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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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PINK FLAG: WHAT MESSAGE DO “PUSSY HATS” REALLY SEND?
Originally published by Bitch Media on January 17, 2017 a The fast-approaching Women’s March on Washington is shaping up to be a massive event, with 130 organizational partners, from the Arab American Association of New York to the Feminist Majority Foundation to V-Day, as well as more than 150,000 individuals signed up on Facebook…
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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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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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Further Thoughts on Creating a Productive Class-Rehearsal Room
By virtue of the fact that, at many colleges, students can earn credit by being in theater productions, academia has cultivated a strange, liminal space that is both a classroom and a rehearsal room. I’ve been hired a number of times to direct students in a production, teaching them as I go what is expected of…
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A Safe Space to Be Unsafe
The University of Chicago made news by telling its incoming students not to expect trigger warnings or safe spaces, and not to bother petitioning the administration to disinvite problematic speakers. Responses have varied from “good for them!” to “how authoritarian!” In between sweeping bans on a major component of campus culture and the sweeping fear…
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So Diversity Is Important to You …
I wrote this satirical piece the other night out of frustration with Chicago’s Porchlight Theatre, which is doing In the Heights with white actors playing leading characters of color. Companies like Porchlight have oversimplified what it means to do diversity, believing apparently that saying they “tried” is enough. This is an oversimplification because it is actually complicated, difficult, and…
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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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Holly L. Derr 