Category: Interview

• February 28, 2022

  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 […]
• February 5, 2018

  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 […]
• March 23, 2017

  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 […]
• March 13, 2017

  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 […]
• March 11, 2017

  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 […]
• December 14, 2015

  Something is Afoot in DC

  Originally published by HowlRound on October 7, 2015 HowlRound readers and social media revolutionaries may remember an event that occurred in our nation’s capital in February 2014 that became quickly known as the Summit. Convened by Washington Post critic Peter Marks around the issue of gender inequity in theatre, a panel of metro-area artistic directors […]
• March 13, 2014

  “Love Alone” Takes on Malpractice, Grief and Gay Rights

  ‘Tis the season when theaters across the country announce their 2014-2015 seasons. Two plays continue to dominate the boards, just as they did last year: David Ives’ Venus in Fur and Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. These shows played off-Broadway in 2010 and 2012, respectively, both transferred to Broadway and both […]
• March 10, 2014

  Binders Full of Women and People-of-Color Playwrights

  Originally posted at Ms. Magazine At a recent panel on diversity in Southern California theater, several of the artistic directors on the panel trotted out familiar platitudes about their commitment to diversity, their willingness to challenge their audiences with plays about people that don’t look like them and their desire to build a more diverse […]
• March 6, 2014

  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 […]
• March 5, 2014

  Dispatches from LALA Land: Latino Theater in Los Angeles es Muy Bueno

  Originally posted at HowlRound I can’t believe I don’t speak Spanish. I grew up in Texas, but I took German in high school. I lived in Washington Heights for three years, yet I never learned much more than huevos y queso sándwich (though I did like being called mami). Now I live in Southern California, but […]