A Note from the Editor

As an official journal of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Theatre Topics traditionally inaugurates the first issue of the year with documentation from the previous ATHE conference. Boston’s complex history of revolutions (both marked [the Boston Tea Party] and unmarked [the Wampanoag uprising]) inspired the conference’s theme, “Theatres of Revolution: Performance, Pedagogy, and Protest.” As we had just published our special issue on Theatre and Protest, the conference felt like an exciting continuation of the many questions raised by our contributors: What makes theatricality a particularly effective as a form of protest? How can and should theatre respond to an increasingly polarized society? How can we call attention to events that often go unrecognized? How can we convert theoretical ideas into action, both in and outside our institutions?

In my introduction to that special issue, I expressed the waves of hope and despair that I sensed many of us find ourselves riding. It was therefore both heartbreaking and emboldening to hear the joint keynote address of Quiara Alegría Hudes and her sister Gabriela Serena Sanchez. In vivid and personal language, they speak openly about discrimination, in both theatre and life, and the sheer exhaustion of having to continually navigate such events. I feel immensely honored to publish their address and hope that their words invoke critical conversations in the theatre community. In that spirit, Theatre Topics’ editorial team invited Martine Kei Green-Rogers, president of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas; Shawn LaCount, artistic director, Company One Theatre, Boston; Patricia Ybarra, former president of ATHE; and Harvey Young, ATHE’s current president to write responses to the address. Both the keynote and the responses can be found on our online edition of this issue. There, we also provide Bethany Hughes’s depiction of one of the conference outings in “Guesting on Indigenous Land: Plimoth Plantation, Land Acknowledgment, and Decolonial Praxis,” as well as Monica White Ndounou and Nicole Hodges Persley’s “Stepping Up: Reflections on the ATHE 2018 Plenary and Pedagogy Clinic,” which provides valuable guidance in addressing some of the challenges raised in the keynote.

While I was working on this issue, the theatre universe coincidently put in me in contact with both Quiara and Gabriela—concurrently, yet independently. I co-teach a community-based theatre class in which my Drew University students mentor high school students from Newark, New Jersey. In the spring of 2018, we took both sets of students to see Miss You Like Hell, a new musical by Hudes at the Public Theater, which charts the journey of an undocumented mother and her daughter. Several of us (including myself, who had brought my own daughter) were affected by the show, but one student seemed particularly moved. Cristina Martinez, who has undocumented family members herself, was amazed to see this story come to light, and to see Latina women who were strong, vulnerable, funny, smart, sexy, and scared. After returning to campus, she framed her ticket.

In fall 2018, Cristina directed Hudes’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Water by the Spoonful. During our department debrief of the production, I shared an excerpt from the keynote address, because I felt it important to turn Hudes’s questions on ourselves:

Does your mainstage season, syllabus, and/or curriculum reinforce dominant cultural values, and in particular, appearance-based and presentation-based casting hierarchies? Do looks, class markers, accents, and presentation afford students more or less cachet when it comes to casting departmental productions? Are students paying thousands of dollars to learn and replicate upper-class market structures? Are departmental seasons modeling theatre for wealthy ticket buyers? Are there abundant opportunities for students to center themselves, and the department, in different values and aesthetic systems?

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Although I am proud that we produced this show, by no means do I feel that we have adequately addressed these questions. I am also mindful that answering Hudes’s revolutionary call is not a one-time event, but a commitment to enter into a state of vigilance. Nonetheless, I also believe it is important to mark the small ripples in the water as well as...