Category: HowlRound
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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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Dismantling Anti-Black Language
originally published by HowlRound on August 27, 2020 Calling all Shakespeare lovers! Have you seen this document: Dismantling Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in Shakespeare? Chicago-based director Lavina Jadhwani, an Asian American theatre artist and educator, created it for other non-Black theatre artists and educators to help us understand how anti-Black language can do harm to Black people.…
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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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#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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#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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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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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…
Holly L. Derr 