Media Archive

“‘Othello’ is famously about race, but there is just as much text devoted to his being an immigrant to the society and not being native to that culture. The specter of religious bigotry is very present. It felt essential to me to put it in a contemporary setting.”

“Society created the environment in which Othello can be brought down,” [Director Bill Rauch] said. “If you take out the social constructs, the story doesn’t happen. And that’s what makes the play so stunningly relevant.”

Because the story centers on a cross-country road trip, [composer Erin] McKeown says she wanted the score to incorporate a wide variety of American genres and idioms in order to reflect the diversity of the nation itself. The show’s rich musical vocabulary includes everything from folk, rock, and jazz to blues, gospel, and Tejano and Cajun flavors.

Summer L. Williams directs Quiara Alegría Hudes and Erin McKeown’s musical “Miss You Like Hell,” a cross-country road trip taken by a mother and daughter, en route to the mother’s immigration hearing.

With a mix of iconoclasm and patriotism, Erin McKeown has created a unique and emblematic piece of art in the musical “Miss You Like Hell,” which follows a mother and daughter road trip and looks at the border wall that may come between them.

At the American Repertory Theater, “Barber Shop Chronicles” celebrates the camaraderie and intimacy of black barbershops in Africa and England. On stage, the shops come alive with arguments over Nelson Mandela, soccer, family, and music. There is dancing, there are tears, there are secrets shared. Some men come in to get cuts, some are there to just be among friends.

“What I want to do is going to take me beyond the rest of my life,” Matt Aucoin told me. That might sound like excessive modesty — or hubris — but it succinctly describes Aucoin’s ambitions.

Born in Nigeria, Ellams lives in London, where [Ellams’] experience as a black man is very different than in his native country. “I saw all these stereotypes of African men in mainstream media and they weren’t matching up with the African men in my life,” he says.