World Theatre Day 2026

Friday, 27 March 

[World Theatre Day was created in 1961 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), and is celebrated annually on March 27 by global ITI centers and the international theatre community. Various national and international theatre events are organized to celebrate an international message and remarks from national cultural leaders. The Global Theater Initiative (GTI), a partnership between Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics (the Lab), encourages U.S. theatres, individual artists, institutions and audiences to celebrate the occasion annually on the 27th of March. 

[Since 1962, World Theatre Day has been celebrated by the circulation of the World Theatre Day Message through which, at the invitation of ITI, a figure of world stature shares their reflections on the theme of Theatre and a Culture of Peace. The first World Theatre Day international message was written by Jean Cocteau in 1962. Succeeding honorees have included Arthur Miller (1963), Ellen Stewart (1975), Vaclav Havel (1994), Ariane Mnouchkine (2005), Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi (2007), Augusto Boal (2009), Dame Judi Dench (2010), Jessica A. Kaahwa (2011).

[In GTI's role as the U.S. center of ITI, a U.S.-based author is chosen to circulate a national message for World Theatre Day in addition to the international message. Past U.S. honorees have included Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp (2021), Indigenous Direction (2019), Heather Raffo (2018), Kwame Kwei-Armah (2017), Ping Chong (2016), Diane Rodriguez (2014), Jeffrey Wright (2011) and Lynn Nottage (2010). 

[In 2022, for the first time, GTI invited a U.S.-based Emergent Artist to pen a message and that author was storyteller/activist Jasmin Cardenas. This is now a continuing feature of the U.S. celebration of World Theatre Day.

[To learn more about World Theatre Day, visit the official website at www.world-theatre-day.org.  —"About World Theatre Day,” Theatre Communications Group website.]

INTERNATIONAL MESSAGE
by Willem Dafoe

[Willem Dafoe (actor, theater maker; b. 1955), Artistic Director of the Theatre Department at La Biennale di Venezia, was among the founding members of The Wooster Group.  Based at The Performing Garage in New York (1977-2004), they developed a distinctive approach to avant-garde theater.  

[He then went on to collaborate with Robert Wilson (1941-2025; director and playwright of experimental theater), Marina Abramovic (b. 1946; Serbian-born conceptual and performance artist), Richard Foreman (1937-2025; avant-garde experimental playwright and director; founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater), and Romeo Castellucci (b. 1960; Italian theater director, playwright, artist, and designer).  

[In the early 1980s, he also began working in cinema and since earned international acclaim for his versatility across both independent and mainstream films.  He has received four Academy Award nominations and was awarded the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 2018.  

[As an actor, he’s received numerous accolades including nominations for four Academy Awards (1987 Best Supporting Actor nomination for Platoon [1986]; 2001 Best Supporting Actor nomination for Shadow of the Vampire [2000]; 2018 Best Supporting Actor nomination for The Florida Project [2017]; 2019 Best Actor nomination for At Eternity’s Gate [2018]), a BAFTA Award, four Critics' Choice Movie Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, four Critics' Choice Movie Awards, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards.  

[He received four Independent Spirit Award nominations winning twice for Best Supporting Male for his roles in Shadow of the Vampire and The Lighthouse (2019).  On 8 January 2024, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

[Dafoe’s commitment to theater continues to shape his artistic vision and performance practice.]

I am an actor principally know as a film actor. But my roots are deeply in the theatre. I was a member of the Wooster Group from 1977-2003 creating and performing original pieces at The Performing Garage in NYC and touring throughout the world. I have also worked with Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson and Romeo Castellucci. Now, I am the Artistic Director of The Venice Theatre Biennale. This appointment, the events in the world, and my desire to return to theatre work has strongly formed my belief in the unique positive power and importance of the theatre.

At the humble beginning of my time in The Wooster Group, the NY based theatre company, we would often get very little public at some of the performances at our theatre. Often the rule was if there were more performers than public we could choose to cancel. But we never did. Many of the company were not trained in the theatre but were people of different disciplines that came together to make theatre—so “the show must go on” was not really our mantra, however we felt an obligation to keep our meeting with the public.

We would also often rehearse during the day and in the evening show the material as a work in progress. We would sometimes spend years on a show while sustaining ourselves with touring of older performances. Working years on a piece would often become tedious for me and I found rehearsals somewhat trying but these works in progress showings were always exciting—even if the tiny public was a damning judgment of the level of interest in what we were doing. It just made me realize how no matter how few people, the audience as witness gave the theatre its meaning and life.

Like the sign in the gambling hall says “YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN.” Shared experience in real time of an act of creation, that may be scored and designed but is always different, is certainly the obvious strength of the theatre. Socially, politically, theatre has never been so important and vital to our understanding of ourselves and the world.

The “elephant in the room” is new technologies and social networking, which promises connection but seemingly has fragmented and isolated people from each other. I use my computer daily even if I have no social media, I have even googled myself as an actor, and have also consulted AI for information. But you have to be blind not to recognize that human contact risks being replaced by relationships with devices. While some technology can serve us well the problem of not knowing who’s on the other end of the circle of communication runs deep and contributes to a crisis of truth and reality. While the internet can raise questions, it very seldom captures a sense of wonder that theatre creates. A wonder based in attention, engagement and a spontaneous community of those present in a circle of action and response.

As an actor and theatre maker I remain a believer in the power of theatre. In a world that seems to get more divisive, controlling and violent, our challenge as theatre makers is to avoid the corruption of theatre solely as a commercial enterprise dedicated to the entertainment by distraction or as the dry institutional preserver of traditions, but rather to foster its strength to connect peoples, communities, cultures and above all to question where we are going. . . . . .

Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to imagine what we aspire to.

We are social animals and designed biologically for engagement with the world. Every sense organ is a gateway for encounter and through this meeting we achieve greater definition of who we are. Through storytelling, aesthetics, language, movement, scenography— theatre as a total art form can make us see what was, what is and what our world could be.

*  *  *  *
U.S. MESSAGE
by Moisés Kaufman 

[Moisés Kaufman (Venezuelan-American theater director, filmmaker, and playwright; founder of Tectonic Theater Project based in New York City, and co-founder of Miami New Drama in Florida; b. 1963) received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama (b. 1961; 44th President of the United States: 2009-17) in 2016.  

[Kaufman’s a Tony and Emmy-nominated director and playwright whose Broadway credits include Paradise Square (2022; 10 Tony Award nominations), Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song (2018), Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams (2011; Pulitzer Prize Finalist), The Heiress with Jessica Chastain (2012), 33 Variations with Jane Fonda (2009; wrote and directed, Tony nomination Best Play), and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (2003; Tony Award, Pulitzer Prize).

[Other productions include: Pulitzer Prize finalist Here There Are Blueberries (2018), Velour: A Drag Spectacular (2024), Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard (2023), Seven Deadly Sins (2021; Drama Desk Award).  He is the co-writer of The Laramie Project (2000) and the writer of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997).  He’s an Obie and Drama Desk award winner and a Guggenheim fellow.]

Hello everyone, I’m Moisés Kaufman, I am a playwright, director and Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project and I am honored to have been asked to address you on World Theater Day 2026. 

