Category: Ms. Magazine
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Helen Hunt Runs the Show in Our Town
Cross posted at Ms. The moment she enters, walking quickly, in her masculine work boots and jeans, you know that she is a woman in charge. That’s what a real stage manager is, after all, but in most productions of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Prize winning classic, Our Town, the Stage Manager is an old white man,…
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New Fire from Cherrie Moraga
Cross Posted at Ms. It was said that during times of chaos, this female force came down to earth to put things right again. — Roadwoman, New Fire Before there was intersectionality, there was Cherríe Moraga, playwright and co-editor of the feminist classic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She…
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Destabilizing Gender Through Performance
Part of a a collaboration between The Good Men Project and Role/Reboot on a special series about the End of Gender. Cross Posted at Ms. I am gendered, just not in all the ways you might think. Whatever part of my brain makes me like makeup and sparkly jewelry isn’t going away any more than…
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The Personal is Political, and it Always Has Been
Cross Posted at Ms. What happens when you take the Trojan women out of The Trojan Women? That’s what playwright Jocelyn Clarke has done in his new play Trojan Women (after Euripides), adapted from the Greek playwright Euripides’ 2,400-year-old original. East Coast-based experimental theater group SITI Company is currently performing the Clarke play, directed by…
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Alice Childress’ Trouble in Mind: An African American Classic Finds New Life
Cross-posted at Ms. When The Help premiered earlier this summer, African American feminists bemoaned the lack of civil rights narratives told by the black women who actually lived through the era. Though it probably won’t be a Hollywood blockbuster, a bulwark American theater is about to open a civil rights play written by an African…
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“Porgy and Bess:” Without the Racism and Sexism?
Cross-posted at MsMagazine.com How should artists approach remounting the classics? Should they respect all of the author’s original intentions and stage a version of the show that reflects them perfectly? Or should they attempt to remove the historical residue often attached to pieces that, however conscious the authors may have been of trying to do…
Holly L. Derr 