Broadway May Be Back, But Who Is It For?
The proliferation of plays by Black creators on the Great White Way is cause for celebration, even as it raises some familiar questions about risk and representation.
All Stories About race
The Familiar and the New: Teaching Black Plays in Jewish High Schools
How a plan to teach ‘Pipeline’ and ‘School Girls’ grew into a curriculum stressing both the plays’ universality and specificity on issues of race, colorism, and inequity.
Racism Shouldn’t Have to Be My Muse
Black trauma demands and deserves creative expression, but our lives are about so much more than tragedy.
Roslyn Ruff: A Cry for ‘Help’
The powerhouse actor has been on a streak of shows about race and the white gaze. Her newest: a theatrical essay by Claudia Rankine.
A Casting Controversy Tangled Up in ‘Blood Knot’
American Players Theatre’s production of Athol Fugard’s play about mixed-race brothers has raised thorny questions about representation.
Agency and Color: A Response to Criticism of ERS’s ‘Measure for Measure’
Given the chance to play Claudio as a black man, neither I nor our production took the racial implications lightly.
Ringside? Let’s Take Down the Ropes
Theatre ought to grow our moral imagination in a time of crisis. How do we get there—and who is ‘we’?
The Ground on Which I Stand
African American theatre is distinct, distinguished, and fully deserving of the kind of funding and respect too often reserved for white culture and institutions.
Breaking ‘Ground’: How the Speech Came to Be and What It Set in Motion
In igniting fierce debates about casting, funding, and racial equity, August Wilson’s 1996 keynote anticipated many of the arguments we’re still having.
The Great Color-Consciousness Raiser
Why reprint a 20-year-old speech? Less to show how far we’ve come (or not) than to marvel at what a great artist still has to say to us now.