Hola, soy Moisés Kaufman, soy escritor, director y director artístico de Tectonic Theater Project. Y me siento honrado de haber sido elegido para dirigirme a ustedes en este Día Mundial del Teatro 2026.

There are moments in history when the world feels as though it is breaking apart — when language itself becomes unstable, when facts are contested, when communities fracture along lines of fear and suspicion. In such moments, we may ask ourselves: What is the role of theatre?

I was born in Venezuela and came to the United States as an immigrant. To leave one’s country is to experience rupture — of language, of belonging, of certainty.

It was through this experience of displacement that I began to understand theatre not simply as performance, but as a space of encounter. A place where identities can be examined rather than assumed. A place where complexity is not feared, but honored. My life between cultures taught me that the act of listening across difference is both fragile and transformative.

When we founded Tectonic Theater Project, we were driven by a simple curiosity: How do we understand the world through the stories of others? How do we gather narratives from the real world, fragments of memory, contradiction, silence — and shape them into something that allows us to see more clearly?

So we asked how a group of artists might come together not merely to interpret a story, but to examine the forces beneath it, to gather voices, to sit with contradiction.

This process has taught me something essential: theatre is not the art of certainty. It is the art of inquiry.

Theatre, at its most urgent, is an act of investigation.

When we created The Laramie Project from the voices of a small American town grappling with an act of violence, we discovered that the stage could become a civic space. Audiences did not come simply to watch; they came to witness. They came to confront grief, anger, confusion, compassion — sometimes all at once. The theatre became not a courtroom and not a pulpit, but a gathering place.

That experience changed me. It revealed that theatre can hold complexity without sacrificing community.

In our time, public discourse often demands that we choose sides quickly. It rewards outrage and punishes nuance. Yet theatre insists on something different. It asks us to dwell in ambiguity. It reminds us that a single story rarely contains the whole truth. It invites us to encounter the humanity of those we might otherwise reduce to categories.

This is not a passive act. It is a courageous one.

To sit in the dark beside strangers and listen deeply is a form of resistance. It resists isolation. It resists dehumanization. It resists the temptation to turn away.

In a world mediated by screens and algorithms, this shared tribal experience is radical. It cannot be paused, scrolled, or muted. It unfolds in real time, and we are accountable to one another within it.

I have often reflected on the word “tectonic.” It refers to the forces beneath the earth’s surface — slow, invisible pressures that eventually reshape landscapes. Theatre works in a similar way. It may not create immediate transformation, but it exerts pressure. It shifts perception. It unsettles assumptions. It opens cracks through which empathy can enter.

And empathy is not a sentimental concept. It is an ethical practice.

When actors embody other people — when they carry their words, their cadences, their hesitations — they ask us to imagine what it feels like to inhabit another life. That imaginative act is foundational to democracy. A democratic society depends upon our capacity to see beyond ourselves.

Peace, too, depends on that capacity.

Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is the presence of understanding. It is the willingness to engage difference without erasure. It is the courage to hear a story that challenges our own.

Theatre does not provide solutions to global crises. It does something both more modest and more profound: it creates the conditions for intimate encounters.

Within the space of a stage, we practice holding multiple truths. And we train in empathy. 

These practices are not separate from civic life; they are essential to it.

On this World Theatre Day, I think of theatre-makers across the globe — in grand institutions and in makeshift spaces, in cities and in villages, in times of stability and in times of conflict. I think of artists who rehearse under threat, who speak when silence would be safer, who gather communities even when resources are scarce. Their work affirms something fundamental: the human need to tell stories and to hear them is irrepressible.

Today, let us honor the rehearsal rooms where questions are asked with rigor and humility. Let us honor the actors who risk vulnerability. Let us honor the designers who shape worlds from light and shadow. Let us honor the crews and theater staffs that make the work possible.

And let us recommit ourselves to the slow, tectonic work of listening.

If the forces beneath the surface are powerful enough, landscapes shift.

May our stages continue to shift the landscape of the human heart.

Let us keep asking questions.
Let us keep listening.
Let us keep gathering in the dark — believing that when the lights rise, we may see one another more clearly.
Thank you.

*  *  *  *
U.S. EMERGENT ARTIST MESSAGE
by Banna Desta

[Banna Desta (she/they; late 20’s-early 30’s) is an Eritrean- and Ethiopian-American writer for the screen and stage who crafts stories about and for the African diaspora.  She is the author of The Abyssinians (Audible, 2024); Midnight in Abyssinia (La MaMa’s CultureHub, 2024); Red Taxi (2025); Bygone Fruit which premiered at the 2024 Women in Theater Festival (6-24 June 2024 in Greenwich Village, New York City) and Pining which premiered at Rattlestick Theater (New York City) and was published by Samuel French in 2019.  

[Desta’s work for the stage has been supported and workshopped by Atlantic Theater Company, The Apollo Theater, National Black Theatre, The New Group, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation.  She has held residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Art Omi, Marble House Project, and Tofte Lake Center.  She was a staff writer for the BET+ series First Wives Club (Netflix Top Ten, 2019-22).  

[Desta has assisted multiple television series in both the writers’ room and on set, including FOX/NBC’s This Is Us (2016-22), and Amazon Prime’s Harlem (2021-25).  She’s held fellowships with Sun Valley Writers Conference, Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film, and The Gotham Film and Media Institute.  She is a writing professor and arts educator at New York University, Rehabilitation through the Arts and Harlem Children's Zone.]

My name is Banna, and I am the emergent author for the International Theater Institute in the United States. Happy World Theater Day to theater makers across the country and around the world. It is my belief that storytelling is the bloodline of humanity, pumping empathy and understanding, reinforcing purpose and preserving culture and legacy in our hearts. Many of us have been shaped and inspired by the stories we’ve heard, whether they’re passed down from previous generations or absorbed through other mediums. Most forms of storytelling share theater’s DNA. They’re fleshed out through performance with tones of drama, comedy or both.

Coming from an Eritrean and Ethiopian household, storytelling was one of the ways I was able to hold on to my ancestral lineage being born and raised in the United States. Whether they were stories that illustrated the natural beauty and simplicity of African life or the tragedies of the civil war that delivered my parents to the U.S.[1974-91] , tales of the past were embedded in me and undoubtedly inspired me to indulge my own imagination and nurture my own creative inventions. They inspired me to explore my own history, sourcing facts to support the fiction in my plays The Abyssinians and Red Taxi, and influencing my love of realist fiction to write contemporary Black narratives in my new play, Nightlife. Like so many people in America, my life has been global and so, my stories reflect that.

Becoming a theatermaker wasn’t a straightforward journey, as the conventions of modern life felt like they required a more traditional vocation. I ignored the call to be an artist. However, in college, theater was my very first class, Monday mornings at 9am, my freshman year. It was there that I discovered Paula Vogel [b. 1951], re-explored Shakespeare, Moisés Kaufman and a number of other classic and contemporary artists and their work. No matter when their plays were published and how many years had passed since, their work felt urgent, and as a result so did my need to tell stories. I could no longer ignore the call. I took my writing more seriously, using it as a means of connecting with myself and sharing my work in the hopes of connecting with others.

