Angie Ahlgren, a writer based in Duluth, Minn., started out as a stage manager at Minneapolis’s Theater Mu in the late ’90s, and she now owns Ahlgren Consulting, LLC, a consulting and coaching business for academics in the arts. Her academic research has focused on stage management, gender, and invisible labor. Last year she began to interview stage managers across the U.S. about their experiences, and in “How Do You Manage?,” Ahlgren distills their words into a bracing portrait of where theatrical stage management has been and where it’s going. As she put it, “The stage managers I spoke to are deeply aware of the hierarchies and power dynamics in their work, and they are, collectively and individually, making big changes in the theatre cultures and communities in which they work.”

Damon Kiely is a professor of directing and acting and an associate dean at the Theatre School at DePaul University. He loves teaching and making theatre—he especially loves the rehearsal room—but, he said bluntly, “Most theatre is boring; it feels stale. There’s one bright spot I know about: Exodus.” For this issue’s Production Notebook (“The Undiscovered Country”), he followed this scrappy ensemble, many of them of his former DePaul students, to their adopted home in Santa Fe, N.M., as they developed an immersive new staging of Hamlet. Raved Kiely, “They are breaking the mold of how theatre is done in almost every way…Exodus shows feel like the best rehearsals, or the best parties, or the best concerts. It doesn’t feel scripted—it feels alive.”