#260806 ~ Interdisciplinary Impacts, AI Actor Knockoffs, Non-Profit Vessels

WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my emphatically intermittent newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…

This installment of #TheatreClique clicks out to pieces that interrogate what the practice of theatre history can and should do, report on the (perhaps inevitable) emergence of producers using AI to poach performances from actors, and a resounding sermon about the complexity of the theatre ecosystem. Plus my commentary about my experience of recent productions, including Are You Mad at Me??, Common Knowledge, Hadestown: The Musical, and True West. And for this week’s opener, I lift this exhilarating pop up performance piece by performance/dance/theatre artist Apollo Garcia — presented as part Meow Wolf Santa Fe's summer performance series, "Phenomenomaly” — a few weeks back .…and if clicking the embedded image below routes to an error message, try clicking here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: whenever possible, whenever linking to paywalled pieces, I try to “gift” the article to #TheatreClique readers. In other words, clicking out to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal should neither present hassle nor burn through your current allotment of free views. Here’s hoping more outlets — hello LATimes! hi NewYorkMagazine! yo NewYorker!— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon... I likewise try to flag when a sign-in/registration is required for access, with the exception of general access sites like MuckRack, TikTok or Instagram. If any obstacles to access to linked materials are particular persistent, perplexing or annoying, please do alert me by replying to this message so that I can adjust accordingly.

Wherein I highlight a handful of the most click-worthy links I’ve encountered in the last few…

• at The Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group’s substack, scholar/writer Charlotte Canning calls for attention to theatre’s “interdisciplinary impact” by exploring “What Theatre History Does and What It Could Do”;

• at Business Insider’s Lucia Moses reports on how actors in “verticals” are raising the alarm about “losing roles to AI knockoffs of themselves” [pdf];

• IndieWire’s Dana Harris-Bridge argues that the unexpected box-office success of Hadestown: The Musical “shows what can happen when distributors actually pursue evidence of demand” ratherr than their own habits of taste;

• Broadstreet Review’s Alaina Johns profiles two Philly Fringe veterans as they take their shows on the road to Edinburgh;

and THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ…

• via the Network for Ensemble Theaters blog, stage director & cultural strategist Alex Meda launches an eloquent, potent, and stirring sermon addressing the myriad crises currently facing institutional theatres, reminding theatremakers that “the nonprofit was always the vessel, never the value.”

Wherein I offer diaristic capsule commentaries chronicling what I liked best (or found most compelling) about the shows I’ve recently engaged... A full accounting of my 2026 theatregoing can be found HERE.

Written & Performed by Bryan Safi • NYC : Off-Off-Broadway • HERE Arts Center • July 2026.

I don’t know that I had any awareness of Bryan Safi prior to receiving an invitation to see Are You Mad at Me?? — the actor/comedian/podcaster’s wildly funny solo show that is ostensibly “about” Safi’s lifelong experience of anxiety and his attendant crippling crises of low self-esteem. (For an instructively comprehensive description of the show itself, see Matt Rettemund’s thoughtful and thorough account at BoyCulture.) Are You Mad at Me?? traipses through several intertwined long-arc jokes, as Safi deftly interrupts his own meticulously-structured flow with snappy (and judgy) crowdwork. (Be warned: goddess help you if you arrive late, appear distracted, or get up to pee; Safi will call you out.) Safi’s charisma is not unlike that of, oh, a feral kitten: inspiring tenderness, even stirring a mild protective instinct but — watch out! — this one’s a biter and those claws are sharp. Safi’s material is at its strongest the higher-concept it goes — a metaphysical running gag about the contrasting front/back of a grocery shopper’s tee shirt; a game show in which the audience is asked to assess whether Safi’s mother’s quips were “homophobic or c*nt”; treating a notorious Sharon Stone PSA as the height of dramatic artistry — while Safi’s fearless, spontaneous, demanding, in-your-face crowdwork propels the show’s simpler pleasures. Smart, diverting, genuinely funny — and a captivating showcase for Bryan Safi’s impressively neurotic clusterf*ck of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent.

See also:

• at 1 Minute Critic, writer/editor Jerry Portwood details how “Safi’s surprisingly candid revelations and off-the-cuff banter add an unexpected layer of sizzle to what could be tired material, with a great payoff by the end”;

• at The Gay & Lesbian Review, writer/performer Brendan McCall praises Are You Mad at Me for its “imaginative humor [that acknowledges] the burdens of trying to please others before being true to oneself.”

Written & Performed by Rosie O’Donnell • Directed by Gabriel Barre • NYC : Off-Broadway • Daryl Roth Theatre • July 2026.

