It's been a year of connecting storytellers with audiences, a culmination of my own searching for a way to reach through the screen of my laptop and only connect.
Yesterday as Suzanne Bachner and I rehearsed my own monologue for Monday's presentation, I realized that the piece itself, Danger Round This Corner, is really the perfect artistic expression of what I've been struggling to achieve for myself and provide for others ever since that day in March 2020 when suddenly the world was told:
Go home.
In record time there was an ad that appeared on TV for Bright Star Care that sought to spin the pandemic into gold for the home care industry.
The grim truth of this period of protracted isolation and dislocation from the rituals of community has been what it has uncovered at the core of our social isolation. When so many of the distractions of life spent on the go were stripped away, many of us found ourselves reassessing the value of our relationships. Which connections have we been willing or eager to invest in from the privacy of that space behind our screens?
The answers were hardly ever what we expected.
In Danger Round This Corner, I play a man at odds with his adult siblings, adrift during pandemic, finding that he has somehow crossed a line he did not know was there who finds himself adrift and without a port in this storm.
In the Spring of 2020, the future for playwrights looked grim because playwrights unlike almost any other creative artist develop and thrive in a symbiotic relationship with their audience. Removing the audience from the life of the playwright is akin to depriving a plant of water and light. It may start to wilt. And if enough time passes, its ability to return to its former fullness recedes into oblivion.
And so I founded the Hear Me Out Monologue Competition with a call for playwrights to submit a monologue on the theme 'Me & My Masks' and on Labor Day we premiered the wonderful work of 12 Finalist Winners: Mahasin D. Shamshiddeen, J. Gulotta, Lillian Ann Slugocki, Michael Wells-Oakes, Janet Kenney, Lucy Avery Brooke, David Cote, Patrick Mulcahey, Jeff Dunne, Lizzie D. Combs, Fran Handman and Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro -- a group of playwrights from all over the country ranging in age from early-20s to mid-90s, from emerging to established. And the awards were announced by our Finalist Judges, an esteemed bunch of some of the most highly regarded folks working in the field: Julie Jensen, Kia Corthron, Gary Garrison, Kate Snodgrass and Doug Wright.
All of this is to say the pandemic has been a leveler in many ways, tossing playwrights everywhere a fundamental question:
What are you going to do with your time behind your laptop?
Are you going to use the time to simply hunker down and write more and wait this out? Or, might it be possible for you, the writer, to find a direct connection to your audience that could sustain you through this period of relative isolation in a way that nurtures your facility to communicate with an audience?
Because everyone who has been touched deeply by theatre understands that in the theatre the communication between the actors in the play or musical unfolding on stage and the audience in the house is a two-way street. The audience drives the emotional flow of each evening in powerful ways essential to the drama coming alive.
I spoke to the unique power of the playwright-audience relationship here.
After last year's presentation of Finalist Winner monologues at the Labor Day Fest, it was clear to me that we'd come upon something powerful in creating a space in which an audience (unmuted!) was responding in real time to the words of the playwright. All seemed uniquely nourished by the experience and so we decided we had to continue. And on each subsequent first Monday of the month, we've presented 5 new monologues for a small audience of 40-50 unmuted active listeners and we call it Some1Speaking. On Monday August 2nd we'll complete a year of 1st Mondays of the month and then this Labor Day we'll begin again with the second annual festival and awards ceremony.
I hope you'll join us to experience this uniquely transformative space we've built in which playwrights grow and audiences coalesce. Personally, for me it's been a joy and a revelation to find myself on both sides of this equation -- equally moving when I've been offering up work of my own as when I've been participating by listening actively, microphone on, as an eager and vocal member of the audience.
It makes me want to rise to my feet and shout Bravo!
