Volume 36, Number 1, March 2026
A Note from the Editor by Sukanya Chakrabarti
It is just past midnight, and a yellow streetlight is filtering through the window of our apartment in Kolkata. I have finally submitted the grades for my fall courses and am nearing the end of the semester. After a day spent with my mother, who is living with dementia, while also caring for my ten-year-old son—here with me in India during his winter break—I find quiet time only after everyone has turned in for the night. As an academic and an artist, I often find myself compelled to maintain a deliberate privacy around my personal life, foregrounding institutional notions of "professionalism" that obscure the care labor embedded in daily living. In doing so, I separate my everyday self from my professional one, concerned that their overlap might be perceived as unproductive, inadequate, or unprofessional.
As a first-generation immigrant to the United States with family dispersed across the globe, my life unfolds across shifting geographies, time zones, and temporal rhythms. I move constantly between roles—academic, artist, professor, mother, daughter, among others. My relationship with time feels perpetually taut, stretched between urgency and absence—I am either pursuing it or running against it. Space, too, feels elastic, reshaped by migration, return, and distance. Yet amid this constant motion, I return repeatedly to the need to anchor myself in the "here" and the "now."
This anchoring takes shape through my work in theatre and performance studies, through my advocacy for systemic change toward greater inclusion, equity, and social justice, and through a deepening commitment to collaboration and interconnectedness in a moment marked by profound division. As I gather the contributions for this issue, I am struck by how closely each article and Note from the Field aligns with my own politics and lived commitments—not only as an artist-scholarprofessor but as a human being in the world. Together, these pieces reflect shared urgencies around care, labor, memory, pedagogy, and collective responsibility, reminding me that our intellectual work is inseparable from the lives we are living.
The article "Playing Childlessness: Motherhood in Performing Arts Academia" examines how motherhood is marginalized within academic culture, with intensified consequences in the performing arts. Drawing on lived experience, interviews, surveys, and existing scholarship, Grace Edgar and Molly Richards Claassen argue that academic structures remain deeply patriarchal, privileging childless norms and male faculty whose caregiving labor is often outsourced or invisible. Their research reveals stark disparities: while nearly half of mothers across academia report career penalties, that figure rises to nearly three-quarters for mothers in theatre, music, and dance.
Through qualitative testimonies and quantitative data, the article documents discriminatory hiring practices, punitive tenure expectations, inadequate maternity and lactation policies, financial precarity, and negative messaging that pressures women to delay, conceal, or forgo motherhood altogether. Performing arts faculty face additional barriers due to rigid rehearsal schedules, production labor, travel requirements, and the devaluation of caregiving work. As a result, many women "perform childlessness" to survive professionally.
The authors challenge the false binary between intellectual rigor and caregiving, putting forth an assertion grounded in matricentric feminist theory that motherhood enhances teaching, artistry, leadership, and empathy. Edgar and Claassen urge us to consider shifting the narrative. Instead of the question "But what do you do with your kids?"—a question they recognize as one unlikely to be posed to a male colleague—they instead insist that "those with the power to provide opportunities to artists should be asking, 'what do you need?'" They conclude with a call to action for systemic reform—advocating for inclusive policies, childcare access, equitable leave, flexible scheduling, and cultural shifts that recognize motherhood as an asset rather than a liability in academia.
Centering ethics of care for the creation and sustainability of a "more humane and equitable workplace," "Braiding Stories: Hair Care and Solidarity on Broadway" by Christin Essin examines how backstage hair and wig work became a critical site of racial justice activism in the Broadway industry following the COVID-19 shutdown. Through feminist care ethics and ethnographic research, Essin analyzes worker-initiated changes in haircare practices for Black performers at Girl from the North Country and Hadestown, demonstrating how the historical devaluation of care labor has enabled discriminatory treatment.
Essin's article foregrounds the often invisible labor of Broadway hairstylists—many of whom lack institutional support, adequate pay, and training in Afro textured hair—while documenting how Black performers have long been forced to shoulder this labor themselves. Essin situates these practices within broader histories of racialized and gendered carework under capitalism, tracing how industry hierarchies obscure responsibility by framing performer–technician relationships as adversarial.
Through case studies of collaborations between stylists and performers, Essin highlights how intimate professional relationships grounded in an ethic of care enabled cross-union solidarity, self-advocacy, and material change, including hiring additional stylists, creating wigs that reflect performers' natural textures, and shifting representational norms. These micro-interventions, catalyzed by pandemic disruption and a racial reckoning, reveal the potential for coalition-based repair of systemic inequities and position care labor as essential to ethical, inclusive theatrical production that amplifies the "centrality of human relationships and interconnectedness."
