Hartford Courant (Sunday)

Staging at home

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

- By Christophe­r Arnott

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. Hilary 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 in

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