Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2026 i American Theatre

A friend recently asked me “about the whole fatherhood thing,” in his words. He and his partner were weighing the pros and cons of having children, and he wanted to know how it was working out for me. Apart from sharing my generally upbeat outlook on the subject, one thing I told him was that his asking me about it at all was a kind of answer in itself: If he is considering it seriously enough to ask a dad friend for advice, that is very likely the path he’s headed for. I’ve always felt similarly about the question of training in the arts. Those who seek counsel from veterans or experts on whether to pursue a degree, or some other course of study, instinctively know that they want to…

“I have these little red cards,” says Ignacio, a young immigrant rights activist, near the end of Yosimar Reyes’s new play No llegamos aquí solos, at Teatro Visión in San Jose, California, Feb. 12-22. “They’re ‘Know Your Rights’ cards, but honestly? I think we should make ‘Know Your Neighbors’ cards.” That is Reyes’s play in a nutshell. Fired up by the need to prepare his neighbors in East San Jose’s historic Latine enclave of Mayfair for ICE raids he’s sure are coming any minute, Ignacio learns that there are better ways to resist than to scold and lecture, and that previous generations—including Mama Doña, the grandmother who brought him from Mexico as a child—have much to teach him about solidarity in the face of adversity. “Sometimes you can become so…

I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD BE A PROFESSOR. And I never imagined I would live in Texas. I was born and raised in New Mexico, and—well, we New Mexicans had some opinions about the Texans who came to ski our mountains. For 25 years I lived in New York. I ran American Records (my theatre company), wrote plays, and directed across the country. In 2015 I was invited to Austin to be a guest respondent for student productions at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). The works were part of the Cohen New Works Festival, a biannual week-long festival where audiences can see up to 40 productions, tucked into every nook and cranny of the Theatre and Dance building, featuring work created, curated, and produced by students. On…

“The closing of MFA programs has been very much on my mind, as it has for so many of us in the field,” said KJ SANCHEZ, an associate professor who leads the MFA directing program at the University of Texas at Austin. As she wrote on this subject for this issue (p. 28), one question kept coming back to her during conversations with her colleagues: How do they make the many contributions MFA programs provide to their universities and to the field more visible? “I hope my article is a call to action for all of us to ensure that our future artists and leaders have avenues for training and development, whether that’s in the academy or via apprenticeship,” Sanchez said. “Both are equally valuable. Both need to be made affordable…

A pre-teen is forced into a mother’s role: That’s one way to read Wendy’s arc in the classic J.M. Barrie tales of Peter Pan and the Darling family. And it’s one spin that Harley Brooke Walker, MFA candidate in Puppet Arts at the University of Connecticut, is questioning with the innovative, nonverbal Darling: A Guided Adventure in Dismantling the Patriarchy at Connecticut Repertory Theatre, Feb. 5-15. The production, which serves as Walker’s thesis project, fuses fairy tale, feminism, puppetry, and audience participation. “There’s a lot of patriarchy in the original story,” Walker pointed out. “I wanted to poke at how Wendy is made a mother immediately, how the Lost Boys follow the leader blindly and feel comfortable in their discomfort with Peter, and how Hook stands for a bigger concept…

“We’re losing our public spaces,” said playwright Steve Yockey. His solution: a timebending dark comedy, Bleeding Hearts, which has prompted long debates among audience members after readings all over the country. Now it’s finally getting its world premiere at the Atlanta-based Theatrical Outfit Jan. 28-Feb. 22. What’s getting everyone riled up? The growing disappearance of middle-class Americans. Known for dark comedies (TV shows The Flight Attendant and Dead Boy Detectives, the plays afterlife: a ghost story, very still & hard to see, Blackberry Winter, and Venus, coming to Atlanta’s Actor’s Express in April), Yockey began Bleeding Hearts in 2016. This longer-than-usual gestation has given him time to hone the comedy, watch the play’s themes evolve with the times, and shape “a super clean play,” as he put it. The…

