Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2025 i American Theatre

Upon the bridge between past and present, between languages spoken and unspoken, stands the enduring Festival d’Avignon, a famed gathering of theatremakers from around the world in a stunning medieval French town. Apart from marking its 79th birthday, this year’s edition (July 5-26) promises to strike a particular chord with theatremakers seeking both survival and celebration, according to a statement by festival director Tiago Rodrigues. While “essential values are today threatened” in the global political landscape, Rodrigues writes, the Festival d’Avignon “has always been at the crossroads of celebration, the public’s encounter with the performing arts, and civic engagement.” Across the 22 days, the fest will host more than 300 events, including shows, lectures, debates, readings, and screenings, at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Palais des Papes, the fest’s permanent…

In third grade, Stefanie Lau’s class received an assignment to map Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Wandering around a block, they jotted down alley names and sketched landmarks. “Of course, everyone’s maps looked different,” chuckled Lau, who now serves as Artists at Play’s co-producing artistic leader. “Everyone had a different scale.” Free-flowing creativity grounded in community is at the heart of Artists at Play’s inaugural playwriting group, “The Neighborhood Project,” which has commissioned four playwrights to write plays based on current or historic Asian diasporic enclaves in L.A. County. Each artist is paired with a community partner and encouraged to build relationships as they write their plays. “Part of our vision is spending time in those neighborhoods, visiting different businesses, or spending time with folks who live and work in the neighborhood,”…

WHAT IS TU PRIMERA MEMORIA DE TEATRO? The first musical I saw live fue Singin’ in the Rain en la Ciudad de México con seis años. Fui con mi papá y con mi mamá, quienes son los pilares de porque me dedico al teatro. I said, “That’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.” WHAT SURPRISED YOU MOST ABOUT NUEVA YORK? When I moved here, it was a big cultural shock. I used to hug and kiss everyone, and everyone was like, “What is she doing?” At the beginning, I was like, “I’m gonna stop.” But then I went, “No, that’s just who I am.” I’m not going to put my roots aside in order to succeed. It took me a minute to step into my…

the Tenderloin grew my eyebrowsDjibouti taught me all the languages I’d forgetThe Mission had the best food, burritos & big macsBayview, Hunter’s Point on Progress Street.A house in DireMy akkoo used to sell injera in the market.Birthed 7 hearts. One survived.My uma worked in a coffee factory. No inglizii, justpure grit. Moving on up to the hillsideMy shoulders were always tense. I write.Our hands have always been our superpower.Them make things. I met Jehovah in the Bay. Allah in Duluth.My great great great grands know him as Waaqa.Indigenous spiritualityPagan when it meant civilian, dwellerNot what it means now.In Waaqeffannaa, blackness is purity. God is most pure.And then the goddess Atete. I know nothing but her name.Could we be kin?We’ve both lost our skin. Healing comes with doro wat, marakka luukku.Our…

No weekend this spring was the same for actor Markell W. Williams. Headlining the Out of Hand Theater production of Amina McIntyre’s How to Make a Home could mean a Friday night in the Atlanta suburb of Snellville, 50 minutes in another direction in Marietta on a Saturday, and then a Buckhead synagogue gig on a Sunday. With the company’s Shows in Homes programs, venues are literally never the same during a run. The annual Shows in Homes, now in its 13th season, has been designed to not only showcase meaningful theatre but to create dialogue and, hopefully, some kind of change. An original oneact play, featuring one performer playing all roles, is centerstage, mostly in houses, preceded by a cocktail party and followed by a talkback. This year’s play,…

For two weeks in August 1960, young Black demonstrators held peaceful sit-ins at the lunch counters of stores in Jacksonville, Florida. They were refused service, ignored by staff, and taunted by white counter-protesters until, on Aug. 27, 1960, members of the Jacksonville NAACP Youth Council were violently attacked. Armed with baseball bats and axe handles, over 200 white rioters chased and beat Black Jacksonville residents during what came to be known as “Ax Handle Saturday.” As the 65th anniversary of this horrific event nears, Stage Aurora Theatrical Company founder and executive director Darryl Reuben Hall is fusing his oral history-based script with music and improv to create The Sit-In Experience (Aug. 24-28). Through this immersive reenactment, audiences will be invited to the lunch counter at a vintage Woolworth’s department store.…

