The Search for a Home
HowlRound was founded at Arena Stage as part of the American Voices New Play Institute. Fairly quickly, the co-founders realized that work they wanted to do could not be best accomplished while sitting within a regional theatre. In 2012, HowlRound moved and found a home in a newly-created, non-academic department called the Office of the Arts at Emerson College. It was a natural fit: as Rob Orchard, the first executive director of the Office of the Arts wrote in the HowlRound Journal in April 2012,
As a college of innovation in communication and the arts, [Emerson] has a core commitment to the values and programs of [HowlRound].
Emerson faculty are, for the most part, active practitioners in the disciplines in which they also excel as teachers. The students who choose Emerson generally do so with a high degree of certainty about what they want to do professionally and how the resources of the College feed their appetite… This is what appealed to me about Emerson and why I am certain that the Emerson culture is perfectly matched to the ideals of [HowlRound].
With the backing of a supportive college president and a commitment to financially support HowlRound’s work, HowlRound was able to stabilize and grow with the underpinnings of a larger institution.
This is where I come in! It’s spring 2015 and a bright-eyed dramaturg in (probably) a circle scarf and patterned tights joins the team as associate producer: the first permanent staff member who wasn’t a co-founder. Suddenly, I was emailing with people I had learned about in school and having my mind blown regularly by amazing theatre from around the world. I remember feeling so much genuine hope and excitement (what we just recently started calling “Millennial Optimism”) in this period: Things were changing, and we were part of it. We were building tools that people were using to shift conversations and norms, and we were doing it with a decent amount of freedom—young enough to not be beholden to attitudes of “this is how HowlRound has always been” or “this is what we’ve always done.”
Projects need resources and safe, trusting environments in order to incubate and grow. The institutional stability and significant philanthropic investment we had in this period is a vital piece of our story.
Shifting Language, Shifting Culture
The years after HowlRound’s founding saw massive cultural change in the theatre industry and the wider world. In theatre circles, there was a real focus on representation on stage. The Committee of the Jubilee published their first invitation/provocation in October 2015, stating, “For the 2020–2021 season, every theatre in the United States of America will produce work by women, people of color, Native American artists, LGBTQIA artists, deaf artists, and artists with disabilities. Every theatre large and small is included in the vision.” The Count 1.0, analyzing the racial and gender breakdown of playwrights on non-profit stages across the United States, was published in November 2015. Folks rallied around the call of 50/50 in 2020, advocating for an equal number of men and women to be produced by that year.
It’s interesting to track the nuancing of the conversation over the years in the HowlRound Journal (and elsewhere—The Count 2.0 includes an “other” category besides just men and women). The language evolves over time from “gender parity” (implying two genders) to “gender inclusive/expansive” (acknowledging the breadth of gender identity).
No conversation about the role of identity in theatre over the past decade-plus could be complete without discussing the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC), a group that began as a program of HowlRound with the name the Latina/o Theatre Commons—initially a political move, putting the “-a” before the “-o,” but renamed in 2017 in recognition of the expansiveness of gender identity. The LTC has done tremendous work in terms of updating the narrative of the American theatre to include Latine artists.
2018-2019 brought a promising sea change in leadership in the nonprofit American theatre, as women and people of color began replacing a generation of retiring mostly-male, mostly-white leaders—which HowlRound documented through a series of conversations called The Changeover. Though it would soon become clear how many of those new leaders were inheriting institutions with massive budgetary challenges, for many of us it felt like a really fruitful, exciting time.
These changes in theatre culture happened as the wider culture changed as well, and not in the direction of progress and equity. Around the 2016 presidential election, the internet—what had seemed just a few years ago as a promising, open utopia—was changing for the worse. I’m not saying anything you don’t already know: Social media algorithms began to prioritize inflammatory content, steal our data, sell us crap, and eventually push slop. Here’s one small example of one corner of theatre internet that we lost: in 2011, a group of theatremakers began talking late at night on Twitter, using the hashtag #2amt (Gwydion Suilebhan writes about it in this essay from 2011 titled “Theatre, Twitter, and Revolution” (a #milennialoptimism title if ever there was one)). In the years that followed, #2amt grew into an online platform of its own, and the hashtag remained active. Until, as David Loehr wrote in June 2016, it was “overrun with 2nd amendment supporters.” Then, of course, we all know what happened to Twitter.
By 2017, we were noticing a significant decline in comments on HowlRound. People just seemed to be engaging differently online, in large part—we hypothesized—because the internet was just becoming meaner. Even in a space like HowlRound, where we moderated comments for civility and positive inquiry, people didn’t necessarily want to put themselves out there.
Looking back on this period, I’m proud of how HowlRound was able to platform and amplify a lot of the voices and projects that really pushed the field toward progress—calling out critics’ biases, centering non-binary artists, learning from writers of color, and more. We reflected the field as it changed and were part of making that change happen. This remains absolutely core to HowlRound’s work moving forward.
Curating, Focusing, and Closing the Firehose
In January 2018, after a year or so of discussion and contemplation, we intentionally scaled back the quantity of content published in the Journal. As then-director Jamie Gahlon put it in an interview with American Theater Magazine in August of that year,
The landscape of really high-quality essays and thoughts about theatre practice has just exploded since 2011. And I think that the journal has shifted in response to the changing landscape, and we’ve made different choices along the way. We definitely had a couple of years, we call them our “years of the content firehose,” where our No. 1 priority was getting as many voices as possible out there, and trying to really make people understand that what we were trying to offer the field was a different model—that we were trying to offer a model where if you wanted to participate you could. And we were trying to operate in a place that was not a top-down editorial structure. Part of signaling that was really like showing the breadth of who is out there and what they had to say…
[But] we’ve pivoted in the last couple of years. This past year in January, we publicly rearticulated our mission and vision and values, and made the decision to intentionally lower the amount of content that we’re putting out… But what we’ve also done is tried to drill down on our editorial agenda… We’re really trying to say, “Here’s where HowlRound sees itself within the landscape, and here’s what we have to offer.”
Closing the “firehose” meant focusing in on what was uniquely ours to do. It meant we were well positioned to support the field in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we saw the number of visitors to our website shoot up as folks looked for community in a time of crisis. We livestreamed #ArtistResource Talks, where organizers Nicole Brewer, Hannah Fenlon, Ann Marie Lonsdale, and Abigail Vega shared resources for freelance artists and others impacted by pandemic shutdowns. In that time, I experienced a brief resurgence of the beautiful, cooperative, genuinely unifying internet, particularly chats during virtual performances or readings where friends and strangers coming together to support artists in this unfamiliar, complicated world. We were also able to platform a lot of the theatre’s responses to the 2020 racial reckoning, like Kelvin Dinkins, Jr. and Al Heartley’s “We Don’t Want Your Statements, American Theatre.”
