Martha Wade Steketee

Critic. Dramaturg. Researcher.

New York, NY

Lover of ghost lights, magic of live performance, and storytelling in song.

Martha Wade Steketee

Critic. Dramaturg. Researcher.

New York, NY

Lover of ghost lights, magic of live performance, and storytelling in song.

Fornés Documentary Director and Editor Discuss Artistic Marriage
Martha Wade Steketee spoke with filmmaker Michelle Memran and film editor Melissa Neidich in October 2018 about their collaboration making the documentary memoir The Rest I Make Up (2018) about the playwright and teacher María Irene Fornés. Fornés was born in Havana, Cuba in 1930, immigrated in 1945 to the U.S. with her mother and sister, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1951, and died in Manhattan on October 30, 2018 after living for some years with dementia.
Contemporary Theatre Review
Critical Eye: Rupert Murdoch on Broadway in Tony-nominated “Ink”
James Graham’s play “Ink” opened April 24 at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Quill asked New York-based arts journalist Martha Wade Steketee to take a look and report back. Here are her thoughts. Playwright James Graham’s “Ink” imagines tabloid emperor Rupert Murdoch’s origin story, rooted in a 1969 London we barely see, amidst London landmarks that are named but not evoked, told by characters sometimes half described.
Quill
Honoring the (Re)Vision: Catherine Zuber on Costume Design Adaptability
AS AUDIENCE MEMBERS, we may imagine that set, light, projection, sound, and costume designs are executed and then solidified, remaining unchanged once designers move to the next project. In practice, designs can continue to evolve far past opening night.
Dramatics
Halley Feiffer: Writing New Roles One Play at a Time
Playwright-actor Halley Feiffer is currently shouldering both of her hyphenated roles in The Pain of My Belligerence, a world premiere running at Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons, directed by her longtime collaborator Trip Cullman, through May 12
The Clyde Fitch Report
Joanna Gleason’s “Out of the Eclipse” With a Song in Her Heart
Deep moody melodies, a dark Yiddish lullaby, a few standards, and a smattering of singer-songwriter staples inform the splendid cabaret offering by veteran performer Joanna Gleason at 54 Below. This Broadway baby and artful songstress has crafted a show out of her life, as the best cabaret can do, by rooting itself in this moment, looking backward and forward and cherishing the present, with delightful artistry.
Theater Pizzazz
Of Sound Mind: Fitz Patton Sees Theater As Tonal Adventure
Fitz Patton is a Drama Desk and Lortel-winning composer and sound designer who has built an extensive and varied body of work on Broadway, Off-Broadway and across the country. While building his portfolio, Patton also channeled his frustration with the static conventions of theatrical production photography into Chance Magazine, a publishing experiment that he calls a “serial art book.”.
The Clyde Fitch Report
‘The Price of Thomas Scott’ Offers Social Themes, a Dutiful Daughter, and Dance Breaks
The Mint Theater will unfurl a trio of plays this season by Elizabeth Baker (1876-1962), a woman of religious upbringing who worked in her family dry goods business as a teenager and in London offices in her twenties and thirties, where she discovered theater and began to write plays. The Price of Thomas Scott, the 1913 play first up of the Mint program trio, is quietly directed by the Mint Artistic Director Jonathan Bank, animated with enthusiastic dance breaks by choreographer Tracy Bersley, and full of social themes without consistently convincing character arcs.
Urban Excavations
Lear deBessonet Makes Theater as a Hopeful Public Proposal
In a previous series of CFR stories called Critical I, theater critics were asked to reflect on their work — what is relevant; who is and is not a critic; the audience for critical writing. We asked critics to tell their own stories and to offer their personal views of criticism. In this new series, I will have conversations with theater creators on stage and backstage about their influences, personal and professional visions, successes and challenges, and what it takes to do what they do.
The Clyde Fitch Report
Heather Raffo in ‘Noura’ Unpacks Family Legacies with Radical Hope and Forgiveness
