What Can an EDI Consultant Do for a Play?

Artist and entrepreneur Kira Troilo leads with empathy and heart.

She has employed both attributes in her work with Boston’s SpeakEasy Stage Company, which recently staged three plays with intricate narratives centering on characters of color: Sanaz Toossi‘s English, Hansol Jung‘s Wild Goose Dreams, and Jackie Sibblies Drury‘s Fairview. These productions—with themes of division, racism, identity, and more—respectively took audiences to a classroom in Iran, to the bustling city of Seoul, and into the home of a suburban Black family readying for a birthday party.

Showgoers at these productions may not have realized how much work went into trying to get them right, but directors and actors from the shows say the behind-the-scenes work of Kira Troilo, an equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) consultant and the founder of Art & Soul Consulting, was particularly helpful in handling the cross-cultural issues raised by these plays with sensitivity and care. Read more

10 winter theater productions that urge us to take action

Imagining a better world or fearing a markedly worse one is often at the center of sci-fi narratives both onstage and off. As the omicron variant continues to spread in this nearly two-year-long pandemic, many of us might find ourselves imagining what it’s like to be free of it. Recently, the variant’s impact has forced theaters, locally and beyond, to suspend some new productions and hasten the end of the runs of a few existing ones. It’s apropos then that this winter season, many companies — some who still have virtual options in addition to in-person — will continue to host panels centering important conversations and feature stories that contend with the issues that plague us, from climate change to identity, disease, and dystopian futures. Here are 10 productions that aspire to push theatergoers to consider cultivating new ways of thinking and spur them to action. Read more.

The Performer Cover Story - Curtis Harding: The Soul Powerhouse on Shitty Guitars, Bum Notes and Being a Control Freak in the Studio →

Curtis Harding is no stranger to spreading the good news through music. Born in Saginaw, MI, the guitar playing vocalist (whose aptly-named Soul Power album just dropped on Burger Records) spent his childhood touring with his evangelist mom. But while she was singing for Jesus, he was writing rhymes as he and his family moved from town to town.

From the outside looking in, the lives of the Hardings may have seemed like a great adventure. “You don’t think about it that way when you’re in elementary school and you have to leave your friends,” says Harding. But the family’s nomadic lifestyle afforded him a different kind of education. The kind of education that might be partly responsible for the quiet confidence/borderline arrogance he embodies. It’s that can’t-put-your-finger-on-it something that makes him intriguing and powerful, yet approachable. Read more