Level Up Your Reading List

By Octavio Solis

Retablos delivers seminal moments, rites of passage, and stunning vignettes about Octavio Solis’s life growing up at the U.S./Mexico border. Living a mile from the Rio Grande, Octavio describes living life among residents and those passing through on their way North. Channeling his inner youth, this memoir gives readers striking insight into his lived experience.

By Lauren Gunderson
Edited by Julie Felise Dubiner

For the play lovers out there, this collection of Lauren Gunderson’s plays discover the power, resilience, and indomitable spirit of women who have shaped history. Introduced and contextualized by dramaturg Julie Felise Dubiner, Revolutionary Women charts an unforgettable journey through time and place, celebrating and exploring the greatness of history’s women.

By James Magruder

Looking for a book about love? Search no further than playwright and dramaturg James Magruder’s The Desert Between Us. In this fictional story, Chase Kincaid lost his spouse due to a heart attack. Now, at the age of 37, he finds himself wondering if he can love again. A story of love, loss, and the spark of a new romance.

Edited by William C. Boles, Anja Hartl, DeRon S. Williams, Khalid Y. Long, and Martine Kei Green-Rogers

Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance investigates and illuminates the relationship between performance, identity, intersectionality, and activism in North America and beyond. Featuring contributions from scholars, artists, and activists across disciplines, this book aims to answer questions such as: How are Black artists, activists, and pedagogues wielding acts of rebellion to precipitate change?

By Virginia Grise

Virginia Grise’s Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto based on lessons learned in the free health clinics of San Antonio and New York acupuncture schools. From the treatments and consejos of curanderas to abortion doctors to Marxists artists, this manifesto explores Grise’s reflections on healthcare while living with PTSD, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings and crowd-funded self-care.

By Yvette Nolan

In this book, playwright Yvette Nolan traces Canadian Indigenous theater artists over the past 30 years, illuminating the connections, artistic genealogy, and development of a contemporary Indigenous theater practice. Medicine Shows examines how theater has been used to make medicine, reconnecting individuals and communities, giving voice to the silenced and disappeared, staging ceremony, and honoring ancestors.

By Ayanna Thompson

Ayanna Thompson’s latest book explores and explains blackface, its historical context, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. Thompson connects the first performances of Blackness on the English stage to the birth of blackface minstrelsy and contemporary performances of Blackness to anti-Black racism—while also providing hope for a future with new performance paradigms. Let’s get into the discussion!

Edited by Trevor Boffone 
and Carla Della Gatta

Co-edited by Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta, Shakespeare and Latinidad is a timely introduction of the diverse ways Shakespeare’s works can and have been adapted for Latinx communities. This work offers strategies for pedagogical and dramaturgical engagement with students when adapting Shakespeare for another culture, giving theater practitioners a new approach to Shakespeare’s works. Writers include Play On Shakespeare artists Migdalia Cruz, Octavio Solis, and Trevor Boffone.

Edited by Philippa Kelly and Associate Editor Amrita Ramanan

Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy offers fresh perspectives on how dramaturgs can support a production beyond rigid disciplinary expectations about what information and ideas are useful and how they should be shared. Offering personal insight into practice, this book is a perfect companion for any student, professor, or practitioner of dramaturgy looking to level-up their dramaturgical skills.

By Drew Lichtenberg

Theater history buffs will love dramaturg Drew Lichtenberg’s exploration of the Piscatorbühne season of 1927-1928, previously neglected as a current of radical experiment in modern theater. While theater seasons changed the course of the 20th- and 21-century theater, only the Piscatorbühne went bankrupt in less than a year. This book tells the story of its collapse, how it predicted the wider collapse of the late Weimar Republic, and how it relates to our own era of political polarization and economic instability.