Extended Play is an online journal published by The Civilians dedicated to the intersections of contemporary theater and society, exploring creative processes, community, politics, and new innovations in storytelling. The site features interviews, conversations between artists, project profiles, essays, and media including photos, audio and video.
The Civilians is a New York City-based theater company dedicated to ambitious and exuberant new works that creatively interrogate our lived experience; question and test the stories that shape our world; and awaken new thinking and perceptions. Our signature work is “investigative theater,” meaning projects created through artistic research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.
To learn more about The Civilians, click here.
EDITORIAL
Faith Zamblé
Extended Play Editor
Faith Zamblé (she/her) is a writer, culture worker, and artist at large, originally from Waukegan, IL. She graduated in 2017 with a BA in Media Studies from North Park University after years of arguing with the Chicago Tribune’s film reviews. Zamblé received an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the (formerly titled) Yale School of Drama in 2013. She thinks of her practice as a kind of weaving, one that is informed by her West African x Caribbean roots, nurtured by constant inquiry and distinguished by its love of “not-knowing.” She is always grateful for the chance to tell stories that honor Black people and celebrate Black experimental work.
Melissa Hardy
New Work Program Manager
Melissa Hardy (she/her) is a New York City based dramaturg and creative producer. She worked at The Play Company for several years, first as a literary manager, then as Associate Producer and finally as the Director of Producing and Artistic Planning. Prior to joining The Play Company Melissa was an associate agent at Bret Adams Ltd. and she currently serves on the advisory board for the Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation’s Ollie Awards. Melissa graduated with an MFA in Dramaturgy and Critical Writing from Brooklyn College.
Phoebe Corde
R&D Program Director and Resident Dramaturg
Phoebe Corde (she/her) is a dramaturg, writer, and illustrator from Westport, Connecticut, specializing in stories of the strange, the magical, and the otherworldly. Before becoming Literary Associate for The Civilians, she was New Work Development Assistant at The Public Theater, where she provided dramaturgical notes and creative support to shows like Ain’t No Mo’, Wild Goose Dreams, and Disney’s Hercules. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from Connecticut College, where she was awarded the Sally Abrahms Prize in Fiction, and has been published by Odyssey and Cadenza Magazine. https://phoebecorde.wixsite.com/portfolio
Leah Putnam
Editorial Associate
Leah Putnam (she/her) is a dramaturg and theatermaker from outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prior to joining The Civilians, she worked as a dramaturg for Live Arts in Charlottesville, Virginia and has worked on developing new work with writers including Let Go of Me by Kelley Van Dilla. She is particularly passionate about immersive theater and also has a background in costumes. Leah completed her MA in English at UVA and her BA in English at NYU.
EDITORIAL ADVISOR
Steve Cosson
Artistic Director
Steve is the founding Artistic Director of the Civilians. He is a writer and freelance director, directing new plays, musicals and classics. Recent credits include “The Belle of Amherst” starring Joely Richardson, the Civilians’ “The Great Immensity” at the Public Theater, and Anne Washburn’s “Mr. Burns” at Playwrights Horizons. Steve won an Obie in 2004 for the work of the Civilians. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia, a MacDowell Fellow, Resident Director at New Dramatists, and he has twice participated in the Sundance Theatre Lab. His plays have been published by Oberon Books in the UK, Dramatists Play Service, and Playscripts Inc. in an anthology. He holds an M.F.A. in directing from UC San Diego and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.
ADVISORY BOARD
Aaron Landsman
Aaron Landsman is a writer, organizer and performance maker . His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Abrons Arts Center Artist Residency, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, and an ASU Gammage Residency. His projects have been commissioned and presented in New York by Abrons Art Center, The Chocolate Factory, The Foundry Theatre, EMPAC, and HERE and funded by Jerome, MAP, Mellon, Graham, NEFA, LMCC and the National Performance Network. Current work includes Perfect City, a 20-year art and activism collective working on gentrification, Language Reversal, a new theatrical work with collaborators in Serbia, Brazil and Nigeria and Night Keeper, a theatrical work about insomnia as a super power. He teachers at Princeton, has guest lectured at Princeton, ASU, Juilliard, NYU, Bennington and Bard, and co-created the Creative Capital Professional Development Program, was the first Development Director at The Field, and the first grants manager for the award-winning ensemble ERS Theater. He has performed with many artists, across the US and Europe, in Australia and on London’s West End. His book about participation, performance and democracy, No One is Qualified, co-written by Mallory Catlett, will be published by The University of Iowa Press in 2022. http://www.thinaar.com
Anthony Lioi
Anthony Lioi is a professor of English at the Juilliard School in New York, where he teaches courses in writing, American literature, and the environmental humanities. He is a past president of ASLE: Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and a current editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. In 2016, he published Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture with Bloomsbury Academic. He has bridge-and-tunneled his way to the Civilians since “The Great Immensity,” and often thinks of the last Passenger Pigeon and her song.
Bertie Ferdman
Bertie Ferdman is associate professor at Borough Manhattan Community College and also teaches at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her research interests include site-based performance, urban dramaturgies, and curating performance. Publications include The Bloomsbury Handbook to Performance Art, co-edited with Jovana Stokic (Bloomsbury Press, 2020) and Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific (SIU Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in Theater, TDR, PAJ, HowlRound, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Performance Research. Her most recent book, Curating Dramaturgies, co-edited with Peter Eckersall, will be out with Routledge in May 2021.
