‘Play at Home’ with Long Wharf Theatre program that invites you to act out brand-new plays

As theaters across the country were shuttered, audiences stuck at home and playwrights out of work, Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven began innovating. The theater is one of the instigators of a national project, “Play at Home,” that aims to remedy some of the challenges of the coronavirus lockdown.

Those who miss the thrill of hearing a brand new script read for the first time can now go to playathome.org/play-with-us, where they’ll find dozens of short new works by some of the modern theater’s current stars. The plays are meant to be downloaded and read aloud at home. Many are written in such a way that the number of performers and other aspects of the play can be easily modified based on the realities of whatever isolated situation it’s being performed in.

The project was started by four major regional theaters — the Long Wharf, Baltimore Center Stage in Maryland, Repertory Theater of St. Louis and the experimentally minded Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C. — plus the national standard-bearer for new American plays, The Public Theater in New York City.

In April, the theaters began commissioning plays from established playwrights, including many of the young writers the theater industry like to refer to as “emerging talents” as well as established writers like Regina Taylor, whose biggest hit “Crowns” was revived by Long Wharf in 2018. Each theater made its own commissions. The playwrights received a flat $500 fee to write a 10-minute play, and don’t receive any royalties because of the public nature of the Play at Home project.

“Play at Home” has received “really positive feedback from the community,” says Hope Chavez, who helped oversee the project as part of her job as Long Wharf’s artistic producer. Chavez says that the various Play at Home scripts have been downloaded over 34,000 times and that over 40,000 people had visited the site.

Long Wharf took its own approach to the Play at Home concept. The theater felt badly for the two writers whose shows were planned for the theater’s 2019-20 season, but canceled by the shutdown. Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady” had gotten as far as its dress rehearsal when it was postponed in March; the sets have been preserved so that the play can be done in the future. Lauren Yee’s “The Great Leap,” scheduled for May, had already been cast. So Play at Home scripts were commissioned from Suh and Yee, and those scripts were also given live public Zoom readings featuring actors from those writers’ postponed Long Wharf live shows.

Some of the other three playwrights Long Wharf pursued for Play at Home also had ties to the theater. Hillary Bettis, who contributed the love story “Barefoot” to Play at Home, is known for “Alligator,” the first play to be produced by the Sol Project, an organization founded by Long Wharf artistic director Jacob Padrón to promote the work of emerging Latinx writers. Ricardo Pérez González’s “On the Grounds of Belonging” had opened the Long Whartf’s 2019-20 season; his Play at Home play is titled “Zoomy Zoomy Kill Kill” and is explicitly written for a Zoom-based reading. The other Long Wharf Play at Home commission, “To Stray or Not to Stray,” is from MJ Kaufman, an Oregonian whose Connecticut connections include degrees from Wesleyan University and the Yale School of Drama.

Two Zoom versions of some of the Long Wharf scripts, with professional actors and directors, have been done so far and a third is due July 15. The shows are followed by talkbacks with the cast and creative team; these discussions can run longer than the plays, which clock in at well under half an hour. These broadcasts are are done just once each, due to performance rights restrictions. Details on how to register to see the free performance on July 15 will be posted at longwharf.org.

In addition to the public presentations, Chavez says Long Wharf staff has been staging the scripts for each other, in private meetings. This is in the spirit of what the plays were intended to be: a way for theaterlovers to gather and share new work during the shutdown.

Since the plays were never meant to be staged in a theater, the writers have a freedom they wouldn’t otherwise have. They are also conscious of the wide range of people who might be performing their scripts. Lloyd Suh’s “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” begins with this stage direction: “Bobby and Andy (any age, any gender, any ethnicity) at home. Bobby is on a laptop or something. Andy might be reading or something.”

The Long Wharf doesn’t plan to commission any more writers, butPlay at Home continues to add more and more scripts. There are currently more than 60 plays on the Play at Home site. Some of the more intriguing titles include “The Greatest 10 Minute Musical Ever Written” by Timothy Allen McDonald & Rob Rokicki, “A Bunch of Scientists on Spring Break” by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb and “None of This Would Have Ever Happened if You Had Just Given an Oscar to Jennifer Lopez” by Tony Meneses.

The Long Wharf is already on to its next online project, a set of short plays it commissioned about Black trans women, curated and co-produced by the writer/performance artist Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi. Those plays are slated to be online by the end of July.

The theatre has announced a flexible 2020-21 season where its main building will remain shuttered and a series of small events will take place in public spaces around New Haven.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.

———

©2020 The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.)

Visit The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) at www.courant.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.