TIME FOR SCIENCE
Mad Cow returns, plus a look at Winter Park Playhouse’s new musicals
Central Florida, let’s talk festivals.
It’s time once again for Mad Cow Theatre’s annual Science Play Festival — can you believe it will be the seventh time the downtown Orlando theater celebrates this wonderful intersection of art and science?
This year, as medical scientists the world over work on finding ways to control the coronavirus, the theater will appropriately use the science of technology to present its festival. Mad Cow will stream the Science Play Festival online, and in a new development, will add a weeklong children’s camp combining science and playwriting to the lineup.
Headlining the event will be Lauren Gunderson, recognized as the most produced living playwright in the U.S. Gunderson has had Central Florida in her sights lately; at the start of the month, she introduced an online reading of her play “Silent Sky” for Seminole State College.
Mad Cow Theatre staged a thrilling production of “Silent Sky” in 2018. It’s a play about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a pioneering turn-of-the-20th-century astronomer at a time when women did not generally enter the sciences. That’s just one of the plays Gunderson has written about women and science. Among her other science-related titles: “Ada and the Engine,” about a woman on the frontlines of change at the dawn of the technological era, and “The Half-Life of Marie Curie,” which focuses on the friendship between the famed scientist and a female engineer.
Locally, audiences might have seen her plays “I and You,” also at Mad Cow Theatre; “The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful
(and Her Dog!)” at Orlando Repertory Theatre; or, most recently,
“Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley” at Orlando Shakes.
Gunderson will be part of a discussion on “What is a Science Play?” alongside “Paradise (SPF 2018)” playwright Laura Maria Censabella and Denise Gillman, who has directed multiple science plays at the theater. That event (7-8:30 p.m. June 25) falls under the theater’s ongoing Drama Club series of theatrical behind-thescenes talks and costs $20.
Viewing the festival’s other events, however, are free.
From 7:30-9 p.m. June 26, Climate Change Theatre Action takes the floor — or screen, as it were — for an evening of short plays about the environment.
Mad Cow will present several of the movement’s 50 five-minute plays from writers around the world. Participating actors, educators and directors include Anthony Pyatt, Tommy Keesling, Cynthia Beckert, Gail Bartell, Susi Rivera, Julie Carr, Justin
Schneyer and Kat Henwood.
Finally, from 3-5 p.m. June 27, young people get their say as the festival showcases short plays they have prepared.
Students ages 13-18 will create new plays during the first Youth Science Play Lab June 15-19. In the weeklong camp, the students will participate in guided writing activities and then be part of casting, rehearsals, and performing their 10-minute science play. The cost is $100 for the week.
To sign up for the Play Lab or get more information on the festival, go to madcowtheatre.com.
New musicals
Meanwhile, looking ahead — way ahead — Winter Park Playhouse has announced the entries in its fourth Florida Festival of New Musicals. We were supposed to see these works this summer, but COVID-19 put the kibosh on that. So, instead, mark