Book Launch / Who Is In The Room? – June 13

Who Is In the Room? Queer Strategies for Redefining the Role of the Theater Director. (Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies 2025).

Brooke O’Harra will be joined by Jess Barbagallo (of the Dyke Division and Room for Cream), Russell Greenberg (Yarn/Wire) and David Gaines (poet performer) who are part of the Be Holding Project.

Who Is in the Room?
If this were a rehearsal and we were gathered to work together, I would begin with a question. I always begin with a question. So, here in this book, I begin:
“Who is in the room?”
I’d like to think one answer would be me and you. Here we are together. Maybe that makes you wonder, “What kind of room is this?” – this book. This room that we are talking about is a room in which we try to conceive of the theater as a place of expansive possibility for each of us. The question “Who is in the (rehearsal) room?” teases at other questions: “Who has the privilege to be in the room?” “Who do you want in the room?” or “What do you want to happen in that room?” Those lead us to the question, “Why has that wanting felt like such an impossible ask for queer people, people of color, and even for women?” For so many of us, the stakes of gathering together have always been high. Underlying these questions is the proposition that, as theater and performance makers, we are tasked with assessing the value of shared time and space and recognizing our responsibility, as artists and as spectators, to make meaning together. In this book, I want to reimagine the terms.