Robert Duffley

Robert Duffley is a dramaturg, editor, and teacher based between New York and Boston. Recent/upcoming productions include the Broadway revival of 1776 (A.R.T. / Roundabout), Claudia Rankine’s HELP (The Shed), Miranda Rose Hall’s A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (currently touring Europe with original direction by Katie Mitchell), We Hear You — A Climate Archive (Dramaten / Georgetown University / Swedish Embassy DC), LubDub Theatre Co’s The Uncle Geoff Magic Show (Target Margin Theatre Labs), The Lazours’ We Live in Cairo (A.R.T.), and Celine Song’s Endlings (A.R.T.). Publications include The Roadmap for Recovery and Resilience for Theater (Editor) and works for Howlround, Routledge’s Contemporary Theatre Review, and Six By Eight Press. Robert is Editor & Associate Dramaturg at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University, Dramaturg for LubDub Theatre Co, and an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College.

WRITING/EDITORIAL

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.

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.

Art Not Without Ambition

An interview with Macbeth In Stride creator and performer Whitney White.

The Many Histories of Magic

Hocus Pocus was a man. In the seventeenth century, Englishman William Vincent swallowed daggers, pulled ribbons from his mouth, and made objects disappear while chanting incantations. Vincent’s act became a favorite entertainment of James I, earning the conjuror a royal license to perform under his stage name as “the King’s most excellent Hocus Pocus.”

Meanwhile: Becoming Porous | Mientras Tanto: Hacia La Porosidad

Though we were often tempted by earnest solemnity, each discordant reality embodied in our collective urged us to consider the punch line, the satire, and the clown as perhaps more appropriate aesthetic signatures for an imbalanced and hypocritical era.

In Kraków, Good Ghosts and Bad at the 2017 Divine Comedy Festival

In Kraków, Poland, the centuries live together like neighbors. Walking the city center’s warren of medieval alleyways and avenues, a traveler finds temporal juxtapositions ranging from the enticing to the astounding.

Target Margin Theater • 10th June 2021

LubDub Theater Company: Making Magic

Over the last year we’ve been thinking a lot as a company about how, in addition to literal stage magic, we really miss the magic of family and the magic of live theater. So we wanted to try and combine all three of these types of enchantment as a way of celebrating our ability to make a show together again.

A.R.T. • 1st March 2019

From Man-Jae to Manhattan

Endlings Playwright Celine Song and Director Sammi Cannold share their journeys to this underwater world premiere.

SixByEight Press • 25th November 2016

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.

A.R.T. Guide • 30th December 2015

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

SixByEight Press • 28th June 2018

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.

A.R.T. • 17th December 2018

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.

13th September 2018

Enhancing the Good: An Interview with Summer L. Williams

The Associate Artistic Director of Company One Theatre and the director of Wig Out! (at OBERON April 26 - May 13, 2018), Summer L. Williams reflects here on the show’s creative process and the role of cultural spaces in celebrating and sustaining intersectional identities.

Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge) • 24th December 2016

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.’

SixByEight Press • 25th August 2017

The Borders Beyond the Wall: Performing Mexican-American Relations

You walk up to a tall cardboard wall. Large quotes welcome your gaze. “I don’t know how this happened,” one of them says. You can see pictures of a desert divided by a large metal fence.

DC Theatre Scene • 23rd April 2014

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.

The Theatre Times • 22nd October 2016

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.

A.R.T. Guide • 22nd August 2016

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.

A.R.T. Guide • 29th June 2018

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.

13th September 2018

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.

DC Theatre Scene • 22nd April 2014

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.