On the 2017 list by The Kilroys of unproduced and underproduced new works by women, trans and non-binary playwrights, Heather Raffo’s elegantly constructed Noura asks a salient question: Do we live for each other or do we live for ourselves?
Urban Excavations
In ‘Network’ on Broadway, Design Battles Howard Beale
The countdown clocks are everywhere at the Belasco Theatre these days. Whether on a screen or presented verbally by characters playing TV technicians or embodied by main characters playing veteran newsmen and newswomen, digital drives Lee Hall’s adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network. The design almost overwhelms the story.
The Clyde Fitch Report
Women Hired Off-Broadway 2013-14 through 2017-18
Women Count IV: Women Hired Off-Broadway 2013-14 through 2017-18 (revised and updated) 1 of 14 By Martha Wade Steketee with Judith Binus. Since 2014, the Women Count report series collects and publishes analyses of production credits to assess gender parity in theater hiring decisions. We ask: whose plays are being done, who is directing them, and how many women are being hired for theatrical off-stage roles in New Yorkâ€™s theaters beyond Broadway?
Breaking Bad Brecht: Off-Broadway ‘Arturo Ui’ Goes Kerplop
It is hard to appreciate a play meant to capture a self-promoting sociopath’s rise to power, especially a broad, biting political satire, when living through a time of political lies, overt repression and daily decimation of the rule of law. But this is The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht’s broad-strokes burlesque, in an Off-Broadway revival from director John Doyle and his Classic Stage Company.
The Clyde Fitch Report
After 50 Years, Elaine May Returns to Broadway
After a half-century absence, Elaine May has returned to Broadway, only to fade away before our eyes. Each beat of Kenneth Lonergan’s long sob of a play, The Waverly Gallery, buries her character, Greenwich Village denizen Gladys Green, a little more. All the while, each of the other characters memorialize her with loving recollections, before her off-stage death.
The Clyde Fitch Report
As Joan of Arc’s Mother, Glenn Close Sears Your Soul
As Isabelle Arc, Glenn Close is a no-nonsense, straight-talking, country woman. She speaks to us from France in the early 1400s amid the Hundred Years War in Jane Anderson’s play Mother of the Maid, now running at the Public Theater. This is Isabelle’s story: the subtitle of the play is “the sorry tale of Joan of Arc as seen through the eyes of her mum.”.
The Clyde Fitch Report
Travisville Explores Race, Urban Renewal and Generational Divide
What happens when private business interests align with public interests, and public servants determine to destroy existing communities for commercial gain? There are too few dramatic treatments of the effects of urban renewal that ran through most cities in the U.S in the mid-20th century from the perspective of the displaced homeowners.
Theater Pizzazz
She’s Bernhardt, She’s Hamlet, and She Wears the Pants
A search for an absent father and finding solace on the stage are both captured beautifully in Teresa Rebeck’s new play Bernhardt/Hamlet. The problem is, there’s more to the play. A lot more. born in 1844 to a Dutch courtesan, died in 1923, buried in Père-Lachaise in Paris — had a life and career so outsized that the field of poster design was revolutionized to capture her.
The Clyde Fitch Report

About

Martha Wade Steketee

Martha Wade Steketee works as a researcher, policy analyst, editor, theater critic, dramaturg. She writes for numerous outlets including her own site UrbanExcavations.com that focuses on theater, film, and live performance.

Steketee has served on theater awards committees (Jeff in Chicago, Drama Desk and Henry Hewes Design Award in New York); reads scripts for theaters, festivals, and competitions; and works with writers on plays and books in development. Has served on the boards of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas and League of Professional Theatre Women, and is currently on the Executive Committee of the American Theatre Critics Association.

She lives in New York City with her husband, no pets, too many books, and four original Art Shay 1962 backstage photographs of Judy Garland at the Arie Crown in Chicago.