American Theatre magazine

17/01/2026

we still have the OG masks if you’re looking 👀

16/01/2026

What shows are you doing or seeing over the weekend?

16/01/2026

Educators, how do you prepare students for adjudicated or competitive settings?

16/01/2026

A new play reading series launched by IndieSpace and Caborca aims to fill healthcare gaps for Equity actors and stage managers who need one more week of work to secure their coverage.

The collaboration aims to fill healthcare gaps for Equity actors and stage managers who need one more week of work to secure their coverage.

16/01/2026

Educators, are there programs or festivals you and your students return to year after year—and why?

16/01/2026

“Depending on the night, it’s an amazing litmus test in that room to see which way the audience is going to tilt—how many Wallys are there and how many Andrés are there. This play can turn you; I’ll be there and think, ‘Oh, tonight, I’m a Wally,’ because there’s just that vibe in the room, or depending on what’s happened in the world.” - Brenda Withers on a new staging of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE

Karin Coonrod explains why ‘King Lear’ is apocalyptic but not bleak, and a new staging of an iconic film returns it to its theatrical roots.

16/01/2026

"There seems to be an obsession in contemporaneous narrative storytelling with THE BACK STORY: drama that spends most of its running time delving into back stories rather than acknowledging the present tense of its figures or characters; in other words, drama where the back story is ALL. (and sorry, everyone, but there are very few playwrights that can pull off Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT or Brian Friel’s FAITH HEALER - both plays that are overtaken by warring and complex layering of back stories). There also seems to be a distrust on the part of viewers and producers too of work that eschews back story as its engine in favor of an unexplained, fluctuating present. It’s as if the lack of a clear and digressive explanation for what we are seeing (the flashback as key device) will somehow mar access to understanding a work. Many a play spends its first act now firmly in back story mode before entering the present tense in the second act. But why not start in the present tense? Why not stay there and NOT give audiences easy keys to characters and situations? What if we are just in it? Or told it? And have to figure it out and/or wrestle with the drama ourselves?

Fornes’ works bridge the known and unknown - that is their power. Her ability, even when interested in the psychological, to maximize the effectiveness of the dramatic, unexpected cut in the frame is what makes so much of her work - and of the magnificent Caryl Churchill’s too - unique and strange.

There’s something to not knowing, to allowing work to be on its own terms, to not have all the answers or to not be able to explain what you are experiencing in a tidy or even untidy manner." - Caridad Svich

theatre in the past

15/01/2026

In this month's awards roundup, The Hermitage Artist Retreat announces a $12 million gift that includes land expansion; United States Artists grants go to 5 theatre artists; and librettists, composers, and playwrights are honored with the Kleban Prize, the National New Play Network's Goldman Prize, and The Farm Theater's College Collaboration Commission.

A roundup of prizes, fellowships, and other recognitions.

15/01/2026

“In the Twin Cities, what I encountered repeatedly was an investment not only in organizations, but in artists themselves—as thinkers, as leaders, as change makers whose work actively shapes how people understand one another and the world they share. It’s not lost on me that Price believed the revolution was there.

When artists are resourced to work deeply and honestly, they do more than produce art. They help communities metabolize history. They surface contradictions. They challenge propaganda. They name patterns before they are officially acknowledged. Over time, they transform culture—not by issuing directives, but by shifting perception.

This is what cities are actually investing in when they invest in the arts: collective sense-making.

ICE’s tactics rely on confusion and fear. They work best where people lack shared language and shared trust. But where artists have been supported to do their work fully—where institutions understand that their role is to back artists rather than constrain them—those tactics are not as effective as they are intended to be. People are less likely to comply in advance as it’s the stated strategy of this administration.

People recognize the pattern.

They recognize one another.

They recognize what is being asked of them.

This is why these intimidation tactics are not as successful—and why escalation follows. When fear does not isolate, power broadens the target. Visibility itself becomes suspect. Identity becomes criminalized. The logic grows less precise but also more revealing.

And yet, even as escalation continues, the response has not collapsed.”

-Nataki Garrett

What happens when the arts are deemed essential?

15/01/2026

“Quarantine’s midday to midnight performance of ‘12 Last Songs’ can’t happen. 10 of the members of our 13 person team don’t have their visas and we still don’t know why. US Citizenship and Immigration Services won’t confirm with us or anyone else why our petition has been paused, perhaps indefinitely. It might well be because two of our party were born in Nigeria and that, despite their British passports, that fact alone put a red flag on the application since Nigeria was recently added to the USA’s 'restricted entry' list. Maybe our documentation is just on an impossibly large pile of applications. Who knows? Nobody will tell us. We’re incredibly frustrated and properly sad to not be able to present this work. We feel like it belongs in New York City.”
-Richard Gregory, artistic director of Quarantine and “12 Last Songs” at Under the Radar, presented with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and Working Theater

12 Last Songs is part live exhibition, part epic performance. It’s about work and how we spend our time. Making a living. Finding your passion. Watching the clock. From midday to midnight on Saturday, January 17, real workers from New York City will perform paid shifts on stage, in front of a live...

15/01/2026

In the winter 2026 print edition, the versatile actor-writer Jacob Ming-Trent talks about his autobiographical solo show, ‘How Shakespeare Saved My Life,’ which plays at 3 theatres this year: Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Folger Theatre, and Red Bull Theater.

The versatile actor-writer talks about his autobiographical solo show, ‘How Shakespeare Saved My Life,’ which plays at 3 theatres this year.

15/01/2026

Vanessa Garcia's report on LAS AVENTURAS DE JUAN PLANCHARD, an exposé of political corruption in Venezuela which ran at Miami New Drama in fall 2023. She wrote in particular about how the rehearsal room and the production helped to release and relieve the unexpressed trauma of Venezuelans who knew that such a show could never be staged in their native country.

In Miami New Drama’s production of Tectonic Theater Project’s ‘Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard,’ Venezuelan artists told a story they couldn’t tell at home.