I wrote a piece for the March/April issue of the Dramatist. The whole issue focuses on the ways theatermakers kept the art alive during the pandemic, and I wrote about what it was like to experience a crowd listening to an audiocast of my play. Excerpt below, full article here.
It was a warm July night in a parking lot in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Multicolored lights from dozens of LED headphones glittered in the darkness. It looked like a silent rave from the distance, minus a DJ on the 1s and 2s.
The crowd had come out and donned headphones to listen to the audiocast of my play The House of the Negro Insane, produced by the Contemporary American Theater Festival. While the pandemic was still raging and most theatres were still shuttered, CATF persevered, finding innovative ways to bring stories to the people.
To echo August Wilson, an audience is a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. That sense of community was the biggest piece I missed in most pandemic theatre experiments. Watching Zoom readings and streamed performances on my laptop didn’t come close to delivering the excitement I feel when artists and audiences experience a story, in-the-moment, communally.
