RYAN O’CONNELL would like you to know that he is tired and pissed off and horny. He is tired of waiting for what he calls “our ‘Transparent’ moment” (some of his fellow actors call it, instead, “our ‘Pose’ moment”), by which he means a single piece of breakthrough pop culture that makes people aware of a heretofore ignored and stereotyped minority, a prizewinning, noisemaking event that kicks open the door to mainstream omnipresence and ultimately to normalization. He is pissed off that it hasn’t happened yet. “I think about this a lot,” he says. “Why, in this woke-ass culture that we live in, where so much attention is given to marginalized populations, do people with disabilities still largely go ignored?” The actor, who has cerebral palsy, is also, he says, “horny for representation that comes from actual disabled people, because we live in a dark hellscape of a capitalist country. Real power can only be accrued through opportunities, and you need to be given the keys to tell your own story.”

As theatres shuttered in early spring, and theatre workers sprang to action creating and presenting works online, one facet of the theatre ecology was left out of the Zoom rooms: the designers. Indeed, some sets and costumes are still sitting in dark theatres gathering dust. For the creative teams, there was no strike or closure to mourn the postponed and canceled shows, and few opportunities to create and share new work online.

Enter HOLD: Design for Empty Rooms, a website that showcases halted productions with a soup-to-nuts peek at the design process. From audio files to costume renderings, from color palettes to pre-production photos, the website offers a glimpse at the directions some of the 2020 spring productions were headed.

I really loved looking through these archives, and I think it’ll be an excellent resource for students too!

Jeremy O. Harris is an actor and playwright, best known for his plays “Daddy” and “Slave Play.” Harris’s latest, “A Boy’s Company Presents: ‘Tell Me If I’m Hurting You,’” was meant to premiere at Playwrights Horizons’s Mainstage Theater in May; but, like so many other productions this spring, it was postponed by the coronavirus pandemic. (This intensely ambitious work—styled after a Jacobean revenge tragedy—is now slated to run during the 2021-22 season.) Here, a conversation with Harris and two of his creative collaborators about the making of a play still waiting to be realized.

Efforts to dismantling systems of oppression can come in many forms: how we view “time,” how we “check our baggage,” or how we pay our artists, but it can also include our language.

We can dismantle oppression in our language as a means of valuing and honoring individuals in the room. There are a plethora of sayings used in rehearsal environments that cause a BIPOC artist to feel powerless and othered in the room; these phrases will not have the same effect on white artists, who have the privilege of doing their work without that added baggage.