the week of november 9-13, 2020
the one where everyone's musing on theater with no theater
Welcome to Nothing for the Group, the newsletter where one dramaturg rounds up one week in theatre news, reviews, and takes.
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virtual theatre
Phone Call, the first part of 600 Highwaymen’s triptych A Thousand Ways, is now available via Canadian Stage, Arizona Arts Live, and Singapore International Festival of Arts. This quietly radical experiment is “a three-part journey that takes place over several months, with each distinct installment presenting a new chance at making simple contact with a stranger.” The experience of Phone Call is described as “on a simple phone call, you and another audience member – nameless strangers to one another – follow a carefully crafted set of directives. Over the course of the journey, a portrait of each other emerges through fleeting moments of exposure and the simple sound of an unseen voice.” The second in-person part, An Encounter, is currently playing at On the Boards in Seattle.
Tony Award-winning solo performer Sarah Jones’ new eight-episode series Sarah Jones & Friends is now available on IGTV. The series “digs into her carpetbag of characters to help us understand one another even when it seems like we have nothing in common.”
Rattlestick’s broadcast presentation of Dael Orlandersmith’s Until the Flood premieres on ALL ARTS on November 15. The performance, based on extensive interviews following the murder of Michael Brown by a white police offer, will be available until 2023.
Woolly Mammoth and the LGBTQ+ creative collective Makers Lab present The JookJOYnt, a free, five-part, multi-sensory video experience of “a journey to a starscape filled with visual vibes, musical menageries, and out of this world audio.” The project will be available to stream from November 17-22.
Perseverance Theatre is live-streaming Frank Henry Kaash Katasse’s The Spirit of the Valley, featuring an all-Indigenous cast, through this weekend. Performances are on Alaska time, but East Coasters can catch Sunday’s matinee.
Julia Izumi’s (An Audio Guide for) Unsung Snails and Heroes, directed by Natsu Onoda Power, will stream on November 17th at 2 PM as part of Manhattan Theatre Club’s Ted Snowdon Reading Series.
musings on theatre right now
The new anthology Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater is now available for purchase. The book, compiled by Sheila Callaghan, Meg Miroshnik, and Kelly Miller, and featuring the artwork and reflections of 148 theatre artists, is “an eclectic collection that reflects the absurdity, humor, impossibility, and grief inherent in making ‘theatre’ at a time when live performance as we know it does not exist.” Proceeds will go directly to the artists, and all your faves participated, so if you’ve got coins to spare, it’s a worthy purchase.
Across the pond, The Pound Project launched the similar Intermission, a book compiling stories, essays, speeches, and poems from the UK's leading actors, directors and writers on “what happens when the stage falls silent: mid speech, at an interval, in between roles...during a pandemic.”
Playwrights Horizons debuted Almanac, a new digital literary magazine. The compendium — “a snapshot of artistic thought in a time of seismic change” — features essays, drawings, interviews, manifestos, short plays from artists and staff members that capture the rapidly changing ideas and mindset of this critical moment.
2021 season updates
Austin-based Fusebox Festival announced Live in America, a new performing arts festival focusing on diversity and broad US geographical representation through communal programming, bringing together 300+ artists from the US, its territories, and Mexico. The two-week festival will be held in October 2021 at The Momentary, a new contemporary art space satellite to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR.
Oakland Theatre Project will present a full year of drive-in theatrical performances for its 2021 season. The line-up includes a site-specific production of Stephanie Anne Johnson's Binding Ties: The 16th Street Station; Lisa Ramirez’s solo adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; Kathleen Collins’ BEGIN THE BEGUINE: A Quartet of One Acts, co-directed by Michael Socrates Moran and Dawn L. Troupe; The Dream Life of Malcolm X, co-created by John Wilkins, William Hodgson and Dawn L. Troupe; and Dave Malloy's musical Ghost Quartet, directed by William Hodgson.
things I read this week
Laura Collins-Hughes on the origin and development of 600 Highwaymen’s A Thousand Ways, a triptych of encounters between strangers
