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#Ferguson: They Who Have the Guns Have the Power
Originally published by tcg on August 27, 2014 (Ed. Note: The following blog salon series will focus on how theatre artists are responding to Michael Brown’s death and the oppression, violence, and resistance happening in Ferguson, MO. This series grew out of a series of discussions between Oregon based theatre-makers Claudia Alick, Mica Cole and Massachusetts based theatre-maker Megan Sandberg-Zakian, and myself. If…
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Taking “Don’t Fuck It Up” to Heart
Originally published by The Know Theatre of Cincinnati on July 17, 2014 In preparation for directing Sigrid Gilmer’s Harry & the Thief, I’m reading a book called Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History. In it, the author, Milton C. Sernott, traces the development of Harriet Tubman as American icon by examining primary sources, children’s books (there are…
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Hollywood, Misogyny, and the Jagweed of Isla Vista
I’m staring at a blank screen, trying to figure out how to write about the thing I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I won’t say his name: I won’t give him that. I won’t read his manifesto: I won’t give him that. I won’t watch his video: I won’t give him that. The…
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Two Plays by Women, Two Different Worldviews
When I hear producers say, “Plays by women don’t sell tickets” (and they seem to say that a lot), I always find myself asking, “Which plays by which women?” The classification “plays by women” denotes nothing other than the author’s sex, and any two plays by any two women are as likely to be as…
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Why Television Writing Staffs Lack Diversity
Originally posted at Ms. in the Biz It’s staffing season for television, and many of us are playing close attention to gender and race of writers getting hired. A report from the Writer’s Guild of America revealed that in the 2011-2012 season, female writers made up only 30.5% of TV staffs. Racial minorities fared even worse,…
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The Perils of Directing While Female
In their pieces, “Women Directors: Language Worth Repeating” and “The Revolution Will Be Systemic: A Response to ‘Women Directors‘,”Jess K. Smith and Hannah Hessel Ratner have started an important conversation about the language that directors use in rehearsal and the extent to which it is gendered. As Ratner pointed out, this is a conversation that’s…
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Top Girls is Top Notch Feminist Theater
Few women playwrights have garnered as much praise and generated as much controversy as Caryl Churchill. Her work has been called feminist, post-modern, post-colonial, Marxist, experimental, irritating, innovative, ludicrous and brilliant. She has worked with feminist collectives such as Monstrous Regiment and at establishment institutions such as the Royal Court Theatre, where she was the…
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5 Things I’m Going to Miss About How I Met Your Mother
5. Slap bets, Slapsgiving, and all the other ways we get to see the sexist and manipulative Barney get the shit kicked out of him. 4. The complex narrative structure at the heart of the show: Stories within stories, jokes that continue to pay off season after season, and a complete disruption of the idea…
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The Myth of the American Theater Pipeline
At a recent summit of DC-area artistic directors, Ryan Rilette of Round House Theatre made a reference to the infamous “pipeline” of new talent that runs from New York and London to America’s regional theaters, claiming that there are not enough plays by women in this pipeline for his theater to produce. The idea of…
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Holly L. Derr 