Link Roundup! – 1/16/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Violet Newman is one of five young girls who make up the cast of Employee of the Year, one of the plays being featured at this year’s Under the Radar Festival. Maria Baranova/Courtesy of the Public Theater

NPR has a story about the Under The Radar festival and how the co-artistic directors of the festival approach their programming:

Meiyin Wang and Mark Russell, co-artistic directors of Under the Radar, crisscross the globe every year trying to answer a single question. “In this day,” Russell says, “when there’s all sorts of great ways of telling stories and everyone’s got a camera … we’re looking at: Why do theater now?”

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The LA Times interviewed the creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag after the Academy Award nominations were announced this past week:

Thursday morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for this year’s coveted golden statue. For the second year in a row, not one nominee in the four major acting categories is a person of color. Furthermore, people of color are virtually absent from all the other categories as well.

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Pulitzer-winning playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, left, and Lynn Nottage stand outside Lafayette Cafe in New York City. (Bee Walker/for The Washington Post)

Lynn Nottage and Susan-Lori Parks were interviewed in the Washington Post about their current work and the way they approach playwriting:

Nottage: For a period I was really frustrated with my students because it felt like they were not socially engaged. They were interested in being famous and not interested in being artists. Now they feel the call to action. Today, they see their parents being pushed out of their homes. They see that they’re not necessarily going to have the same access to health care and to a livelihood that another generation had.

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American Theatre’s list of 7 theatre makers to know features some exciting artists from around the country:

Udofia, who originally wanted to be a lawyer, was studying political science at Wellesley College when she attended a conference at American Conservatory Theater. She immediately gave up her legal aspirations and got an acting MFA from ACT. While she still works as an actor, her playwriting career is gathering steam. “One of my biggest missions is to write Africans within America,” Udofia says. “Because sometimes when we see Africa, all we see of Africa is Africa far away. There’s something about that distance that can make Africa feel foreign, and there are so many African bodies operating and working within America.” Among other things, she hopes her work leads to “an expansion of what we think American is.”