Kelundra Smith

Atlanta

Theater Critic and Cultural Journalist at Freelance

Director of Pubs @bookstcg @americantheatre. Words in @nytimes, @gardenandgun, etc. Playwright behind The Reconstruction Trilogy. Our best days are ahead of us.

Articles

Diversity and Its Discontents: It Was Never About the Money

1 week ago | americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith

On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., I had the pleasure of seeing four new plays. My long weekend started on a Thursday with Karen Zacarías’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence at Arena Stage, directed by artistic director Hana S. Sharif. This lavish manners play regaled the audience with elaborate costumes and juicy tête-à-têtes for more than three hours.
Rhiannon Giddens Goes Back to the Porch

2 months ago | gardenandgun.com | Kelundra Smith |Anna Davis

For centuries, music was the only avenue in America through which Black people could connect to their culture and a sense of joy. Spirituals, field hollers, and folk songs helped pass the workday before and after the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet as sharing music became more industry than art, Black Americans were often written out of the very genres they helped birth: country, blues, folk. The desire to reclaim those cultural traditions is part of what drives Rhiannon Giddens.
Against the Dying of the Light: Toward a Risky Theatre

Jan 9, 2025 | americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith

Last October, I had the chance to attend the annual Freedom Awards, hosted by the National Civil Rights Museum. The 2024 honorees were civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill, civil rights leader Xernona Clayton, and filmmaker Spike Lee. In all of the remarks and speeches that evening, it became even clearer to me that for every movement, there must be a countermovement. This is how we truly balance the scales of justice in the United States of America.
Restoring Memphis's Clayborn Temple

Oct 2, 2024 | gardenandgun.com | Kelundra Smith |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian

Arts & CultureThe revival of a civil rights landmark reaches a majestic milestone By the time Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis to lead a march in the spring of 1968, city sanitation workers had been on strike for more than a month. After a faulty garbage truck crushed two of them to death, the mostly Black male workers met and organized the strike at Clayborn Temple.
The freedom that comes with creating art

Sep 26, 2024 | atlantamagazine.com | Kelundra Smith

ARTlanta is a quarterly column dedicated to celebrating the artists, creatives, and designers who give Atlanta its flavor. It’s been a while since my last ARTlanta column. I spent most of the summer doing something new, as I saw the play I wrote, The Wash, take flight in a co-production by Synchronicity Theatre and the Impact Theatre. I reviewed theater in Atlanta for more than a decade, and it was truly a surreal process to be on the other side of the stage.
AMERICAN THEATRE

Sep 11, 2024 | americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith

The musical Waitress charmed Broadway audiences in its 2016-21 run (following its 2015 premiere at American Repertory Theater). Now regional theatres are dipping their spoons for a taste. The story of Jenna, a young woman stuck in a bad marriage and a dead-end job at a small-town diner who finds solace in baking, started as an independent film starring Keri Russell and eventually made its way to the stage with catchy tunes by Grammy winner Sara Bareilles.
Imagining Brighter Futures

Aug 14, 2024 | americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith

Close your eyes and imagine your ideal theatremaking ecology. Who do you see? Where are stories being told? What does it smell, sound, and taste like? Now open your eyes. Can you translate your most hopeful imagination into reality? American Theatre has asked 16 of the brightest minds in all areas of our industry to do a version of this thought experiment, and we will be publishing their work over the remainder of this year.
5 Things Theatre Criticism Taught Me About Playwriting

Jul 31, 2024 | americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic,” said Oscar Wilde. For the better part of the last decade, I was a freelance theatre critic in Atlanta. I spent many nights and weekends in the aisle seat watching stories unfold onstage and then participating in musings about what I’d seen with strangers. That decade also highlighted for me the stories I wasn’t seeing: about poor people, people of color, people living with disabilities, or transgender or nonbinary folks.
‘We Are In The Wrong Place’

Jun 19, 2024 | americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith

In 1968, the regional theatre movement was finding its legs just as the Civil Rights Movement reached a major inflection point. About a month before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Zelda Fichandler, founding artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., sent a memo titled “Confidential Plan” to the board about her intentions to integrate the theatre’s acting company and audience.
New Swap Meet Musical Opens Shop in San Diego

May 24, 2024 | americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith

In San Diego County’s Latine community, shopping at the swap meet is as much a part of life as sleeping and breathing. Need a new pair of shoes, toys for the kids, fresh produce, and some vintage jewelry? The swap meet has it all—and more.