Alexis Greene

American Theatre magazine, Feb. 9, 2021

Hanane Hajj Ali (she/her) is many women. She is an actor and a playwright. A feminist and a political activist. A mother and a wife. A private and public risk-taker. Beyond Lebanon, where she was born in 1958 and where she lives today, she is perhaps best known for her one-woman play Jogging:

Bistro.com April 19, 2020

Cabaret is intimate. Or as Tovah Feldshuh says, “A good nightclub act is a bit like a date: it has a sexual factor in it, it has an entertainment factor in it, and it has the knowledge that people are eating while they’re watching.” In a theatre, there’s an invisible wall between an actor and her audience, and chances are nobody is eating. But despite those differences, cabaret can be the platform where the most vital elements of a stage musical—its songs—first find an audience, and where songwriters who want to bridge both worlds can hone their craft and maybe change musical theatre as we know it. More and more, songwriters forge careers in cabaret, where they can try out their numbers before trying the world of musical theatre.

The Theatre Times, May 18, 2017

I am a dramaturg. I am also a biographer.

As a dramaturg, I try to help a playwright tell the story of her play. As a biographer, I try to tell the story of a life. Does one role feed the other? Do the skills required for one art overlap with the skills needed for the other? Is there a dramaturg-biographer collaboration?

WIT Journal, Feb. 1, 2017

Despair and fear, sadness and fury. These emotions have swept through me since the November election threatened to up-end democracy. How do I resist? What actions can I take? Possibilities hurtle around the corners of my mind, as I try to devise a plan, a tactic, that will enable me to resist the politician-thugs who now hold sway in the U.S. government, in what I can only describe as a terrifying right-wing coup.

--- read more->

American Threatre magazine - December 10, 2014

"Where are they? Living Memory. Women in the Public Square"—an event involving Colombian women who are performers and more than 300 women who are simply Colombian citizens—was created by Patricia Ariza, actor and director, playwright and poet, standard-bearer of the women's movement for peace in Colombia.

Far from the safe proscenium stages of Broadway, Ariza takes performers and nonperformers into the streets and squares of her country, engaging them to bear witness and be fearless in the face of oppression and violence against women.

On the Issues Magazine, Spring 2011

The Economy is Greener
but are women getting the green jobs?

Every morning the trucks roll out of the garage at Community Environmental Center (CEC), and every morning Ruby Carrasquillo is sitting in one of them, heading to a worksite.

Carrasquillo is a weatherization technician at CEC, a Queens-based nonprofit that brings weatherization to low-income homes and apartment buildings in the New York Metro Area. She is also a member of Local 10 of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), and she spends her days blowing cellulose insulation into walls, insulating pipes, weather-stripping doors, or caulking windows.

On the Issues Magazine, Fall 2008

Recently, while walking on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I live, I saw a woman who made me think of Nora from Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, more than a hundred years later, of course, and considerably older.

The woman was inching a number of upright shopping carts along the pavement. She would move one, then stop and move another, herding them, as it were, down the sidewalk. Each cart was crammed with her personal items and each was covered with an industrial-size, black plastic bag. She could have been in her late fifties or early sixties, and she looked healthy and well-groomed. She had just been evicted from her apartment, she told me, after losing her job and not being able to pay her rent. She was heading toward a shelter.