Alisa Soloman

Alisa Solomon is writer, teacher and dramaturg based in New York City. A Professor of English/Journalism at Baruch College-City University of New York and of Theater and English at the CUNY Graduate Center for many years, she is moving in September to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, to teach in and direct the Arts Concentration in the new M.A. program there. Her writing covers a range of cultural and political subjects (see below). As a dramaturg, Solomon has worked with such directors as Anne Bogart, Lee Breuer, Liz Diamond, Jim Simpson, and at the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue directed by Anna Deavere Smith.

As a journalist, Solomon has been writing theater criticism and political and cultural news and feature stories for more than two decades. In addition to contributing occasionally to The Nation, The Forward, The New York Times, and other publications, she was on the staff of The Village Voice for 14 years, covering such areas as US immigration policy, the anti-war movement, gay and lesbian issues, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She has won awards for her reporting on abortion rights, electoral politics, and women’s sports, and was the 2002 recipient of a Media Award from the Detention Watch Network (a national coalition of immigrant rights and services organizations) for an eight-part investigative series. The series, “The Gatekeeper: Watch on the INS,” examined the immigration agency’s functions, exposed its most hidden flaws, and most of all, showed the impact of policy and enforcement on actual lives; it was nominated by the Voice for a Pulitzer Prize in national affairs reporting. Her most recent book, co-edited with Tony Kushner, is Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Solomon also continues to write as a theater critic and scholar. She edited Theater and Social Change, a special issue of the journal Theater in 2001, and is the co-editor (with Framji Minwalla) of the anthology, The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater. (NYU Press). Her book, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge), won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 1997-98.

I am working on several things, some on high boil, some only simmering. First, I am continuing to write theater criticism for the Village Voice and occasionally elsewhere. Even – or maybe especially -- in these mean and narrow times, theater matters and therefore clear, critical thinking about it matters. Rather than merely provide thumbs-up/thumbs-down consumer reports in my reviews, I have sought to participate in and contribute to a public conversation about theater that values analysis, context, nuance, and reasoned argument. That may sound grandiose – and to be sure, it’s a bit much to ask when one has 450 words and an overnight deadline. Still, I believe that to write about the arts is to write about the world, not to retreat from it.

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What do you consider the most pressing social issue right now?

Oy! So many to choose from. For me, I guess it all boils down to: Bush’s (really the Heritage Foundation’s) idea of the ownership society on the one hand, and the political power of the evangelical Christian right on the other. That these two forms of American conservatism are jointly ascendant at a time of needless war makes me fear that America is developing a unique, local form of fascism. This is not a word I throw around easily. But I am coming to believe that the moralistic and fundamentally mean-spirited ideologies of both strains of conservatism are making us a more intolerant, punitive, willfully ignorant, heedlessly imperial nation. Of course, in the long run none of this will matter if we don’t do something fast to reverse the ravages of global warming.

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It’s important to understand how the right is thinking and organizing, so first I’d recommend such astonishing documents as the Luntz memo, spelling out Republican strategies for language and issue-framing, and the pro-business strategy set forth by Lewis Powell in 1971 that has shaped Republican policy since.

Then, some good progressive analyses of the current state of affairs, such as Thomas Frank’s What’s Wrong with Kansas?, Esther Kaplan’s With God on Their Side and George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant.

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