As We Are: An Interview with Julia Bullock and Christian Reif
On their work for AMOC*'s upcoming tour of El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered.
Featured Publications
Robert's work as a writer and editor includes pieces for HowlRound, Contemporary Theater Review (Routledge), Breaking Character Magazine (Samuel French), The A.R.T. Guide, The Theater Times, and other publications. This page shows a selection of published writing.
Stories | We Hear You
The following stories were shared digitally between March 2022 and June 2023. We invited young people around the world to share some facet of what it’s like to be alive at this pivotal time in the earth’s long history.
Roadmap for Recovery and Resilience for Theater
An ongoing collaboration between the American Repertory Theater and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, offering strategies and information for theaters seeking to reopen following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Exhibits of Evanescence: Performing Arts Curation Strategies from Kraków’s Theatre Museums
An LED screen in a stairwell of the museum displays an unforgettable picture. A row of Baltic beachgoers lounge in the foreground; shirtless and suntanned, they recline within reach of the advancing surf. Their attention, and ours, is fixed on a figure some yards out at sea. Perched above the waves on a stepladder, arms raised like an uncanny celebrant, stands a man in a tuxedo: he is conducting the waves.
From Man-Jae to Manhattan
Endlings Playwright Celine Song and Director Sammi Cannold share their journeys to this underwater world premiere.
The Edges of Acceptance: Imagining Othello in a Contemporary US Context
A.R.T. Editor and Assistant Dramaturg Robert Duffley spoke with Othello director (and Oregon Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director) Bill Rauch and actor Chris Butler, who plays the title role in the OSF production arriving at the A.R.T. in January.
Faux Feminism: An Interview with Fauxnique
The first cisgender woman to win a major drag (queen) pageant, Fauxnique is a queen among queens. Here, she speaks about the co-evolution of her drag performance and feminist practice.
There Is No Line: Director Jenny Koons on the Politics of Participation
The room is the thing for Burn All Night director Jenny Koons. Grounding her directing work in experience as an educator and organizer, Koons sees rooms—rehearsal rooms, classrooms, and performance venues—as the spaces where we model, and redefine, the social patterns of oppression or liberation.
Ghost and Guest: Staging Hospitality in the 2015-16 Season
In his 1997 work Of Hospitality, Derrida observes that to visit, as either guest or host, is to progress ‘from one difficulty to another.’
Poems Which Will Shatter the Glass: Methodologies for Protest Theatre
How does theater register protest, or organize communities towards action? Through three case studies, this essay charts three key strategies for protest theater: aesthetics as critique, radical encounters, and audience mobilization.
Despite Bomb Threats, "Out of The Blue" Plays On (Internationally)
Out of the Blue, currently playing at Moscow’s Satirikon Theater, is restricted to ages 21 and up. Written by Vladimir Zaytsev, the drama follows a gay teenager’s struggle to come out to his friends and family, and to survive the series of remedies that they prescribe to “fix” him. For audiences in Russia and abroad, the play offers a rare chance to experience the stories of Russia’s LGBTQ youth.
Riots and Risings
Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars premiered in February 1926 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Opening nearly a full decade after the 1916 Easter Rising, the play brought the rebellion’s divisive legacy directly onstage at the new Republic’s national theater.
Ice Fishing: An Interview with Mark Rylance
Two-time Tony Award-winning actor Mark Rylance (Hamlet, The Seagull, Boeing-Boeing, Jerusalem, Richard III, Twelfth Night, Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies) discusses Midwestern winters and the creation of Nice Fish
New Generation of Russian Artists Under Political Pressure
The withdrawal of Moscow municipal funds crucial to the collaboration accompanies rising political pressure on artists here in Russia’s capital. Recent reactionary attention signals the newest new wave of challenges to theaters with a long history of crossing state-sanctioned boundaries of truth.
Report from Moscow: Russian tensions Ice Woolly's Festival of New Radical Theatre
The Russians are not coming. Monday morning, Woolly Mammoth Theatre announced the cancellation of their upcoming festival of work from some of Moscow’s most innovative artists.
