Have all those zoom meetings got you down? Feel like you can’t spend another minute feigning interest as poorly lit colleagues with bad sound drone on about work? Join the club, but don’t give up on the medium. Believe it or not, the best cure for zoom overexposure is not abstinence, but more zoom, only in the form of zoom theater. On Saturday, June 6, the UCSB Theater Department’s Launch Pad program presents Alone, Together, a daylong festival of original short plays and monologues written specifically for everyone’s new favorite medium, the video conference.
As a result of the depth of the Launch Pad program’s contact list, these will not be just any zoom plays. The 24 writers involved include some of the top playwrights in the country, and they have been working tirelessly with the UCSB BFA students who will perform their work since April. Expect to be amused, provoked, soothed, and tickled by the mass of collective theatrical intelligence that will be on display. Contributors include Arlene Hutton, Sheri Wilner, Yussef El-Guindi, Anne Garcia-Romero, and Dan Castellaneta. Artistic director Risa Brainin was just made a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, and she’s as fired up about this innovative Launch Pad move to online as she has ever been about any of the dozens of great shows she has brought to UCSB in the past. Performances begin at 11 a.m., and continue throughout the day and into the early evening, with “chapters” beginning at 11, 1, 4 and 6. Registration is required, but it can be done at the virtual door.
CHAPTER 1: Begins at 11 a.m. (PST)