The engagement with these needs for human connection and effective collaboration is also extended into the discussion in the following article, "Staging the Archive: Dr. Héctor P. García." "How does a playwright take a hero down from his pedestal and honor him while also capturing the essence of his humanity?" ask coauthors Marco Darien Muñoz, Thomas A. Oldham, and Iraisa Ann Reilly. In its examination of how performance can activate historical memory to address contemporary political urgency, this article documents the creation of House Bill 3979 Amendment #10: The Life and Works of Héctor P. García, a biographical play staged at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2022. Drawing from García's extensive campus-held archives alongside student devising workshops, interviews, and community storytelling, the project sought to counter the "pending erasure" of Latine civil rights history amid Texas legislation restricting diversity and education.
Rather than presenting a straightforward biography, the play blended archival materials with fictional framing to humanize García and connect his legacy to students' civic responsibilities. Grounded in theories of archive and repertoire, "adapturgy," and collective memory, the processcentered production bridged campus and community, empowered student agency, and demonstrated how staging the past can serve as an act of resistance, education, and communal remembrance in the present.
In "The Henry Experiment: Exploring Shakespeare's Text with OP-ish Methods," Danielle Rosvally, Troy Coleman, Ian Downes, Teya Juarez, and Kambrea Blu Lagrosa argue that Shakespeare's underproduced history plays can support antiracist pedagogy when productions prioritize salience—what "leaps" from the text for specific audiences—over inherited notions of relevance or authenticity. Centered on an experimental Henry VI, Part 2 at the University at Buffalo in 2024, Rosvally et al. detail how the creative team used "OP-ish" practices: selectively borrowing from Shakespearean Original Practice (like cue-script "scrolls" and a Prompter) while rejecting elements that would distance audiences from the text. Combining these methods with "yassification" (a hypercontemporary, queer remix of Shakespeare's cultural capital), the production embraced improvisation, planned randomness (bell prompts), and collaborative design to dismantle bardolatry and hierarchies of expertise. The result was a low-theory, access-centered performance ecology that helped student actors and audiences connect Shakespeare's political unrest to present-day concerns, making the history play newly legible, playful, and pedagogically powerful as an antiracist theatre practice.
The online articles in this issue interrogate how performance value is culturally constructed, revealing that perceived decline—whether attributed to aging voices or to K-pop's supposed Western derivation—is produced by institutional bias rather than artistic capacity. Chuyun Oh argues in her article "G-Dragon: 'The King of K-pop' from Indigenous Korean Performing Arts" that K-pop dance is not a derivative of Western pop but emerges from Korea's long-standing system of elite and traditional performing arts education. Tracing her own experience through autoethnographic research alongside institutional histories of arts middle and high schools, idol academies, and universities, she shows how prodigy training, syncretic pedagogy, and group-based performance underpin both traditional Korean arts and contemporary K-pop. Through fieldwork at a National Gugak High School concert, Oh demonstrates how traditional practices—such as salpuri, samul nori, and synchronous group dance—anticipate key features of K-pop choreography. The article culminates in a close reading of G-Dragon's 2025 music video DRAMA, revealing how his choreography fuses Korean shamanic breath, traditional theatre, ballet, hip hop, and contemporary dance. G-Dragon's training at the National School of Traditional Korean Arts positions him as a living confluence of heritage and global pop, embodying K-pop as a genre rooted in Korean cultural lineage rather than Western imitation.
Jackie Olson, in her article "Aged Out or Amplified? Reclaiming the Voice of Women in Theatre," examines how aging women's voices are marginalized in theatre despite their technical skill and expressive depth. Drawing on Jayne Raisborough et al.'s study "Reduced to Curtain Twitchers?," Olson shows how women actors aged fifty to seventy are sidelined through ageist assumptions about vocal decline, limited casting opportunities, and dismissive rehearsal practices. Their perceived vocal "loss" is revealed as contextual silencing rather than biological deterioration. She critiques vocal pedagogy and industry norms that privilege youthful timbre and flexibility while overlooking the resonance, control, and authority of mature voices. Through performance case studies—Jen Silver-man's The Roommate and Death Becomes Her: The Musical—Olson demonstrates how roles centered on middle-aged women challenge age stereotypes by framing vocal change as growth and agency. Ultimately, she argues for pedagogical and industrial shifts that recognize vocal evolution across the lifespan, asserting that age can deepen vocal presence and enrich theatrical representation rather than diminish it. By centering marginalized performers across age, genre, and culture, both online articles reveal how embodied training, lived experience, and longevity challenge dominant narratives of perceived decline and authenticity in the performing arts.
