Category: Review
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Forget the Times: Stream This Feminist Playwright’s New Work Now
Originally published by Ms. Magazine on March 22, 2021 Editor’s note: Lauren Gunderson’s new play The Catatrophist (now streaming) is a one-person show about her husband, a virologist. A major publication recently ran a scathing review of the play. The review was perceived to be sexist by many in the theater industry. While this piece intentionally does not link…
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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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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…
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A Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, Part 10: Torture Porn TV
WARNING: This review spoils everything. When what film critic David Edelstein called “torture porn” became a trend in 2004 and 2005, its relationship to the growing awareness that the US had become a country that tortures was clear. On screen representations of people being tortured by evil but human monsters served as a means of…
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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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A Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, Part 9: Be Careful What You Wish For
Originally published by Ms. Magazine on October 30, 2015 Apparently the spirits of Halloween can be quick to respond this time of year, because no sooner did I wish for a Gothic horror-based film that enables its young heroine to save herself and even her family without the help of men, whether dead or alive, than I found…
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Advantageous: Feminist Science Fiction at Its Best
This article was originally published by Ms. Magazine on July 8, 2015. A sighting of that rare bird called feminist science fiction is truly a thing to celebrate. It does exist, sometimes by accident (see Alien), and sometimes on purpose (see almost anything by Octavia Butler). With Advantageous, a film written by Jacqueline Kim and Jennifer Phang,…
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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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A Feminist Light in the Piazza
Originally posted at Ms. Magazine The great Southern writer Elizabeth Spencer wrote her most famous story, “The Light in the Piazza, ” while living abroad. She had left the small town in which she grew up, Carollton, Miss., on a Guggenheim Fellowship for Italy. There she also wrote The Voice at the Back Door, about race…
Holly L. Derr 