WHAT ORIGINALLY GOT YOU INTERESTED IN SCENIC DESIGN? The dioramas in the Natural History Museum that my father took me to as a child. WHEN YOU FIRST SIT DOWN WITH A NEW SCRIPT AND NEW PROJECT, WHERE DO YOU START? ARE THERE CERTAIN THINGS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR? On my first read, I really try not to think about how the script will become a production. I try to be sensitive to the mood of the piece and trust my intuition. I love research, so I will dive into historical, geographical, contextual primary research. Even if the design ends up somewhere abstract, it’s important for me to start the process grounded in the real world. I think of myself as a detective, trying to figure out the clues to solve the…

NOTE Deniz (the writer/director) is onstage and asks the actors to take turns playing her throughout the piece. She gives them notes in real time, creating a live commentary on identity stereotypes and how the cast perceives her. DENIZ (NARRATOR) Everybody is fleeing. Protestors are being shot. The economy is collapsing. Theatre artists are on strike. They don’t want to accept the mandatory hijab for their actresses onstage anymore—and that means they can’t stage anything. Hope and motivation are lost. People are looking for a window to jump out of. I want to do something. I want to engage my theatre friends and motivate them to keep working. I came up with an idea: shadow puppets. I’d ask artists in Iran to design them, then showcase their work in New…

PRODUCTION HISTORY Amm(i)gone is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Kelly Strayhorn Theater in partnership with The Theater Offensive and NPN/VAN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). Amm(i)gone was developed as a Hatch Arts Collective Project. Amm(i)gone is also supported by the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @the Frontier; the Point Foundation’s Andrew A. Isen Internship; The Heinz Endowments’ Small Arts Initiative; Opportunity Fund; PNC Charitable Trust; Andrew W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation; Arts, Equity, Reimagined Fund; Dreams of Hope; and Workhorse Collaborative. Amm(i)gone was first produced at Kelly Strayhorn Theater in 2022. It was then produced…

What goes into the recipe for a new play? For Dhaba on Devon Avenue, now in its belated premiere in a co-production by Chicago’s Writers Theatre and TimeLine Theatre (through July 27), playwright Madhuri Shekar stirred in a helping of immigrant history, a dash of Chekhov, a pair of local actors she wanted to write for—and a to-die-for saag grilled cheese sandwich a friend once made for her. “I was like, ‘What the fuck, this is amazing!’” recalled Shekar, whose plays include Queen, House of Joy, and A Nice Indian Boy (now also a film). That moment of culinary rapture is recreated in Dhaba when Rita, a young South Asian American woman who works in her family-owned restaurant, offers this off-menu delicacy to her business consultant sister, Sindhu, who’s on…

“Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own,” Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert once said. “But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live.” That’s the place playwright Ken Weitzman wants to take audiences for The Happiness Gym, now in the midst of a National New Play Network rolling world premiere that began in April at Theatre Lab, the resident company of Florida Atlantic University, and next appears at Dallas’s Kitchen Dog Theatre in August. Billed as “a theatrical exercise in well-being,” the show builds on the work of the “positive psychology movement”—i.e., folks who have been studying happiness since the late 1990s. After decades of research into misery and the idea of “getting back to zero on the emotional number line,” as Weitzman…

NOTE In Martyna Majok’s play Queens (which premiered as queens at Lincoln Center Theater in 2018, and which is slated for a Manhattan Theatre Club production this fall in a newly rewritten version), two generations of immigrant women pass through the same illegal basement apartment over two decades and debate among themselves how to launch a new life in America. In 2017, a young Ukrainian woman, Inna, shows up looking for the mother who abandoned her years ago, launching the memories of current landlord and former basement resident Renia, who abandoned her own young daughter in Poland. This scene takes place the first week Renia arrived at the basement, in December 2001, after she just received some devastating news from back home in a language her roommates Pelagiya and Aamani…