Discovering theater was where my life felt most romantic, where I felt most comfortable to wrestle with the world’s competing contradictions. When I moved to New York to pursue storytelling more seriously, I was astonished by the depth of artistry, the grit and grace of theater’s artisans and the immense compassion theater inspired in me. I sat in the audience of plays like Is God Is at Soho Rep [by Aleshea Harris, 2018], In the Blood at Signature Theater [2017] and Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse [2020], awestruck at the blend of rigor, chemistry and collaboration that made these experiences possible. I felt eager to create, to experiment, to court risk.

Most important of all, theater taught me that we must lean on each other. The life of theatermakers, theaters and their audiences depends on us working collaboratively towards our united future. We must protect each other’s dignity. One does not have to look too far to witness the theatrics of daily life, whether that be in our politics, our communities or even on our phones. Today, as I address you in 2026, the dominant narrative from the highest seat in office, as well as our national leaders, is encouraging us to be cruel to each other. Their intent to erase history, misinform us and keep us at odds with one another is more clear than ever before. Their messaging is sinister, divisive and harmful. It is an assault on our collective dignity.

Despite the fearmongering, despite their deepest wish to separate ourselves from each other, it is our responsibility as theatermakers to have the courage to rewrite this narrative. In order to reclaim the narrative, we must turn to our foundation. Theater is foundational to many, if not all, of the ways we exchange stories in the world today. It is where we can seek more thoughtful provocations about our times, it is where our heartbeats synchronize, it is where we enter the dark to feel the light. We must be fearless and relentless in protecting this sacred space and to attempt at making the connection.

On this World Theater Day, may we recommit to the truth, may we guard our foundation, and may we keep humanity's bloodline alive, in and outside the theater.

[I don’t repost the World Theatre Day messages each year, but I have done so for several of the recent ones.  You can check back on these sets of messages: “World Theatre Day 2012” (24 April 2012), “World Theatre Day: 27 March 2022” (4 April 2022), “World Theatre Day 2023” (27 March 2023), and “World Theatre Day 2024” (28 March 2024).

[In addition, I’ve posted a version of a report on another ITI event, the 1986 Theatre of Nations festival in Baltimore, Maryland, the first and so far only appearance of TON in North America.  “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” which was originally written for The Drama Review in 1987, was republished on Rick On Theater on 10 November 2014.

[ITI, the International Theatre Institute, is an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).]

Physical Theater

 

[Almost three months ago, I published a four-part series on theater education and training on Rick On Theater.  One article, “It’s A Clown’s Life: Lessons From Clown School” by Lara Bevan-Shiraz, was about physical theater, the topic of the two articles posted below.  “It’s A Clown’s Life” was posted in “Theater Education & Training, Part 1,” 3 October 2024.

[Physical theater can be defined as a genre of theatrical performance that encompasses storytelling primarily through the performers' physical movements, which may also include masking.  Mime and theatrical clowning have influenced many modern expressions of physical theater, and traditions such as Commedia dell'arte, as well as Asian theater forms such as Japanese Noh and Balinese theater have influenced Western physical theater.] 

“CHICAGO’S PHYSICAL THEATER FESTIVAL:
MOVING IN MANY SENSES”
by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho 

[This article, which wasn't published in American Theatre’s print edition, was posted on the magazine’s website on 2 August 2024.]

This essential gathering, now in its 11th year, doesn’t just regularly break the fourth wall; it also breaks down theatrical and global barriers.

A baby and a theatre festival: Over a decade ago, a beloved Chicago couple discovered they were pregnant with both. Their kids now run about wild, creative, free. The annual Physical Theater Festival Chicago proved a popular tween this year, boasting eight different shows, five workshops, and three virtual events across the month of July [13th-21st], and attracting over 2,000 audience participants. But you may be surprised to learn that this landmark celebration of storytelling was conceived on an unassuming flight of fancy.

Co-founders and artistic directors Alice da Cunha [actress, director, and producer] and Marc Frost [novelist, screenwriter, film and television producer and director; b. 1953] first met doing physical theatre in the U.K., and they continue to draw lifelong inspiration from sweeping curations like the London [international] Mime Festival [1977-2023]. “When we came to Chicago, Marc and I always said that when we retired, we would start a physical theatre festival,” said da Cunha. They didn’t have to wait that long, receiving a curatorial grant of $3,000 from Links Hall just two years into their Chicago residence—and three trimesters into the gestation of their firstborn, Benjamin.

[Links Hall in Chicago is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering artistic innovation and public engagement. It maintains a facility that offers flexible programming, facilitating research, development, and presentation of new work in the performing arts.]

If anyone can tackle such a massive undertaking, it’s these two brilliant creative leaders. Da Cunha and Frost have become local theatre celebrities, known for their warm effervescence and sharp critical eye for movement. Audiences crowd around them at each show for a conversation or a Carioca “hello” (two kisses on the cheek) as the two bustle about festival tasks. Their whole lives seem to have prepared them for these moments, as they switch seamlessly between community building and company management, diplomacy and art, heart and mind, one language and another. They extend many bridges.

[Everything that comes from the city of Rio de Janeiro, including natives, is called Carioca. Cariocas are also extremely friendly and are very comfortable with physical contact, such as kissing on the cheek, which is a typical greeting.]

Each year it’s moving to see how they form a border-defying family. Da Cunha’s roots in Portugal and Brazil and Frost’s upbringing in Chicago help them create Windy City spaces that feel like home to artists from all over the world. This year’s lineup featured much-anticipated spectacles which had garnered high renown in their home countries and accolades across international festivals. These included Clayton Nascimento’s grounded and transformative Macacos, from my native Brazil: Chula the Clown’s hilarious and heartbreaking Perhaps, Perhaps . . . Quizás from México; and an array of multigenerational offerings like cinematic The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much from Voloz Collective (France/U.K.). From Chicago artists there was Scratch Night, featuring works-in-process; Theatre Y’s soul-stirring Little Carl; and an outdoor Millennium Park extravaganza with circus and magician performers. 

All the pieces this year delved into some element of play, metatheatricality, and silent imagery. Many were one-person shows; some were completely nonverbal. All fit da Cunha and Frost’s expansive definition of physical theatre: “If you close your eyes, you wouldn’t get at least 50-90 percent of the storytelling.” Bodies in space morph into anything and everything: A child’s struggle to put on a jacket transforms them into a rhinoceros in the delightful Don’t Make Me Get Dressed (by Boston’s The Gottabees). In Macacos, a Black Brazilian man realizes the stage is a space to dream and resolves to become a jazz diva, until history bursts at the seams and floods in more sobering anecdotes. And in The Man Who Thought . . ., bodies turn into walls, bullets, horses, and spilled coffee, in the style of French movement artist Jacques Lecoq [1921-99].

American performing arts often feel siloed. Genres like theatre, standup, circus, and clown self-segregate, and it’s not often you see a company deeply integrate those approaches and communities. This festival proves the value of intertwining international performance pedagogies. I felt the air shift with possibility each moment a performer broke the fourth wall, shifted genre midway through a show, ventured into self-referential territory, or pulled up audience members. Speaking with patrons, I learned that many look forward to the Physical Theater Festival each year because of this risk-taking innovation, which has become increasingly rare in a risk-averse American theatre landscape. People’s excitement around the international shows should be a lesson to Chicago, and more broadly the U.S., to continue branching out from conventional Western storytelling.