The articles in this issue identify an urgency to recognize the present challenges and initiate change in real and practical ways. Continuing an examination of the "real," Kirsten Pullen, in her Note from the Field "ATHE 2025: The Real," reflects on her long relationship to ATHE. She explains why moving the 2025 conference online became, in their view, the only ethical choice. Drawing on member income data, shrinking university travel budgets after COVID-19, and the environmental and labor costs of hotel-based conferencing, the piece argues that in-person meetings increasingly exclude graduate students, contingent faculty, and underfunded scholars while also straining ATHE's finances. The online format lowered costs, enabled broader participation, and supported ATHE's equity-oriented grants.
Pullen's Note details how the committee designed a virtual conference around "The Real," including themed tracks, new submission formats, spring symposia, and sponsorships. As political conditions worsened—attacks on DEIA, visas, arts funding, and higher education—the program pivoted toward urgent advocacy: plenaries and town halls addressing virtual/real power, institutional survival, coalition-building, and collective action. Pullen recognizes the need of the hour and asserts, "We need to make art rooted in local, immediate contexts that solves problems and answers questions. Despite the material and existential threats that surround us, our work has value, especially when we collaborate with unlikely allies. This is the only ethical choice."
In his Note from the Field, "The Real, the Vital, and the Visionary," CarlosAlexis Cruz reflects on ATHE 2025 as a turning point for theatre education in higher education. He asks, "Are we passive participants or active players at this moment?" Framed by a virtual conference held amid political hostility toward the arts, DEIA initiatives, and the humanities, this Note argues that theatre education is undergoing a necessary transformation from Eurocentric and insular training toward civic engagement and collective action. Cruz positions theatre educators not as passive observers but as "constant visionaries" tasked with shaping reality through art, pedagogy, and advocacy. Drawing on Freire, Brecht, Boal, and contemporary conference dialogues, he calls for rejecting scarcity mindsets, nostalgia, and professional compliance in favor of shared leadership, mutual aid, and community-rooted practice. Cruz's Note redefines "the real" as plural, hybrid, and politically situated, insisting that inclusion alone is insufficient without systemic change. Cruz concludes that gathering—virtually or in person—is essential to sustaining a resilient, justice-driven future for theatre education.
The contributions in this issue therefore recognize the need for clarity, with a mindful focus on the real, which emphasizes the urgency of equity and fairness in labor practices, a focus on human relationships, care-driven collaborations, resisting the divisive, oppressive, classist and elitist practices, and finally an ability to shift the narrative and pivot toward active transformations.
This issue is the result of extraordinary care and labor, and I am deeply grateful to Managing Editor Aileen M. Keenan, Coeditor Kimberly Jew, Editorial Assistant and Online Editor Heather Barfield, Book Review Editor Jashodhara Sen, and everyone whose commitment brought it to fruition.
As I close this introduction in the quiet hours of the night, I return to the shared insistence running through each contribution—that theatre, performance, and scholarship are never separate from the conditions in which we live, labor, care, and survive. The articles and Notes from the Field gathered here ask us to remain attentive to the present—not as an abstract moment but as an embodied, relational, and political reality shaped by caregiving, precarity, racialized labor, historical erasure, pedagogical urgency, and collective resistance. Together, these works refuse neutrality. They insist on care as methodology, collaboration as praxis, and equity as an ongoing commitment rather than an aspirational slogan.
What emerges across this issue is a call to act with intention—to question inherited norms, to disrupt structures that reward invisibility and exclusion, and to imagine practices that center human relationships over institutional convenience. Whether through reframing motherhood in academia, foregrounding backstage labor, activating archives, retooling Shakespearean pedagogy, or reimagining professional gathering itself, each contribution models ways of staying present and accountable to one another.
CarlosAlexis Cruz reminds us that inclusion alone "is no longer the goal; systemic transformation is." In a moment marked by fragmentation and fatigue, this issue of Theatre Topics affirms that gathering—intellectually, artistically, and ethically—remains vital. By holding space for complexity, care, and collective visioning, these pages invite us not only to reflect on "the real" but to shape it together.