Carol Martin
Carol Martin, Ph.D. is a Professor of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her books include: Theatre of the Real and Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, Brecht Sourcebook, Sourcebook of Feminism and Theatre, and Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Her articles have been translated into French, Japanese, Chinese, and Polish. Her book series, “In Performance,” is comprised of international anthologies of plays and performance texts and is published by Seagull Books. Her guest-edited issues of TDR include: Documentary Theatre, Performing the City, and The Return of the Real. Martin has been awarded several fellowships including: VisitingProfessor Fellowship at Tokyo University, Komaba, Graduate School of Arts and Science; Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellowship; a Fulbright to India; and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar Fellowship. She has been a keynote speaker at several international conferences.
Eric M. Glover
Eric M. Glover is an assistant professor adjunct of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at Yale, where he is an expert on black musical theater. Eric’s first book in progress, an antiracist history of the musicals and the antimusicals of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, makes a case for taking them seriously as musical theater writers. Eric’s writing appears in his articles written for a general audience, JADT, The Sondheim Review, Theater Journal, and a WILL POWER! study guide, respectively. Eric is an executive committee member of the American Society for Theater Research in the field of theater and performance studies. Eric has also worked as a production dramaturge for Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (Yale Repertory Theatre, University Theater, New Haven, 2020).
Friðrik Agni Árnason
Friðrik Agni is the project manager of the Reykjavík Arts Festival, which is a multidisciplinary arts festival that takes place biannually in Iceland. I studied art direction in Milan and cultural studies in Iceland. Previously I have been working as an art director and stylist for various fashion projects in Iceland, Sweden and Dubai.My passion and background is in dancing. I started in Ballroom dancing at a young age and have competed around the world but also taken part in theatre productions in Iceland as a dancer. I teach dance fitness at the gym and have my own dance and event company where we also arrange trips abroad for groups where we soak in dance, culture and wellness.In my freetime I write short stories and poetry and have published an audio and e-book with Storytel Internationally.I live to inspire and to be inspired. I love the process of creating and collaborating with people.
Jan Cohen Cruz
Jan Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts, Engaging Performance, and Remapping Performance, edited Radical Street Performance, and, with Mady Schutzman, co-edited Playing Boal and A Boal Companion. She was Director of Field Research for A Blade of Grass, which supports socially-engaged artists, and directed Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. A longtime professor at NYU, Cohen-Cruz initiated Drama’s minor in applied theater and received ATHE’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement (2012). Jan was evaluator for the US State Department/ Bronx Museum cultural diplomacy initiative smARTpower and for seven initiatives of NYC’s Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) t. She is writing, with Rad Pereira, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965-2020, by Those Who’ve Lived It.
Jazmin Llana
Jazmin Llana is a professor of drama, theatre and performance studies at the Department of Literature, De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines. She is the Vice President of Performance Studies international (2018-2021) and an Associate Editor of Performance Research, Routledge Journal of the Performing Arts. In her home country she was Head of the National Committee on Dramatic Arts of the [Philippine] National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in 2014-2016 and now serving again as a member of the Executive Council of this committee for 2020-2022. She was founding chair of the NCCA Research Program Technical Working Group (2016-2020) and General Editor of the (forthcoming) NCCA Research Journal.
Milo Rau
Milo Rau is a director, author and since 2018/2019 artistic director of NTGent (Belgium). Critics have proclaimed him «the most influential» (DIE ZEIT), «most awarded» (Le Soir), «most interesting» (De Standaard) or «most ambitious» (The Guardian) artist of our time. Since 2002, he has created and published more than 50 stage plays, films, books and actions. His productions have been presented on major international festivals, including the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival d’Avignon, the Venice Biennale Teatro, the Wiener Festwochen and Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, and have toured more than 30 countries worldwide. Milo Rau has been awarded numerous prizes, the most recent of which include the European Theatre Prize 2018, the Peter-Weiss-Prize 2017, the 3sat-Prize 2017, the 2017 Saarbrucken Poetry Lectureship for Drama and, in 2016, the prestigious World Theatre Day ITI Prize, as youngest artist ever after Frank Castorf and Pina Bausch. In 2017, Milo Rau was voted “Acting Director of the Year” in the critics’ survey conducted by the magazine Deutsche Bühne. He has been awarded two honorary doctorate degrees, first in 2019 by the Theatre Department of Lunds Universitet (Sweden) and more recently in 2020 by Ghent University (Belgium). Rau is also a television critic, lecturer and a prolific writer.
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez research focuses the systems of support and training for cultural professionals and follows from extensive career as a producing artist and non-profit administrator. He is the author of Performing Policy: How Politics and Cultural Programs Redefined U.S. Artists for the Twenty-first Century (2015), which assesses how arts policy research and development initiatives since the 1990s have radically reshaped artists’ practices and opportunities nationwide. At present, Dr. Bonin-Rodriguez is at work on a second book, Groundwork: Race, Equity the Network-based Infrastructure for U.S. Artists, about the emergence, development and aspirations of network-based artist service organizations since the 1970s and 1980s. Dr. Bonin-Rodriguez is an Associate Professor in the Performance as Public Practice Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and the founding Chair of the undergraduate Minor in Arts Management and Administration, which provides students with arts leadership training in the nonprofit and commercial sectors, as well as international production work, jobs in arts journalism, and arts entrepreneurship, to name a few. Nationally, he is the co-editor for Artivate: a Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts and a Regional Liaison for the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program.
Sonja Kuftinec
Sonja Arsham Kuftinec is Professor of Theatre at the University of Minnesota. She has published widely on community-based theatre including Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (SIU Press, 2003). From 1995-2005 she developed several collaborative theatre projects with youth in the Balkans and Middle East. In Theatre, Facilitation and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East (Palgrave, 2009) she analyzes, in part, how Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed has been adapted within a conflict context. Recent research focuses on infused pedagogy and organizational culture at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, arts literacy, and creative engagements with contested memory.