the week of march 8-12, 2021
this is not a pandemic anniversary edition
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Identity design by Elizabeth Haley Morton.
online theatre
Psalmayene 24’s The Freewheelin’ Insurgents premieres March 17th at Arena Stage. The filmed musical is part of Arena Riffs, a three-part commissioned series exploring “the grief and void created by the pandemic, the nationwide reckoning on racial injustice, finding joy in difficult times and the exploration of one’s relationship to the country.”
Lincoln Center will stream past productions its Private Reels: From the LCT Archives series. Upcoming showings include Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (directed by Nicholas Martin), Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves (directed by Lila Neugebauer), Marco Ramirez’s The Royale (directed by Rachel Chavkin), and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole (directed by Liliana Blain-Cruz).
Two other theatres — Goodspeed Opera House and the Goodman Theatre — also announced they’ll be opening up their Disney vaults for streaming. Goodspeed will stream their 2019 production of Brett Ryback and Eric Ulloa’s Passing Through (directed by Igor Goldin); The Goodman will stream Christina Anderson’s How to Catch Creation (directed by Niegel Smith), Noah Haidle’s Smokefall (directed by Anne Kauffman), Measure for Measure (directed by Flora Lauten), and Raquel Carrió’s Pedro Páramo (directed by Robert Falls).
A reading of Ellen Steves’ Thin Mints streams March 19th at 7 PM as part of Sideshow Theatre Company’s House Party series. Directed by Justin J. Sacramone, the play “follows a troop of Bonfire Girls during a five-day woodland jamboree as they prepare for an important election…and offers a warped perspective on the consequences of a community governed by abuse and manipulation.”
Omer Abbas Salem’s The Secretaries streams March 10-16 for the Goodman. The reading, directed by Audrey Francis, is part of the Goodman’s Future Labs, a new artistic program to develop works authored and directed by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, AAPI, SWANA and other Chicago-based artists of color.
reopening watch
BAM announced its outdoor and online 2021 season. The line-up includes an outdoor production of Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Simon Stephens’ sound installation Blindness will open Off Broadway on April 2nd. Directed by Walter Meierjohann, Blindness premiered at the Donmar Warehouse last summer. In New York, socially-distanced audiences (capped at 100) will experience the story through binaural headphone technology while immersed in an atmospheric design.
Park Avenue Armory will resume in-person performance this month, starting with Bill T. Jones' Afterwardsness. The venue will operate at 10 percent of its normal capacity and require masks, physical distancing, and on-site rapid testing.
playwrights making TV
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will write and executive produce a pilot for FX based on Octavia Butler’s Kindred.
Charly Evon Simpson signed an overall deal with HBO. She’s currently on the writing staff of Perry Mason and will be a consulting producer on the next season of Industry.
assorted news
The National Asian American Theatre Company commissioned five Asian-American female playwrights—Jaclyn Backhaus, Samantha Chanse, Mia Chung, Naomi Iizuka, and Anna Moench—to write monologues for characters no younger than 60 years old. All five will be performed together as a piece entitled Out of Time.
things I read this week
Diep Tran on what the limited reopening of New York theatres means for actors (Backstage)
Lily Janiak on the Urban Institute’s distressing report on the pre-pandemic precarity of California arts workers, and how society needs to “reinvent how we value and protect broad swaths of the labor market if we are to emerge from this pandemic” (San Francisco Chronicle)
Ava Wong Davies’ review of HELLO, an intimate, constantly interrupted, week-long succession of texts and videos from Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas (Exeunt)
I’ve been dreading the grim cascade of one-year anniversary features for weeks. I was invited to reflect on my pandemic year in two publications and politely declined, because bless those people who can eloquently articulate their losses and hopes right now but I am not one of them.
I understand the need to process the exhausting hell we’re still living in — especially after the Trump administration refused to acknowledge the mounting severity of the pandemic for months — but I haven’t been able to figure out how to reduce the enormity of the last year into a few neat paragraphs yet. My life last March already feels like an artifact, or a book I read years ago that I heartily recommend to everyone but in truth can only hazily remember. And as the magic and possibility of the After Times looms, I’m worried about America’s (and the theatre industry’s) long history of ignoring and compounding collective trauma, and how it could thrust us all into a new crisis.
I don’t have any profound conclusions — I’m really living up to my misery chick vibes here — but if you also found yourself rattled by this week of reflection, you’re not the only one.
