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This essay examines ways in which aspects of Roman Catholic doxology are represented in Rajiv Joseph’s 2009 Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Although the play is often read from a psychological lens, as a historical text outlining the United States’s invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, or as a poststructural/postcolonial work that emphasizes binarism, anthropomorphism, and abstract issues of religion like eschatology, this essay studies how Joseph explores ideas related to the physical and spiritual works of mercy and other tenets of Roman Catholic doctrine.

Kelvin Dinkins, Jr., formerly the General Manager of Yale Repertory Theater, became A.R.T.s new Executive Director; and Dayron J. Miles was appointed as Associate Artistic Director, having led A.R.T.s community engagement initiatives and having piloted a program in arts organization management for BIPOC participants. The season opened with Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Anna Deavere Smiths collage of interviews taken in the wake of the uprising that followed the acquittal of four white police officers who were accused of violating Rodney King's civil rights. [...]it's just a chronicle of the short, sad life of a famous person, but when the sound and fury are as attractively mounted as they are in this Evita, they're hard to forget.

Through a case study of the creative process on the thirtieth anniversary revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in 2023, this essay argues for centering theories of power in theatre practice as well as scholarship. The limits of mainstream US theatre models manifested in the workings of structural racism and what Gayatri Spivak calls “zones of sanctioned ignorance”—structurally overdetermined blind spots—about race, history, acting theory, and the division of labor in the “creative”/ labor process. Knowledge of cutting-edge “theory,” the continuing critique of our own worldmaking assumptions, and expansive visions of “theory” integrated with “practice” could disrupt mind/body dualism and lead us to reimagine conventional US theatre protocols, opening possibilities for progressive change.

Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy (2008) is more than just a play; it is a social indicator or a documentation of how prejudice adheres to its establishing principles on systemic racism, economic inequality, and social injustice within the American healthcare system. In this vein, Smith recreates documentary theatre accounts to raise awareness of how minorities experience racism, and classism in their quest for decent healthcare. The play unravels the racial and class-based causes of healthcare injustice, and how injustice cycles repeat themselves in the lives of people of color. Smith depersonalizes the various forms of inequities that one may experience in the health sector and makes the readers demand change for the many cases of injustice in the system. This paper shows how the stories in Let Me Down Easy describe the lingering effects of racism on the health of people and offers a call for justice.

In her book Forget Having It All, Amy Westervelt (2018) poignantly sums up the societal pressure a working mother can feel: “We expect women to work like they don’t have children, and raise children as if they don’t work” (p. 14). As a working mother with two young sons, I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. While I aspire to juggle kids, career, and marriage and maintain some semblance of personal identity, I wonder how we got here and how we might meaningfully resist this conditioned, patriarchal, and deeply internalized pressure on mothers. This dissertation project, MatraSpeak, is an arts-based research (ABR) project that explores mothers and how they speak about success and ambition, and how that connects to their personal identity and career choices. This study utilized surveys from 150 mothers, three focus groups, and in-depth interviews from 40 working mothers in the New York area. The interviews have been transcribed, coded, and analyzed through a feminist theory lens and turned into a full-length ethnodrama. MatraSpeak was performed live on November 14th and 21st where I tracked audience responses via post-play survey and analyzed the results connecting to my research questions. The purpose of this project was to achieve a greater understanding of the experiences of working mothers and to demystify and debunk any illusions or misconceptions surrounding the working mother and her choices, if any. This project explored motherhood– our perceptions of it, the ways we talk about it, the expectations placed on and around it– and how our understanding of motherhood has evolved. This work is pioneering in that it brings motherhood studies—a critical yet often underrepresented area of research—into conversation in the arts through verbatim performance. By engaging with the lived experiences of mothers, this project offers fresh insights into themes of identity, success, and ambition as it relates to motherhood.

Costume design intimately interacts with the actor, and is one of the most visual bridges that connects the actor's physical body to their character's. However, traditional theatrical structures can create power imbalances that disconnect the actor from their character, potentially affecting their physical embodiment and character presentation. Actors from marginalized communities who are already less likely to see representation through characters onstage– particularly queer and trans bodies– can have their identities dismissed in the dressing room, making character embodiment challenging to achieve. Through my participation as costume designer in two theatrical productions at UC Santa Cruz, I developed a method of “consent-based design practices,” creating an environment in costuming spaces where actors feel empowered to have agency over their personal identity in relation to their character. I explored the power dynamics and gaps between director-designer-actor, and developed ways to refocus the actor during the costume design and costume construction processes. With this methodology, I aim to center actors’ identities, experiences, and personhood. I argue that these practices improve both the characterization of my designs and the relationship between actor and character to enable a richer visual production. I implement theories from intimacy coordination; consent-based performance practices; and queer, trans, and feminist methodologies to address how to support the care of all bodies, particularly of marginalized identities, onstage through costume.

While current ELA policies cast a shadow over educational practices, this article highlights the twilight of possibility within the darkness, exploring how three early career English teachers navigate these challenges by employing humanizing literacy pedagogies to bring light and positivity back into their classrooms.

In our ever-changing, turbulent social and political climate, issues of race, racism, and representation continue to be a high-profile aspect of society. When scrutinizing US history, taking into consideration the mistreatment communities of color, we must take into account the error of our past and consider how these communities left with indelible ideas of misrepresentation have been affected. When examining our own societal and cultural viewpoints, we must consider the sensibilities experienced by people of color. Though society has made significant strides in the areas of equal rights and equality over the past 50 years with the success of the 1960s civil rights movement, the question of misrepresentation communities of color remains a significant area of concern for the community, even in today's progressive environment. On the evening of November 8, 2019, the opening night of UC Santa Cruz's production of the Dharma-Grace Award-winning script, What in the World?, a play addressing issues of homelessness, poverty, and racism, a protest by students of color took place in which they stormed the theatre and took over the stage. This extreme action led to the cancellation of the remainder of the evening's performance and the subsequent six performances.In light of this event, it is clear that POC concerns of misrepresentation remain prevalent in our student body here at UCSC. To best understand the protest, it is essential to examine the event and to assess the present. In doing so, it is necessary to take a current cultural snapshot of the sensibilities of both the community of students of color, as well as their \"white\" counterparts, which comprise a significant portion of the student body here at UCSC. The use of critical race theory to examine the motives behind this event will inform and possibly justify such an act of extremism, however, may uncover a reality in which our younger generations have succumbed or surrendered to the ideologies of the past rather than create new doctrines of a developing and progressive cultural movement. To test my hypothesis, I will conduct an ethnographic study of members of the UCSC student body, including both students of color and Caucasian participants. By sampling opinions, viewpoints, and value systems of members of our student body, I will provide a current assessment and cultural snapshot, which will aid in understanding the current state of racial concerns in the Theatre Arts Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and provide insight into questions of representation, embodiment, and permission.