for every American president. But when Artistic Director Bill Rauch brought in his longtime colleague from Cornerstone Theatre Company, Alison Carey, to direct the program, she steered…
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Feminist Theatre: What Does it Do and How Does it Do it?
Originally published on HowlRound on September 14, 2016 It’s a fascinating time to be a feminist in the theatre. Thanks to The Kilroys, The Count, and women like Sumru Erkut and Ineke Ceder, we’ve made incredible progress in raising awareness of the lack of equity for women in our field. Actual change has been slower…
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A Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, Part 10: Torture Porn TV
WARNING: This review spoils everything. When what film critic David Edelstein called “torture porn” became a trend in 2004 and 2005, its relationship to the growing awareness that the US had become a country that tortures was clear. On screen representations of people being tortured by evil but human monsters served as a means of…
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Further Thoughts on Creating a Productive Class-Rehearsal Room
By virtue of the fact that, at many colleges, students can earn credit by being in theater productions, academia has cultivated a strange, liminal space that is both a classroom and a rehearsal room. I’ve been hired a number of times to direct students in a production, teaching them as I go what is expected of…
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Holly L. Derr 