You’d think that among theater people, the biggest control freaks would be an artistic director and a playwright—those responsible for the company’s aesthetic vision and the text used onstage. But when Elevator Repair Service’s John Collins and playwright Sibyl Kempson talk about Fondly, Collette Richland, it’s clear that instead of obsessing about control, both are exhilarated by the lack thereof.

Elevator Repair Service became an international sensation with Gatz—part of a trilogy involving onstage readings of classic dead-guy literature: Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway. So what happens when they co-create their next production with “one of the most radical, transgressive, and hilarious playwright/performers out there”? That someone, the very much alive Sibyl Kempson, talks about the experience.

Paul Douglas considers himself an “albino unicorn.” A moderate Republican, he’s also a meteorologist who believes climate change is real. Music-theater artist Cynthia Hopkins decided to make art about the crisis after a 2010 Arctic expedition. In a recent interview, the pair discusses global warming and ways that art, science, and spirituality can work together to change minds about a changing planet.

During a 2010 trip to the Arctic, Cynthia Hopkins serenaded a sailing vessel, the Noorderlicht, that carried her and other artists on what she calls a “lucky, life-transforming” journey. First sung with ukelele accompaniment on the ship’s deck, the song is now part of Hopkins’ new climate-themed music-theater work, one she characterizes as a “love song to the miraculous clemency of our world.”

Staging a story of the deity Ganesh traveling to Nazi Germany to reclaim the Sanskrit symbol of the swastika was complex enough, even without this factor: It’s told not by a Jewish or Hindu cast but through “actors perceived to have intellectual disabilities.” Back to Back Theatre’s Bruce Gladwin discusses the work and the questions it raises about exploitation, power, and cultural appropriation.

Ever since Shakespeare penned King Lear in the early 1600s, the tragedy’s text has been endlessly challenged—so much so, writes Guthrie Theater senior dramaturg Michael Lupu, that it’s nearly impossible to find a “pure” Lear. From a 1681 version with a happy ending to Peter Brook’s famed 1962 staging, Lear has seen countless reconstructions—including She She Pop’s Lear with a twist, Testament.

The best performance work, says PS122’s founding director Mark Russell, comes from crossing and combining genres or disciplines: “Those were the cracks where the light gets in.” In conversation with the Walker’s Philip Bither, Russell reflects on punk, performance, and the legacy of the Walker’s Out There festival at the quarter-century mark.

Amid the clamor of Super PAC–powered politicians duking it out on a whole new level this election season, Laurie Anderson’s Dirtday! offers a timely, quietly powerful rejoinder. An artist who normally steers clear of directly addressing politics in her work, she recently discussed her motivations in applying the “sharp tools” of her art to the topics of peace, politics, and never-ending war.

Turning 27 in 1980, Patrick Scully left the dance collective he called home to work independently and “explore what being gay meant to me as an artist.” A decade that began with optimism yielded surprises as political conservatism, the destruction of his downtown block, and AIDS rocked his world. For our continuing series reflecting on the Twin Cities in the 1980s, Scully shares his memories.