It’s not an overstatement to say that The Rosie O’Donnell Show (1996-2002) got me through much of graduate school. I watched the show, nearly religiously, often twice a day (first, live from NYC at 10am and, then, again on tape delay from Hartford at 4pm). I subscribed to Rosie: The Magazine. And my most successful Halloween costume ever happened in 2002, right after the show went off the air and Rosie “shocked” America by coming out as a lesbian, complete with lesbian haircut. (For my costume, I basically wore my own favorite outfit — oversized red corduroy shirt, khaki clamdiggers, leather slides — to which I added a bit of mousse, a touch of lipstick, and a single handprop: a flip out wallet-style photo-sleeve filled with printed snapshots of Rosie’s kids. Though many an erudite partygoer mistook me for Oscar Wilde, enough of the others were more than happy to engage my impromptu Chatauqua-style performance wherein I spent nearly the entire evening answering questions about Rosie O’Donnell while “in character” as Rosie.) But for someone who counted themselves something of a Rosie O’Donnell superfan, even I was a bit surprised to realize that I had never seen LaRosie live and in person. So when ‘twas announced that Rosie would bring her solo show (launched last summer in Edinburgh) to New York for a limited run, I hopped to those tickets. And Rosie’s show was — to use one of Rosie’s favorite expressions from back in the day — “a delight.” Not unlike her 2015 HBO Special (A Heartfelt Stand Up, in which she told the story of her recent heart attack as a way to advocate for more precise diagnosis protocols for women), Common Knowledge deploys O’Donnell’s formidable charisma as a comedian and storyteller to tell the story of what she’s learned from her fifth child Clay’s experience of autism as a way to advocate for a better, kinder approach to autism awareness and research. (Some of the show’s most pointed passages directly confront the failures of the current President and the current Secretary of Health and Human Services on this count in particular.) And finally seeing Rosie live, while surrounded by an enthusiastic, intergenerational crew of O’Donnell aficionados — who were all clearly relishing the experience as much as I — was truly a delight.

See also:

• Deadline’s Greg Evans praises Rosie O’Donnell’s "candid and, not surprisingly, humorous” account of her perseverance in the face of “all the tribulations of life and Trump”;

• at Instinct, gossip columnist Rob Shuter insists that “Common Knowledge isn’t merely Rosie’s best stage work. It’s one of the finest solo performances you’ll see this year. It’s funny without trying too hard, emotional without becoming sentimental and deeply personal while somehow speaking to everyone in the room.”

Music, Book & Lyrics by Anais Mitchell, with Direction for the Stage by Rachel Chavkin • Directed for the Screen by Brett Sullivan • Bleecker Street • July 2026.

By now it’s a bit of a critical commonplace to proclaim this pro-shot of Hadestown as perhaps the most strikingly effective live-capture of a contemporary musical this century. Director Brett Sullivan’s deft deployment of some familiar tricks/techniques — bits of backstage hustle, luxuriating in applause, holding for laughs, showing sheet music — infuses Hadestown: The Musical with the feeling of a “concert film” — of capturing a moment in time — in ways that amplify an ineffable sense of “liveness” and being present at a particular performance. Sullivan also savvily recalibrates the placement of audience cutaways to also fortify this sense of presentness, while also somehow preventing this production from descending into the banality of “comedy special” or award show reaction shots. As I experienced Hadestown: The Musical, I was reminded of the intoxicating pleasures of some of the great live performance documentaries of the early 1980s — Mike Nichols’s Gilda Live (1980), Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense (1985), Tommy Schlamme’s Whoopi Goldberg: Direct from Broadway (1985). Yes, I did giggle a bit at the ways that Patrick Page’s glittery boot made me think of Hades as HIM. But I also wonder if Amber Gray might just win award recognition for her work in this: sure, she’s as big and broad as Broadway gets but the camera also captures the nuance, texture, & depth of feeling that undergird Amber Gray’s gorgeous performance, likely securing both it and her “legendary” status in the annals of Broadway lore. With the film’s unexpected and unprecedented financial success, it’s also stirred some unusually interesting hot-takes from likes of actor/advocate Matt Rodin, from theatre marketer/pundit Katharine Quinn, and from arts administrator/advocate Howard Sherman. A raft of soon upcoming theatrical releases of other pro-shots — including Six: The Musical LIVE on August 14; Fallen Angels on October 22, and Giant on November 19 — will test these hypotheses, but here’s hoping that the success of Hadestown: The Musical serves as the much-needed proof-of-concept for the (potential) financial and cultural viability of this particular mode of remote performance.

See also:

• TheatreMania’s David Gordon talks to the Hadestown cast about “how they brought their performances to the big screen after thousands of times on stage”;

• Variety’s Owen Gleiberman captures how Hadestown: The Musical “transmits how Hadestown is as much a happening as a musical.”

Written by Sam Shepard • Directed by Wasif Sami • Princeton, NJ : Princeton Summer Theater (Hamilton Murray) • July 2026.

I don’t know that I’ve seen Sam Shepard’s True West in its entirety since watching the 1984 American Playhouse version. (If I’m not mistaken, I watched with avid intensity on the not-new 13” black&white portable TV I had in my bedroom.) Of course, I witnessed innumerable scenes from the in scene study classes and other contexts in the intervening years but, somehow, never a full production. So it was fascinating to re/encounter this remarkable script through a captivating production from Princeton Summer Theater production that featured engaging and committed performances from the full PST ensemble (Jordan Rashdan, Joseph McLean, Jacob Schorsh & Shaelin McKenna). Director Wasif Sami’s staging balances the plays quick reversals of dramatic intensity by leaning in adventurously with sound, light, and scenic flourishes which, ultimately, underscores the play’s often-overlooked surrealist elements. A fascinating time capsule of a distinctly 1980s crisis of (white) masculinity that, in the PST/Sami production, amplifies the play’s surprising relevance to and in 2026.1

See also:

• TownTopics’s Donald H. Sanborn III asserts that PST’s “True West offers an intense conclusion to a season whose aim seems to have been to reflect on various periods of the 20th century — examining character dynamics, societal mores, and entertainment”;

• South Jersey Theatre Critics’s Talia Walters recommend True West “to those who enjoy shows with high stakes and rarely ever a dull moment.”

TRANSPARENCY DISCLOSURES for #260806: I am friendly with Alex Meda as a professional colleague. Apollo Garcia and I have stayed in connection and conversation ever since his time at the University of New Mexico, where I was his professor. I attended Are You Mad at Me?? and True West as a guest of the respective productions and at no direct expense to myself.