Take Perhaps, Perhaps . . . Quizás [Quizás is Spanish for ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybe’], for instance. This nonverbal one-woman show, which depends on audience participation, contains a degree of fourth-wall-breaking and engagement that is still all too rare in American theatre, and was executed impeccably in festival performances.

Dressed in a wedding gown, Chula the Clown starts out seated, penning love notes and romantic dreams on sheets of paper—then crumples them up. Her “mask”—a painted white face with arched brow—locates itself between the traditional 18th-century clown look and the 2010s boy brow makeup obsession. Hair sprouts from her head like an untamed wedding bouquet, moving with her as she jolts her head to notice the audience. She searches for a groom in the audience. Purses her heart-shaped lips and heaves a wordless sigh. Muchacha’s unimpressed. 

Gaby Muñoz, the person behind the clown, has taken this particular piece around the world for 14 years, and has several other shows under her belt as Chula, who she describes as an extension of herself. Perhaps, Perhaps . . . Quizás has a heartwrenching ending you don’t see coming: As audience participants return to their seats, the protagonist realizes the extent of her loneliness, and, as Muñoz put it, her “absence of self-love.” Muñoz based this devastation on her own experience of separation from a longtime partner with whom she lived in London and Montreal. When she returned to Mexico City heartbroken, she didn’t know many people and decided the audience would become her playmates. “People are surprised with how much they can participate,” Muñoz said. “Audiences who don’t normally do theatre become a part of it. It’s vulnerable for me like it is for them, because I don’t know what will happen—I am not totally in control.”

She said she’s seen it all: At one performance a while back, a woman protested when Muñoz selected her boyfriend as the groom. But the ending is always the same, she said: We see the beloved protagonist restart the cycle of searching for love from the outside, never from within.

“The piece aims to lighten the theme, but it’s surreal how resonant it remains—trying to find your strength with someone else, when actually you must find it within yourself,” said Muñoz. “It’s been a form of therapy to me. I am a mirror to so many other stories like mine. I find community. I know I can feel deeply in silence, and still people can understand my pain.” 

That balancing act between joy and pain also triumphed in Clayton Nascimento’s powerful Macacos. I’d long awaited this international sensation; several family friends in Rio de Janeiro had already seen the show, which has even impacted Brazilian justice and education. Nascimento’s central conceit, he said, is that “theatre is a space to dream,” and he makes full use of its possibilities, taking us through an embodied history crash course in Brazilian racism, recent murders of Black boys, and his own joyous dreams for more expansive and free living.

He begins the show in Brazilian Portuguese, with subtitles projected, contorting his body to depict white people hurling racist slurs, morphing into a Black child playing with a toy car, and relishing in the “Single Ladies” dance to emphasize Black joy. His body feels as poetic as his language, and watching him, I felt I was experiencing the genre of choreopoem afresh. Several minutes in, he stopped to address us in English, asking audiences members to share Chicago’s history of anti-Blackness.

At each place he tours, Nascimento modifies the show to suit that city, throwing in references and asking the audience to share their city’s realities. In Chicago the play ran 90 minutes, but in Brazil it often hits a sweeping three-hour mark, full of local references and a brave grappling together. This version for the U.S. aims to bridge the specificity of Black Brazilian experience with what international audiences may comprehend, offering more recognizable cultural touchstones, like novelist Machado de Assis [Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer; 1839-1908], plus context about the U.S.’s own complicity in Brazilian oppression.

Beyond Nascimento’s tireless physical prowess and agile command of form, seamlessly moving us through different theatrical approaches, Macacos delivers its message and then some. Normally you can’t measure theatre’s impact on society, the way it shapes hearts and minds in mysterious and intangible ways. But Macacos has brought forth real-world justice: After one show in Rio, a lawyer approached him to reopen the case that is central to the show, in which police murdered 10-year-old Eduardo de Jesus Ferreira by his home. Now public schools in São Paulo plan to teach his script, aiming to fill a gap in education regarding Brazil’s history of colonial violence.

[Macaco is the Portuguese word for ‘monkey’ or ‘ape.’ It’s also a racial slur against black men and women (macaca)  in Brazil.  Americans may remember the 2006 incident when Republican U.S. Senator George Allen of Virginia used the word macaca to refer to an American of Indian descent who was filming an Allen reelection rally for Allen’s Democratic opponent.  Allen went on to lose his reelection bid.]

As the one-man show tours the world, Nascimento often brings along Eduardo’s mother, Terezinha. “The people have opened their arms to her,” he said. “Look at what the theatre was capable of.” She wasn’t able to come to Chicago for the Physical Theater Festival, but did provide a letter, addressed to her son, whom Nascimento embodied.

A spotlight of mourning focuses Nascimento, whose eyes fill with the tears of saudade. He speaks her words: “Clayton told me the stage was a space to dream. So I’m going to dream with you, my son.” 

[Saudade is a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament.]

Macacos will next travel to Russia. I become misty-eyed thinking of all the places the Physical Theater Festival artists see, all the lessons they carry, all the stories they exchange, all the people they touch. Nascimento expressed his excitement about breaking the fourth wall, yearning to dream together with people from all over. Brazil poses its own tremendous challenges in conversations about race, and if Nascimento’s play could impact people’s lives there, well—I cannot deny that anything is possible. Hearing stories like Nascimento’s puts the world in context: Theatre has treaded upon dreamlike surfaces. It is only logical to expect more transformation to come from cultural exchanges, more than we could dare imagine now.

Said Nascimento, “Terezinha’s voice in the play stands in for many mothers who lost their children to violence. She becomes like all the mothers in the world. And every time this play happens, this mother can speak with her child. I have seen Terezinha along the years. And with each performance the play has allowed her heart to find more hope and see the world. The message I want to give people is: Dream.”

Even at workshops it was clear that dreaming at the Physical Theatre Festival means a great deal to Chicago residents beyond your average theatre artist. In a workshop called “The Clown and the Silence,” led by Gaby Muñoz, one participant said she didn’t have a background in theatre at all. What brought her there? “A retired lawyer needs a lot of clown,” she said with a laughing sigh.

As Muñoz put it, opportunities to play allow you to “viajar sin viajar” [‘to travel without traveling’]. Work across the festival transcends borders and ignites the human spirit, sometimes without language, always physically clear, and ever genre-bending. “I think a lot of people don’t know of the option to make theatre that way,” said Alice da Cunha.

She and Frost know they’ve done it again when they sit at the back of a theatre and listen to the audience. “That’s the most important part,” said Frost. “Listening to the audience.”

So I let the laughter and cries wash over me. The chatter in the lobbies invited me into a kind of family. Attendees who’ve been with the festival from day one mixed with those who had just fallen in love that day. Kids laughed with grandparents. Strangers speaking different languages felt familiar to one another because they’d experienced emotions through plays together, in their bodies. This sticky Chicago July, the globe seemed to move just a bit closer together.

[Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (she/her) is American Theatre’s Chicago associate editor.  On ROT, Furtado Coutinho’s writing appears in "‘How to Survive an Election: Laugh With “POTUS,”'" 14 November 2024; “‘Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias,’” 9 October 2024 (in “Theater Education & Training, Part 3”); and “‘Wish You Were Here: A Radical Access Roundtable,’” 6 July 2024.  (A more complete biography of Furtado Coutinho follows "‘How to Survive an Election.’”)]

*  *  *  *
“RUNNING AWAY TO JOIN CIRCUS THEATRE”
by Gary M. Kramer 

[Eight-and-a-half years before Gabriela Furtado Coutinho’s report on the 2024 Physical Theater Festival Chicago, American Theatre published this article by Gary M. Kramer (January 2016 [vol. 33, no. 1], part of “Approaches to Theatre Training꞉ The Mind/Body Divide,” a Special Section.  (The text below ran online as “Running Away To Join Circus Theatre,” posted on AT’s website on 16 December 2015.)]

How circus arts companies are training artists to become both actors and acrobats.

Once upon a time, so the axiom went, everybody wanted to run away and join the circus. These days, though, no one has to run away; circus is becoming more of a possibility in one’s own backyard. Circus arts organizations are popping up everywhere, and everyone from established theatrical troupes to fringe performers are incorporating acrobatics and circus arts in their work and creating theatrical spectacles. This growing trend has created a demand not only for practitioners of circus arts, but also trainers and directors who specialize in these arts from all over the country.

Jeff “Tree” Anderson is a coach, choreographer, and director who cofounded Clan Destiny Circus, a circus theatre in Asheville, N.C. He firmly believes that “everyone deserves circus.” Unable to compete with Cirque du Soleil with its huge sets, costumes, and music, Anderson and his DIY circus create workshops for ordinary people to participate in activities ranging from pole dancing to acrobatics and human pyramids, to programs where parents can learn to “fly” their kids properly. Anderson’s theatrical work includes teaching mime to show how a face or body moves when it is happy or sad.

“What does an angry face/sad body look like?” Anderson asks rhetorically. “The responses to these exercises are mental, physical, and emotional.”

He continues, “Once we have mime, we tell stories. One such performance is the cycle of the Hindu Creation Myth, or another piece, Day in the Life Mechanica, about how circus can liberate you.” His shows feature silk elements and aerials, as well as hula hoopers and spinning fire staffs.

Anderson studied mime and theatre in college and was inspired to create his acrobatic mime troupe in the late 1990s. “The genesis for all of this comes from Mummenschanz [Swiss mask theater troupe who perform in a surreal mask- and prop-oriented style] and Vsevolod Meyerhold [Russian and Soviet experimental theater director, actor, and theatrical producer; 1874-1940], a contemporary of [Konstantin] Stanislavski” [Russian and Soviet theater director, actor, and teacher – father of modern Western acting; 1863-1938], he explains. “He developed biomechanical theatre, which is a physical representation of complex internal emotional concepts, and he built these crazy sets with slides and intense physical work activities.

“What I find is that people have muscle memory from years of play and putting their butt over their head,” Anderson continued. “The play and the sense of adventure and creating a character hits on a deep childhood thing—everyone has an aspiration to be a famous performer. Doing something like circus speaks to that.”

Peter Andrew Danzig is an actor and personal trainer, as well as the founder of Theatrical Trainer, a Philadelphia-based company designed to condition actors, dancers, and circus professionals to enhance their performance. His company provides one-on-one coaching to prepare an actor for a specific role. He leads workshops for casts and teaches new skills in movement coaching, choreography, and physical theatre.

Danzig realized that the landscape for physical theatre in Philadelphia was growing quickly, with independent companies and large resident theatres incorporating acrobatics, light tumbling, and circus arts, as well as general extreme physicality and even Parkour into their productions. His training is based on kinesiology, biometrics, and each individual’s physiology.

[According to Wikipedia: Parkour is an athletic training discipline or sport in which practitioners attempt to get from one point to another in the fastest and most efficient way possible, without assisting equipment and often while performing feats of acrobatics. With roots in military obstacle course training [parcours du combattant – French for ‘obstacle course’] and martial arts, parkour includes flipping, running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping, plyometrics, rolling, and quadrupedal movement—whatever is suitable for a given situation.]

“There are no longer actors who just dance—there are actors who do circus silk work [also known as “aerial silks,” among other names], and tumbling, and backflips, and are extreme physical contortionists,” Danzig explained. “But most actors are not specifically trained one way or another to address the needs of the role.” His company, then, was created to help “prepare character movement,” incorporating circus arts and physicality.

Indeed, it is common now for directors to ask performers if they have a front roll or know other forms of tumbling. Danzig recalls, “On one of my first jobs, I was asked to stand on someone’s shoulders and create shapes. I had danced my whole life, but this was something new. It was out of my repertoire.”

Learning the skills is one thing, but just as important is learning to stay in proper condition to do them on a theatrical schedule; singing, climbing, or dancing 7-8 times a week for 2-3 hours at a time means burning calories at a rate equivalent to that of a soccer player. To keep up one’s stamina, Danzig recommends conditioning exercises that range from planks and V-ups to leg lifts and weight-bearing activities that engage the body’s core.

“Actors need to think of themselves as athletes,” said Danzig. “Circus works with biometrics, so we want them to be able to bound and jump and land, and use multi-plane arc movement to address that kind of work. There needs to be upper body strength.”

A recent example of his work: He taught the cast of [Philadelphia’s] Luna Theater Company’s all-female production of Animal Farm [17 October-7 November 2024] some light tumbling and acrobatic work, including building a windmill with their bodies.

“You can’t just go to a gym and do crunches or a cardio class—it’s a different kind of conditioning and a rigorous skill set,” Danzig explains. “If the actor is climbing silks, push-ups and upper body strengthening and push-and-pull activities are much better than lifting weights and doing bicep curls.”

Also in the City of Brotherly Love is Damon Bonetti, founding artistic director of the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, a theatre company that has begun to incorporate circus. Their upcoming staging of He Who Gets Slapped (March 30–April 10), adapted by Walter Wykes from Leonid Andreyev’s [Russian playwright; 1871-1919] original [1915], is set in a seedy French circus in the 1920s, although the actual circus is only heard from offstage. Still, Bonetti—whose background is in more traditional theatre—plans to incorporate circus arts into the production. He has partnered with the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts and hired performers from local companies such as the Headlong Dance Theater and Pig Iron Theatre Company, who are adept at physical work.

Bonetti plans to use circus and physical arts to create interludes at the top and in between scenes that will involve live music and establish location, as well as create flashbacks that further or foreshadow the plot and character development. “The actress playing the show’s lion tamer bought a bullwhip and is going to learn the skills involved with cracking it,” Bonetti boasts.

