#howlround

An excellent article on trans inclusion in every part of the theater making process, from hiring to the rehearsal room to staff training to production.

Dalek radio waves

“Although changing theatre culture doesn't happen overnight, I'm very encouraged. In most cases, there's a true desire to learn, work outside the box, and to enlist trans* actors, directors, writers, and designers, ensuring they operate in safe spaces.”

In her experience, a Malawian audience expects to participate and be a vocal partner in the experience—shouting out advice to the actors, heckling, noisily laughing, and cheering. She gave an example of one of the Shakespeare productions she directed: when Hamlet is at Ophelia’s grave and cries out “I loved Ophelia,” in anguish, a member of the audience in Malawi shouted, “Too late” and got a huge laugh. With a Western audience, that the same moment was met with silence and quiet emotion from the audience. When Nanzikambe performed Hamlet at the British Council in Malawi, which is a venue where most people from the Western world watch theatre, she observes that all was very quiet right until the end, when the audience stood and clapped and cheered. Until that moment, the Malawian actors were convinced that the performance was going badly because they were getting no vocal feedback.

One of my most rewarding theatre experiences to date was a track in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s As You Like It, where I played one male, one female, and one non-binary character. The team that created that opportunity would never have known that’s what I wanted had they not given me the chance to explain what I would find most gratifying.

In short, there is very little that could have tempted me to make the two-and-a-half-hour round-trip to Prospect Lefferts Gardens last August to attend not one, but two Shakespeare plays—but I found myself lured in by the unique premise of Double Feature’s productions of Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A brand-new company co-founded by directors Mikhaela Mahony and Katherine Wilkinson, Double Feature offered back-to-back presentations of two of Shakespeare’s most tonally antipodal works, both performed within (and, indeed, throughout) the same Brooklyn brownstone.

Via an email conversation, Moses graciously shared her rationale for this script change with me: “During the first read, I realized that at the end of the play all the Native characters were either dead or banished. That is not the message I want to leave audiences with at all.” Moses further clarified that her primary goal of the production was “to highlight the important connection between Black Liberation and Tribal Sovereignty and how, in order to achieve both, we must also achieve a deep solidarity with one another.” She kept Roderigo alive to keep her goal from being lost at the end of the show. His redemptive presence provided an example of a Native character who initially mirrored then overcame the learned aggression of his colonialist oppressors.