Out All Day: New Orleans • 30th May 2023

Review of A Midsummer Nights Dream by The NOLA Project

The NOLA Project’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Brittany N. Williams, is a romp, and this tight 2-hour production flies in the face of anyone who alleges The Bard’s works are boring. Incidentally, this production marks a full circle moment for The NOLA Project, having performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream as their first sculpture garden production, back in 2011.

Eater New Orleans • 10th May 2023

Sam Caruso Is Forging a New Path With French-Style Custard in New Orleans

Salvatore “Sam” Caruso started making ice cream at home in 2018 with a two-quart Cuisinart machine, but he could never get the texture right. Despite his best efforts, it was always too icy, not smooth enough for his taste. Then, as the world shut down in March 2020, Caruso found himself with ample free time after being let go from his job. He used a serendipitous tax return check to buy a higher-quality ice cream machine for $1,300 and started experimenting.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 27th April 2023

Black Southern Playwrights Take Center Stage

The interruption of the COVID-19 pandemic gave way to a time of reckoning for theatre and theatremakers. As we collectively emerge from the pandemic’s crucible, let me present a beacon of hope for what theatre in the United States can be, at its best: “adaptable, emergent, sustainable, and well.” I am quoting Lauren E. Turner (she/her), the founder and producing artistic director of New Orleans-based theatre company No Dream Deferred and the We Will Dream: New Works Festival.

BOMB Magazine • 21st February 2023

Eva Doumbia and Chef Alexandre Bella Ola Interviewed

I first met Eva Doumbia while she was on a research trip to New Orleans. I was enthralled by her explanation of the show she was creating which used elements of documentary theater and religious ceremony to address food history, its connections to the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. I was honored when she asked me to translate the show from French into English and produce its United States tour.

Medium • 28th September 2022

A Goat Song for the American Theater

Deliriously jet-lagged, standing at the lip of the Theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis hill in Athens, I learned the etymology of the word “tragedy.” To the delight of word nerds everywhere, “tragedy” roughly translates to “goat song.”

Medium • 8th August 2022

The Presumption of Belonging

I've moved a lot. Not for any of the usual reasons, like the military, or my parents getting divorced, or even specifically for work. My parents are still together, still living in the house I grew up in—well, technically the house I did most of my growing up in, from ages 8 through 18.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 13th June 2022

From Awareness to Action: Facilitating Change in the American Theatre

Amelia: We’ve seen radical transformation! That keeps me going. To break it down for people who might not be familiar with our terminology, we are doing anti-racist work, which is assuming a context of white body supremacy culture, yet it’s not just about race. The collective liberation we are steering organizations towards is not about “diversity and inclusion” and filling a quota of how many global majority people you’ve hired at your organization.

AMERICAN THEATRE • 10th March 2022

The Shows That Got Away and/or Found a Way

One of the most important jobs of theatre journalism—some would say its central, even only, job—is to bear witness to and commemorate a fundamentally ephemeral medium in words and pictures. That’s plenty true in normal times, but this documentary mission has become especially urgent in a time of deep uncertainty and constant reshuffling due to an airborne virus, which has disproportionally encroached on art forms and social practices that rely on appointment gathering and shared (indoor) space.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 8th March 2022

Clowning for a Cause: Healthcare Clowns Offer Opportunities for Holistic Healing

Although the mark of countless successful theatrical performers is their passion, it takes a special combination of versatility and compassion to transition theatre skills into a healthcare setting. Tiffany Riley does precisely this work as a healthcare clown and a founder of the Laughter League and North American Federation of Healthcare Clown Organizations (NAFHCO).