While this is Bonetti’s first production with circus arts, he already is open to incorporating more acrobatics into his theatre. “Here in Philly, we have had such a rich tradition of physical performance,” Bonetti said. “Ten years ago, it was very divided between physical and classical text; they didn’t mix much. But those bridges have come down, so that you’re not just going to see a classic performance done in a traditional way. Even if it’s not a super-movement piece, you’re going to see more expressions featuring the body; it’s more visceral. With this particular play, it worked out perfectly.” Indeed, though he admitted that “it’s a tease that we don’t get to see the performance of circus,” by incorporating “interludes that are organic in the story,” he’s made circus integral to the storytelling.

Caitlyn Larsson is the director of Fit to Fly [Berri, South Australia], a company that independently contracts with theatres to provide “circus to real people.” A self-described “fixer,” Larsson travels all over the world to work with companies that want to incorporate circus in their productions.

“I come in early and start with nothing, or come in late and fix what they already have—make it presentable, make it pretty, make it understandable to the audience, tell a story, give it life, and make it more dimensional,” she explains. “I get people who can dance or do aerial—not both—and I open them up to doing more to show them how amazing they can be.”

Larsson’s work involves creating trust and a safe space for this kind of play. She tailors her work to individuals and groups, and trains performers for circus routines at their level.

“The real work is bringing character to a piece—gestures and facial expressions—and bring that to the story,” says Larsson. “If your character is climbing a fabric, why does he do that? What does he want at the top of it?”

Part of her craft is guiding actors by talking about the world of the play and creating that world’s distinctive rules.

“I have directorial training, so I pick out what they are trying to express,” she says. “People hold things they create dear to their hearts, and theatre doesn’t always work that way. You sift through the parts that work . . . I show them they have a good instinct when they have an idea or a suggestion that doesn’t quite work, but I can also take them in a different direction; it’s remolding the tidbits.”

Larsson has also performed as an aerialist and done volunteer work with Clowns Without Borders, a humanitarian organization. Hers is a hectic life, but Larsson acknowledges that the pros outweigh the cons.

“I’m OK not having many belongings,” she says. “I have three suitcases of circus paraphernalia and one suitcase of clothes. I don’t own property or have a lease. I’m a vagrant; I love to travel.” (She did point that she has a retirement account, but “no guarantees when I get old.”)

It turns out that some people do still run away with the circus.”

[Gary M. Kramer is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia who, in addition to his articles for AT, reports about film and writes reviews for Salon, Cineaste, Gay City News, Philadelphia Gay News, The San Francisco Bay Times, and Film International.  He’s the author of Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews (Harrington Park Press, 2006), and the co-editor of Directory of World Cinema: Argentina, Volumes 1 and 2 (Intellect, 2014 and 2016).

[Readers of Rick On Theater will have discerned that I have an affinity for physical theater.  I’ve never been a big fan of clowning (see my reviews of Theater of Panic in “Short Takes: Some Unique Performances,” 28 July 2018, and The Second New York International Festival of Clown Theatre in “Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive,” 15 March 2021), but there have always been exceptions.

[I have, however, always admired the work if Bill Irwin and David Shiner (see my report on “Old Hats,” 22 March 2013).  There are other physical theater performances on which I’ve blogged, notably “Golem (Lincoln Center Festival, 2016),” 28 August 2016; I also greatly enjoyed The Street of Crocodiles by the Théâtre de Complicité (now named just Complicite), a troupe dedicated to the physical theater style of Jacques Lecoq.  (I saw Crocodiles years before I started ROT, so there’s no report on that show.

[I myself studies mime, originally for the physical discipline—but I enjoyed it so much that I actually performed it a few times.  I also coached the casts of two shows in mime when I was in grad school.)

[For several years, I was also closely associated with the late avant-garde director and play-maker Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), about whom I’ve blogged a lot, and he had an abiding interest in circus performances, an attraction which had begun in Hovey Burgess’s New York University classes when Shapiro was studying directing at the School of the Arts (later renamed the Tisch School of the Arts).

[Shapiro declared that his favorite classes at NYU had been the circus classes taught by Burgess (b. 1940), a circus clown and juggler who turned to teaching circus techniques to actors, and his productions were vert physical and often full of circus work.  But the level of physicality in his shows came not just from the circus work, but very much out of the Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99) techniques and principles to which Shapiro was devoted.

[A number of the actors with whom Shapiro worked extensively were also circus artists, such as Michael Preston, who performed as Rakitin with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, and Cecil MacKinnon, a founding member of the Pickle Family Circus and a ringmaster and clown with the Circus Flora.

[Circus performance is an immediate form: what the observer sees, as Burgess pointed out, is what is happening at that moment.  While conventional theater artists create illusions, Burgess believed, “Circus is more real.”]

"How to Survive an Election: Laugh With 'POTUS'"

by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho

[Avid theatergoers are quite familiar with political plays, like Gore Vidal’s 1960 The Best Man (revived on Broadway as Gore Vidal’s The Best Man in 2012; see “Best Man” by Kirk Woodward, 19 July 2012, and “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024), Part 2,” 25 September 2024), which is literally about politics and politicians, or Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (1983; see “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October 2009), which examines politically sensitive issues.

[But Gabriela Furtado Coutinho is here considering a play we can look at as therapy—laughter is the best medicine, as the saying goes (from the Book of Proverbs, popularized by Reader's Digest)—for recovering from today’s politics (specifically, 5 November two weeks back).  

[That’s how Furtado Coutinho sees POTUS, the 2022 political farce.  So have many spectators, it seems.

[This article was posted on American Theatre’s website on 28 October 2024.  It didn’t appear in the magazine’s print edition.  (All dates in the article, unless otherwise noted, are 2024.)]

Selina Fillinger’s popular farce about women taking control of the White House hits different this fall.

Selina Fillinger didn’t set out to write a play about electoral politics. But events in the current presidential election have transformed how audiences receive her play POTUS, Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, a farce about women having to step in for an incapacitated president. Sound familiar? POTUS, among the most-produced plays in the country for the second year running, was scheduled at 11 TCG member theatres well before Vice President Kamala Harris advanced to the top of the Democratic ticket in the aftermath of President Biden’s June debate performance. 

[Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the publisher of American Theatre, is a nonprofit membership service organization that promotes professional nonprofit theater in the United States. Its services and publications focus exclusively on its member theaters, though its publications are available generally.]

Of those productions, 10 are programmed in September and October, before Election Day on Nov. 5. (One brave theatre, Zoetic Stage in Miami, has slated it for Jan. 9-26, 2025.) There are a few tried-and-true ways to cope with election jitters: inhaling ice cream straight from the carton, obsessing over bad TV, piercing the ceiling with existential gaze every morning and night. POTUS has been offering a communal alternative: shared laughter. Said Suzanne Tidwell, house services manager at Trinity Rep ([Trinity Repertory Theatre, Providence, Rhode Island] where POTUS ran Sept. 5-Oct. 27), of reactions to the show, “I’ve heard it repeated over and over: ‘Thank you. We needed that tonight. We really need to laugh.’”

Tidwell recalled the experience of debate night in particular, “They were quick to respond to every joke. They chose to be at the theatre that night instead of watching the debate. It became a sanctuary.”

[The second presidential debate (Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris) took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 10 September at 9:00-10:30 p.m. (EDT).]