HEN I GRADUATED WITH AN ACTING DEGREE IN 2014, I felt like a rudderless boat. Soon after, I took part in a two-week post-grad boot camp called SpringboardNYC, run by the American Theatre Wing. Designed to help recent theatre grads transition into careers in New York City, the program offered a simple mantra: Stay warm, dry, and fed. This was the foundation of success before diving into creative work, and it took me several months to get there. I couch-surfed at friends’ apartments, and for a month I shared a bunk bed with my toddler cousins in Brooklyn before finally landing a lease. I juggled multiple jobs: stocking shelves at a retail store at the crack of dawn, then running across Manhattan to clock in as a hostess at a…

NETWORKING AND KNOWLEDGE-BUILDING TCG’s Research programs include long-standing studies such as the Salary Survey and Fiscal Survey, as well as responsive snapshot surveys. The National Conference is a biennial gathering of theatre professionals to forge connections, address field-wide issues, and celebrate the theatre of the host community. Theatre for Activism is a series of gatherings to strengthen care, share practices, and forge connections between activists and theatre practitioners. GRANTMAKING AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS THRIVE! Uplifting Theatres of Color provides unrestricted funds for those who have all too often been outside the grantmaking sector’s funding opportunities: Black theatres, Indigenous theatres and Theatres of Color which are closely connected to and have positive impact on their chosen communities. The Rising Leaders of Color Program forms cohorts of exceptionally talented early-career leaders of color…

Theatre education has shaped every chapter of my life, guiding me from childhood stages in Houston to my current role as co-executive director of Theatre Communications Group (TCG). My earliest training began with community theatre classes, where I learned the fundamentals of acting, ensemble play, and creative exploration. Those experiences introduced me to the joy of performance and the discipline required to pursue it seriously. When my family moved to Atlanta, I continued on this path—joining the thespian society, attending Pebblebrook High School’s Cobb County Center for Excellence in the Performing Arts, and participating in the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program, all of which deepened my understanding of storytelling and artistic rigor. Carrying that passion with me to the Theatre School at DePaul University, I received a BFA in acting. DePaul…

UNIVERSITY THEATRE DEPARTMENTS constitute a unique ecosystem within the larger world of American theatre: revolving doors of students with four years (or so) to get their educational needs met, and an (ideally) stable professor population with institutional memory and long-term goals in mind. These are the professors who usually make artistic decisions about season selection, since, like professional theatres everywhere, university theatre departments also program seasons of plays and musicals. Absent a board or an artistic director, how do they make these decisions? And what do their students think about their choices? To find out, we polled over a hundred theatre students at colleges and universities across the country via survey and phone interview. Our first finding: Students are generally enthusiastic about their seasons (61 exclamation points in 113 survey…

PLAYWRIGHT JONATHAN NORTON is sitting at long bench at a table inside a Starbucks in posh West Village, Dallas, when I walk in to meet him. From our email exchanges, I know he’s just finished a meeting for the Dallas Theater Center’s (DTC) production of Noises Off, splitting his time between his roles as interim artistic director and playwright-in-residence. He’s been working double duty like this since artistic director Kevin Moriarty transitioned into the role of executive director in 2024. Norton has been a constant in the Dallas arts scene for nearly as long as I’ve written about it. To me, he first appeared as a breakout talent, someone who seemed to burst onto the theatre scene fully formed, but in fact, he’s been nurturing his writing voice in Dallas…

Playwright Emily Kaczmarek spoke about Soft Target with Tamilla Woodard, a director who serves as chair of the acting school at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. TAMILLA: When I read this play, I was just amazed by your weird, wacky, gorgeous imagination. There’s a kind of childlike audacity with which you write your characters. You can just feel them coming from a place that has no censorship, like it’s coming from this pure-hearted 12-year-old imagination, but through the craft of a writer who has great skill. It’s an unusual combination. EMILY: I take that as a huge compliment. I trace my origins as a writer back to when I was a kid. I was constantly writing stories. When I was maybe 10 or 11, my parents let…