73 Plays in Quarantine
by Thomas Macias
The theatre may be dark for now, but for a small group of theatre artists, staying connected via video chat has helped satisfy the desire to collaborate. Please enjoy the following blog post from Purple Rose Resident Artist, Thomas Macias.
Saturday, March 21, 2020.
We started with a new play by my new wife Bethany. It was the first time she had shared the script with anyone, let alone had it read out loud. We were only a handful of people, but it was the start of a much longer project than we had anticipated.
Just over 100 days later, this group had read or watched 73 plays.
The process was fairly simple – people got PDFs or hard copies of plays to read. Plays that they’ve read before and wanted to share, plays they’ve always wanted to read but never had time, or just a play that looked interesting. We shared it with the group, and read it on Zoom at 5pm every day. The person who suggested the play would cast it with whoever attended, and away we went.
At most, we had about 10 people on a single call, but usually it was somewhere between 3 & 6 people. As such, we read mostly plays with smaller cast sizes, but that hardly limited our pool of choices.
And to be clear, I personally haven’t read or watched 73 plays in 100 days – I think my count is 62.
And, as the world changed, so did our group.
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT:
Thomas Macias, 28, has been with the Purple Rose since his 2013-14 apprenticeship. He has worked with The Purple Rose Theatre Company for 5 years as a Stage Manager before transitioning to his current role as the Development Associate for the theatre. He is also a Resident Artist and stars alongside Jeff Daniels in Guest Artist, a feature-length film based on the World Premiere Purple Rose Stage Production.
Thursday, April 22, 2020.
Virtual Trivia for Detroit Arts – a weekly trivia night to raise money for Detroit Arts Organizations – started up, and members of our group started attending the Thursday events. Sometimes we’d read a short play before trivia. Other times we’d just skip the reading and only attend the trivia night to hang out, make hashtags (#TossedSaladandScrambledEggsWarriorPrincess), and have friendly banter with the other teams (trash trash, smack smack). I also started my Joga Journey with Joga Master James Kuhl – Artistic Director at Tipping Point.*
*I apologize for all the inside jokes here, but, I’ll
stop before it gets way out of hand. #RedCarGif
Monday, May 25, 2020.
As the protests around the country (and the world) started to happen, our group joined in. I gave blood for the first time since 2011, we skipped a play reading to attend a vigil in Chelsea, we attended town halls and talks from both Actors Equity Association (those of us who are members of the union) and from the Black Literature & Art Queens Network, and have had conversations about being Anti-Racist Allies. Most recently, we’ve been working from and continue to work from a Google Document created by Autumn Gupta and Bryanna Wallace called Justice in June.
We also decided that the next handful of plays we read would be exclusively written by authors who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). The truth was that, until that point, the authors of the plays we’d been reading had been mostly white. When we include this handful of plays by BIPOC playwrights, out of the 73 plays we’ve read, only 9 are from BIPOC authors. We are a group of well-intentioned white people, and we have a lot of work to do.
I’ll be writing a part two to this blog that includes data I’ve collected on the plays we’ve read, along with a few of our favorites – thank you for reading!
END OF PART I
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