Artistic directors and house managers shared with me how this sentiment is ringing true for theatregoers across the country, in spite of the abysmal divides among Americans. The play’s hilarious confrontation of power, patriarchy, and “the pursuit of sanity” already felt timely when it opened on Broadway in 2022 and ran through the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

[POTUS opened for a limited run at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway on 27 April 2022 after 13 previews starting on 14 April. (For those not familiar with the acronym, 'POTUS' is the common shorthand designation for “President of the United States,” referring to the current executive.) The show closed on 14 August 2022 after 126 regular performances. It was playwright Selina Fillinger’s Broadway début (and only her second play presented in New York City).  

[The production was directed by Susan Stroman (in her non-musical Broadway début), with scenic design by Beowulf Boritt, costume design by Linda Cho, lighting design by Sonoyo Nishikawa, and sound design by Jessica Paz. It starred Lilli Cooper (Chris), Lea DeLaria (Bernadette), Rachel Dratch (Stephanie), Julianne Hough (Dusty), Suzy Nakamura (Jean), Julie White (Harriet), and Vanessa Williams (Margaret).

[POTUS received 2022 Tony nominations for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for Rachel Dratch and Julie White and Best Scenic Design of a Play and was also nominated for 2022 Drama League Awards for Outstanding Production of a Play and Distinguished Performance Awards for Dratch and White.

[The show got mixed reviews from the New York Times and the New York Post, but the ensemble cast was generally praised for their comedy work by Variety, the Washington Post, and other outlets. Show-Score, the theater review aggregator, gave POTUS a score of 85%, with 92% positive reviews.

[The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade (22 January 1973) was issued on 24 June 2022.]

But it feels especially bracing right now to watch an all-femme cast avert disaster at the White House.

Take Trinity Rep’s first impulse toward the script: As artistic director Curt Columbus put it, they “picked it as an antidote to two old white men talking at each other. Then two weeks before rehearsal, one of the old white men dropped out and the world changed. It was such a different environment in the rehearsal room.”

At [Baltimore] Maryland’s Everyman Theatre, where the play ran Sept. 1-29, associate artistic director and POTUS actor Tuyết Thị Phạm said her rehearsal room also buzzed with “a shot of adrenaline” when it became clear that [Vice President Kamala] Harris would be the Democratic nominee.

The day that news broke, Curious Theatre Company [Denver] artistic director Jada Suzanne Dixon drove through picturesque Colorado to rehearsals for POTUS, which would play Sept. 7-Oct. 13. She wondered, “Do we need to do anything different? That was the question I was mulling over. By the time I got into the rehearsal room, there was this buzz and energy in the room. I said to everyone, ‘The beautiful thing about this play is it’s already on the page. Yes, the world is doing something different. Yet we don’t have to do anything different with our storytelling, because it is already here: women’s rights, feminism, and intersectionality.’”

Some productions responded to the historical significance of Harris’s campaign with subtle nods, adding Beyoncé’s “Freedom” [2016; from Lemonade] to the bow music or to the “Bitch Beats” playlist referenced in the show. Tracking such changes was self-professed theatre enthusiast “Broadway Bekah” Walsh, who has traveled around the country since the play premiered on Broadway to catch as many productions as possible. So far she’s seen POTUS 34 times at 20 theatres.

[A musical bow is an ancient musical instrument that can be picked, struck, or bowed to create sound.

[On her website, Susan Stroman notes: “As part of the plot, Harriet encourages Stephanie to listen to a playlist called ‘Bitch Beats’ – a compilation of songs that are the quintessence of female power, like Rihanna’s ‘Breakin’ Dishes’ or Bikini Kill’s ‘Rebel Girl’. She motivates Stephanie to find her confidence by dancing out a series of Power Poses.”

[Bekah Walsh, who describes herself as “theater obsessed,” is a theater writer and influencer from Baltimore, Maryland. In August 2023, after having seen POTUS twice on Broadway (see above) before its limited run ended, took off on what she dubbed the “POTUS Trail,” during which she traveled around the U.S. and Canada to see as many regional productions as she could. Starting at the Laboratory Theater of Florida in Fort Myers (4-19 August 2023), she posted her experiences online on several different websites, ending her trail in May 2024 with the production at the Sylvan Adams Theatre of the Segal Centre for Performing Arts in Montreal, Quebec, Canada (12 May-2 June 2024).]

Walsh said she’s watched the tone of the play go “from a place of commiseration, laughing about being stuck represented by men, to suddenly having hope, to having the potential of a woman in this position.” Few things hit the same, she said, in every production: Some have leaned more into the ending’s dramatic edge, while some went further with the farce throughout. Many were staged in thrust, Arena‘s [Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage; 13 October-12 November 2023] was in the round, and Everyman’s had actors running through the audience (while they improved clever DMV-specific references). 

[“DMV” is a local appellation which stands for the “District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia.”]

But across all the productions she’s seen since July, one line has jumped out: “Why isn’t she president?”

Fillinger anticipated these nuances but worked to ensure that the script would remain evergreen. The dynamics in the play, she said, “translate to any institution, office, or household.” At any moment, she said, “People are going to project it onto whatever the electoral moment is.” There’s been a “breadth of interpretation.” At one opening, she was especially caught off guard when, at the end, an audience member exclaimed, “Nikki Haley for President!” Laughing at the memory, she said, “But I hope that people can also see what’s happening underneath, because that’s where the real work begins.”

“Whoever is president, it is going to be on us, on the people, to make our voices clear, and that will always be the case. Patriarchy and white supremacy exist across parties, and there are fundamental issues with our democracy,” Fillinger concluded.

All the theatremakers I interviewed about POTUS said it brought in new audiences and fuller houses than expected. Even in Tampa [Florida], where audiences are more conservative than in other cities where the show has played, the turnout “cracked our all-time Top 10 list. The community really embraced it,” said David M. Jenkins, artistic director of Jobsite Theater, where it ran Sept. 4-29.

Indeed, the nonpartisan play has proven its expansive resonance not only in the number of U.S. productions over the past year, but also in how well it translated abroad. Back in April, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus production in Hamburg, Germany played with a compelling postmodern take.

[The German translation of POTUS by Nico Rabenald (Die Schattenpräsidentinnen – “The shadow presidents”; nb: the word Präsidentin in German means a female president), directed by Claudia Bauer, premièred at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus (German Playhouse) on 12 April. It ran until 31 May.]

Still, Curt Colombus of Trinity Rep reminded me of a sobering U.S. reality: “It might be harder to laugh after Nov. 5.” That’s why he—and presumably most other theatres—steered clear of programming the play post-election.

Zoetic Stage will chart that great unknown as the team revs up to tell the story around Inauguration Day, regardless of the election outcome. Instead of a POTUS fall slot, they went with Martin McDonagh’s [2003; Broadway: 2005] The Pillowman [24 October-10 November] for spooky season, which “Miamians really get into,” said stage manager Vanessa McCloskey. But it’s not all innocent thrills: She and Zoetic artistic director Stuart Meltzer shared they were excited about Pillowman’s cautionary, unfortunately relevant depiction of a totalitarian government.

“Miami gets a lot of election exhaustion,” said McCloskey. As a former resident, I can vouch for this: I’ve personally witnessed political tension rift even the closest of Latine families living in South Florida. The political proves personal, with trauma from citizens’ original homelands informing voting decisions in this heavily immigrant and first-generation-American community.

