Category: HowlRound
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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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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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Lynn Nottage Talks Research, Collaboration, and the Fracturing of America,
Originally published by Howlround on January 28, 2016 Lynn Nottage’s newest play, Sweat, a co-commission by Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) and Arena Stage, originated in OSF’s American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle. Nottage’s contribution to this ten-year program of commissioning “up to thirty-seven new plays from moments of change in United States history” deals…
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Women’s Voices Theater Festival: A Weekend in the Emerald City
Originally published by HowlRound on November 10, 2015 This piece is a follow up to an earlier preview of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. Read the original piece here. Was it Oz? Well, it took me about as long to recover from my weekend in DC as I imagine it took Dorothy to settle back…
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Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon
Originally published by HowlRound on March 26, 2015 Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, first presented in New York in 1859, bears more than a striking resemblance to its better-known stage sister, George Aiken’s adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which premiered in 1852. Both plays, in their attempts to create sympathy for slaves while also…
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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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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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Dispatches from LALA Land: Double Casting and The Antaeus Company
Originally posted at HowlRound When The Antaeus Company began in 1991, under the auspices of Center Theater Group, the idea was to find a way to maintain a classical theater company within the specific environment of Los Angeles where, for most actors, a living is made through a series of one-day jobs as costars, guest…
Holly L. Derr 