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 5th January 2021

Seuls en Scène Festival 2020 / Festival Seuls en Scène 2020

Masse wasn’t interested in simply asking artists for video recordings of the works he had intended to present this year and instead came up with a programmatic mix of video recordings of live performance, “staged” readings, one making-of documentary, and a series of docutheatre works.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 24th November 2020

Hold on Tightly, Let Go Lightly

Pursuing a life in theatre or medicine requires such dedication that it can be hard to imagine a career transition, and yet, as this year has viscerally reminded us, the only constant in life is change. Although the path between theatre and medicine may not be evident at first glance, the specific skill set that both professions require makes the transition more seamless than one might imagine.

AMERICAN THEATRE • 18th February 2020

Into the Woods

The turning point was Katrina, as is so often the case when you’re asking questions in New Orleans, trying to get to the heart of the matter. A Studio in the Woods is located on a plot of land purchased by Lucianne and Joe Carmichael in 1969, comprising 7.66 acres of endangered forest in the Louisiana wetlands.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 13th January 2020

"French and yet never French enough" / « Français, mais jamais assez français »

Any translator worth their salt can tell you the real work of translation is not the literal (painstaking!) rendering of one language into another, but instead the necessary accompanying cultural translation that carries the meaning of the work.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 18th November 2019

The American Theatre Was Killing Me

For those unfamiliar with the term “racialized trauma,” counselor Ayanna Molina of True Love Movement explains: “Trauma is hurtful, emotionally damaging situations that you cannot control. [With my clients], the racialized component is that [they] happen specifically because you are Black.”

NOBO Commons • 22nd June 2019

Radical Buffoonery

An interview between Amelia Parenteau and Jon Greene, founder and Artistic director of the Radical Buffoons.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 23rd May 2019

New to New Orleans / Venant d’arriver à la Nouvelle Orléans

This Carnival, Eva Doumbia and Marie Houdin, two French theatre artists, returned to New Orleans at the height of parade season, each drawing inspiration from the city and forging connections for their upcoming public art projects.

AMERICAN THEATRE • 23rd April 2019

At Europe’s Good Chance Theatre, Refugees Have a Dome and a Home

Good Chance Theatre was started by two Brits, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, when, in 2015, they passed through Calais, France, on their way to Germany and they saw the makeshift refugee camp that had formed there.

WomenArts • 14th February 2019

Revolutionary Love: Elizabeth Vega & the Tornillo Occupation

Elizabeth Vega is an “artivist” – an artist and activist who understands that art is its own form of powerful resistance. She has dedicated her life to harnessing that power and teaching others how to do the same. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, she works constantly on projects that combine art and activism...

AMERICAN THEATRE • 28th January 2019

Trigger Warnings Are Not Enough: Why You Need an EDI Advocate

Can a Black girl be called “pale”? How about a Latina ? No matter how you parse the linguistic technicality, the word smacks of whiteness, said one of the actors. And so on Day Two of rehearsal at People’s Light in Malvern...

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 20th November 2018

Bringing French Theatre to Princeton

When you hear Princeton, New Jersey, “bastion of French culture” may not be the first thought that comes to mind. (In fact, according to the 2010 US Census, only 618 people were recorded as French speakers in the city, which has a population of 28,572.)

IRT Theater • 1st October 2021

Tussaud/Antoinette | IRT Theater

A story of two Maries. One ruled wax, one ruled France. One survived, the other did not. So one made a sculpture of the other’s guillotined head… and launched an empire.

Kickstarter • 13th November 2019

WOKE: A Dream Play

WOKE is a new play by Amelia Parenteau about an intimate interracial relationship, set entirely in a bed, directed by Emma S. Kimball.

New Statesman • 19th August 2019

“Everything that follows is true”: how verbatim theatre questions the meaning of truth

In Miracle Village, a community for convicted sex offenders in rural Florida, five men sit in a therapy class, and are made to introduce themselves. “Say what your offence is, and then say what you actually did,”

Dixon Place • 11th April 2017

(Projection)

(Projection) peels back the layers of a New York millennial apartment, subverting and reinforcing the classic living room play to reveal the universal truths of defining yourself in your 20’s....