Recent Essays

The team at HowlRound Theatre Commons reflects on 2023 and looks ahead to 2024.

Amelia Parenteau details the devising process of Intramural Theater, sharing how the company creates a safe and supportive container for artists to tap into their wildest expressions and devise theatre that is wacky, surreal, and layered.

Mask maker Tara Cariaso details her process for creating new masks for Commedia dell’arte, alongside a pedagogy that removes the harmful stereotypes originally embedded in the form and creates space for more actor agency. 

How might neurodivergent adults like to experience theatre? Taking this question as his starting point, Rob Onorato explores an approach to performance that embraces elements of neurodivergence as catalysts for formal innovation.

Amelia Parenteau sits down with Sarah Cameron Sunde, who has translated and directed six of Jon Fosse’s plays, to mark the occasion of Fosse being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Their conversation pays tribute to Sarah and Jon’s longstanding creative relationship, examines the plays’ Norwegian context as it is translated internationally, and uplifts the need for American audiences to see more dramatic work in translation.

Rex Daugherty offers a guide for theatremakers who want to produce theatre in nontraditional spaces, sharing the experiences of Washington, DC’s Solas Nua. 

When Ty Defoe and Larissa FastHorse’s For the People premiered at the Guthrie Theater this fall, it became the theatre’s first mainstage production by Indigenous authors. Robert Hubbard reviews the play, lauding its comedy, spectacle, and commitment to the Native community of the Twin Cities.

When utilized fully, social media can function as a critical extension of work being done onstage. Trevor Boffone pulls from his experience as a content creator and social media manager to share concrete steps that theatremakers and theatre companies can use to leverage the unique potentials of social media. 

Kristin Idaszak reflects on experiencing Theatre Du Polet’s Be Water, My Friend at the Prague Quadrennial. This protest art about Hong Kong’s fight for democracy in 2019, performed in the Czech Republic, crosses cultures, political regimes, and time periods.