AFT Staff Recommendations 2021
As the year draws to a close, the staff of About Face Theatre has compiled a list of the books, games, and media that are keeping us afloat right now. They offer wisdom, escapism, enrichment, and challenge in different ways. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift for someone this holiday season, including yourself, we wholeheartedly recommend checking some of these out.
Recommended by Megan Carney, Artistic Director:
Braiding Sweetgrass:
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
This is one of those books that I can only read a little bit at a time because each chapter is so full of wisdom that I have to sit with it awhile.
-Megan
Recommended by Mikael Burke, Associate Artistic Director:
A Strange Loop
By Michael R. Jackson, playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre
Usher is a Black queer writer working a job he hates while writing his original musical… about a Black queer writer working a job he hates while writing his original musical. Michael R. Jackson’s blistering, mind-blowing, Pulitzer Prize-winning new musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons — including the punishing thoughts in his head — in an attempt to capture and understand his own strange loop.
I recognize that not many people will be able to get out to Washington, D.C. to see this incredible production. But if you can, this show has stuck with me for a long time after seeing it.
-Mikael
Recommended by Kirsten Baity, Green Room Collective:
Antiracist Writing Workshop:
How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom
By Felicia Rose Chavez
The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a call to create healthy, sustainable, and empowering classroom communities. Award-winning educator Felicia Rose Chavez exposes the invisible politics of power and privilege that have silenced writers of color for far too long. It’s more urgent than ever that we consciously work against traditions of dominance in the classroom, but what specific actions can we take to achieve authentically inclusive communities?
Reading this book is helping me dismantle so much of what I’ve been taught about teaching and rethink what it means to be a good writer.
-Kirsten
Recommended by Logan Jones, Managing Director:
Hades
By Supergiant Games
In the video games Hades, you play as Zagreus, immortal son of Hades, on his quest to escape from the underworld, fighting through many angry lost souls along the way. Death is a mere inconvenience for Zagreus, returning to Hades’ palace each time to reflect in the Mirror of Night and try again. Receive Boons from the other gods of Olympus and find treasures to aid in each escape attempt.
I’ve played this games through several times and each time I discover something new. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in awhile.
-Logan
Recommended by Audrey Kleine, Operations & Production Manager:
Red, White, and Royal Blue
By Casey McQuiston
When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius―his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There’s only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse. Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through?
I read a lot of books—I just hit over 100 books in 2021! And Red, White, and Royal Blue is my #1 recommendation for the year.
-Audry
Recommended by Sharon Pasia, Green Room Collective:
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir
By Michelle Zauner
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
This book speaks to me in so many ways. The descriptions of the food. The way she writes is like poetry.
-Sharon
Recommended by Charles Riffenburg, Marketing Manager & Graphic Designer:
Steven Universe: Art & Origins
Steven Universe: End of an Era
By Chris McDonnell & the creators of Steven Universe
These two books take fans behind the scenes of the groundbreaking and boundlessly creative Emmy Award-winning Cartoon Network animated series Steven Universe. The eponymous Steven is a boy who—alongside his mentors, the Crystal Gems (Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl)—must learn to use his inherited powers to protect his home, Beach City, from the forces of evil. Bursting with concept art, production samples, early sketches, storyboards, and exclusive commentary, this lavishly illustrated companion book offers a meticulous written and visual history of the show, as well as an all-access tour of the creative team’s process.
I love books that take you behind the scenes of the creative process, and I really like getting to know the people behind Steven Universe. They seem just as wonderful as you would imagine.
-Charles
Recommended by Dylan Toropov, Director of Individual & Major Giving and Special Events:
Dune
Directed by Denis Villeneauve, adapted from the book by Frank Herbert
Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet’s exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence, only those who can conquer their own fear will survive. Brought to the screen by the director of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, this is a classic epic that begins to interrogate the white savior myth and colonialism.
I’ve seen this movie three times now and each time I get something new from it. I love the visuals and the storytelling. I highly recommend everyone see it in IMAX if you can.
-Dylan