Meltzer elaborated, “In our community, we weren’t sure how POTUS would be received amid that tension” in the run-up to Election Day. But by the time January comes around, they reasoned, “The decision will have been made,” as McCloskey put it, “and there will be more space to laugh together.”

Creatives hold their breath to see not only how the election will turn out, but how the play will feel as a result. 

While artists may swing the energetic pendulum of public discourse and crave revolution, they still live in context, the Florida productions reminded me. Jobsite’s Jenkins employed intentionality similar to Zoetic’s with a politically diverse city. The goal in Tampa, Jenkins said, was not to alienate audiences before they even came into the theatre.

Other theatres around the country, meanwhile, marketed the material’s edgy side, from language and slur reclamation to protest. At Chicago’s Steppenwolf [Theatre Company; 26 October-3 December 2023] last November, for instance, the dramatic final moment saw Harriet (played by force of nature Sandra Marquez) flicking a cigarette butt onto the American flag, which went up in smoke. Tampa had to tread in the opposite direction.

“We truly avoided even using the term ‘feminist farce,’” said Jenkins. “It’s a trigger, and the work does speak for itself. Sometimes a theatre might want to prescribe a reaction—we feel a need to stress the importance of what we’re doing. But sometimes it’s not conducive to bringing in an audience. So we relied on the experience; we talked about ‘girls night out’ and levity.” A few patrons, he said, sent angry emails after seeing the show, but they were a minority. Cheers were heard at key lines most nights. But when it came to Dusty’s, “Affordable, safe reproductive health care is a basic human right,” at a time wherein Amendment 4, Right to Abortion Initiative is on the ballot, the room pulsated with a different kind of energy. 

Observed Jenkins, “You could feel that people wanted to respond in a positive way, but at the same time, they weren’t laughing or applauding; there was some alternate energy. As if that moment crosses the line too much into our reality. As a producer and theatremaker, I appreciated that, having this mixed company sit in discomfort together.”

Surprisingly, Bekah Walsh said, at performances she attended around the country she noticed the most intermission walkouts not in Florida, Texas, or Tennessee, but in California. “You could see some seats were emptier at this one performance, which I thought was funny, being in a liberal area,” she recalled. “Maybe it was just the audience that day. You never know.” 

You really never know. “Maybe personally I had some nervousness around how the audience might receive it,” said Jada Suzanne Dixon, even at edgy Curious Theatre Company in Denver [7 September-13 October]. “But then there were stories—like, someone came with a friend who lives in the neighborhood, blocks away, and had never been to our theatre. And they shared, ‘I’m going to become a subscriber.’ This play opened up doors for us.”

Each theatre had its own wraparound programming, from voting information to pantsuit nights, but one that stood out to me was Trinity Rep’s “Femme Night” [11 October]. That iteration opened up dialogue about the rarity of femme-centered professional spaces. Suzanne Tidwell, Trinity Rep house services manager, shared with me how impactful it was to her, working the event.

“I’m usually busy and focused on logistics,” she said. “But I looked around at the lobby with the pre-show reception and realized I was in a space entirely filled with femme-identifying audience members, board members, and staff members. I saw this beautiful space to feel seen. As a woman of a certain age, when I started doing theatre, I was the first female to have been on the technical crew at my university. To be able to look around at the femme-identifying lighting ops and sound ops and run crew and know we’re doing the work of reclaiming our language and vocabulary and space has been a really moving experience for me.”

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece that extrapolated on my complicated relationship with mirrors, with looking on my femme and Latine body. As each staff member involved with POTUS productions described mothers bringing their daughters and daughters bringing their mothers to this show, I heard their glimmering hope. The image of Kamala Harris’s niece looking up at her during the DNC came to mind.

[The first link above takes readers to an article, “Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias” by Furtado Coutinho, the author of “How to Survive an Election.” It’s posted on this blog in “Theater Education & Training, Part 3” (9 October 2024).]

The women depicted in this play are complicated, imperfect, messy, and complicit, and the fact that they’re allowed to be so gives me hope that we as a country can have more complicated, imperfect, messy conversations with one another about our systems of power. One by one, mirrors transform and small glass ceilings break, as femmes of every age watch POTUS’s women live large. We recognize the largest parts of ourselves. Dark, decisive, daring.

Fillinger has said that conservatives think the POTUS in question is Clinton, and liberals think it’s Trump. But that offstage body was never the invisible matter that mattered. Close your eyes and see it: Across the country, across many lines of division, we are all laughing at the same play. Fillinger might have given us the one POTUS we can all agree on. I consider it a win.

[Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and raised in the vibrant immigrant community of South Florida, Gabriela Furtado Coutinho is a U.S.-based actor, writer, director, cultural strategist, and graduate of Northwestern University (Theatre/English Creative Writing BA).  In addition to now guest lecturing at Northwestern, she serves as Chicago Associate Editor of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre magazine.  

[In addition to previous work with various Chicago collectives, as well as The Kennedy Center in their theater education/TYA division and Emmys/Television Academy in development of new kids’ TV, Furtado Coutinho has experience in developing new work, curating tangible care practices, writing in lyrical verse, and embodying power classical roles.

[On ROT, Coutinho’s writing appears in “Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias” as referenced above and “‘Wish You Were Here: A Radical Access Roundtable,’” 6 July 2024.

[Born in Berkeley, California, in 1994, Salina Fillinger grew up in Eugene, Oregon.  Working one summer at Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, she saw a production of Julius Caesar and started to envision a life in the arts.

[She left Eugene to study acting at Northwestern University in Chicago and took her first playwriting class in her sophomore year.  Her teacher encouraged her to enter the university’s Agnes Nixon Festival, established by the creator of the classic soap operas One Life to Live and All My Children.  Fillinger’s play, inspired by a headline about a man who walked into a bar and swallowed a pickled human toe used as a gimmick in drinks, was selected.

[The student dramatist went on to win the 2015 national Judith Barlow Prize for an original one-act play that was inspired by the work of a historic woman playwright.  In Fillinger’s case, it was 1928’s Machinal by Sophie Treadwell (1885-1970) and Fillinger’s play was Three Landings and a Fire Escape, about three women who become improbable friends and help one another through difficulties, one of whom summons the fortitude to take on the troubles.

[Fillinger morphed from a would-be actor to a writer, and in 2016, she heard the broadcast of presidential candidate Donald Trump “bragging about grabbing women by their genitals.  I, in turn, sat down to write a farce.”  By 2017, she had written POTUS, Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, a farce in which the President of the United States inadvertently spins a verbal gaffe into a worldwide crisis and seven brilliant and stressed-out women on whom he relies risk everything, including their sanity, to keep him out of trouble.

[“The play is highly political, but it is not partisan. Republicans think it’s about Bill Clinton, Democrats think it’s about Donald Trump,” says the playwright.  Nevertheless, she had some difficulty selling the script—but “in 2022, well into Biden’s first term, POTUS premiered on Broadway.”  It became the third most-produced play of 2023—and remained on the list in 2024 at number seven.]