Last week, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center at CUNY ran its annual Prelude Festival. This year’s offerings included interdisciplinary performances, Segal talks, and panels with events available digitally for free.
A wide range of performances were presented this year from fully-developed pieces to excerpts from works in development. One piece that has been developed through previous iterations (including as a radio play) over the past several years is The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. by Sybil Kempson of 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr & Perf. Co. in collaboration with Dee Dorcas Beasnael, Chris Giarmo, Graham Reynolds, Brian Mendes, Victor Morales, Crystal Wei, Oceana James, and many others. This experimental play defies genre boundaries as it explores the figure of Mary Shelley, her life, and her famous literary monster in a work that promises to invent as many interpretations of Mary Shelley as there are definitions for the word “Gothic.” The work combines fictional narratives, literature, anachronisms, and historical research together in a rambling epic exploring the literary icon. These elements are juggled in an audiovisual collage that matches the play’s idiosyncratic structure.
Detroit-based theater ensemble A Host of People presented an excerpt of a project in development called Fire in the Theater!. A Host of People began to develop this original work in April of 2020; the project is an investigation into the freeness of speech in our current digital age and divisive sociopolitical landscape. This multimedia work is community-sourced with the ensemble actively conducting research including research into conspiracy theory communities and soliciting personal experiences by interviewing individuals and inviting people to share their stories. Interested in Fire in the Theater!? Contribute your own experiences to the collection of research at A Host of People.
Amongst my personal favorite of the performance excerpts came from the artists of the Hatch Arts Collective, a Pittsburgh-based theater group formed by three friends – Adil Mansoor, Paul Kruse, and Nicole Shero – interested in making socially-engaged and community-activating theater. In an intimate and organic Zoom call between the three artists, they presented insights into the Hatch Arts Collective prior to sharing individual projects currently evolving. Shero presented a currently untitled project that is archiving her life in detail, including recreations of websites from her adolescence, a personal project she intends to keep as self-facing only.
Like Shero, Mansoor and Kruse also shared individual projects that are deeply personal. As part of some graduate work, Kruse interviewed caretakers at an HIV/AIDS hospice in Texas which led to Kruse discovering that his mother had a cousin, Jeff, that died of HIV/AIDS. The revelation came when discussing his interview work with his mother. Jeff had died in the 90s at the age of 31, having returned home to the Midwest after living for several years in Los Angeles where he had contracted HIV. From conversations with people who knew him, Kruse has reached the conclusion that Jeff was likely a gay man, a surprise to Kruse who had previously believed himself to be the only queer person in his Midwestern family. It sparked his play Once Removed which explores Kruse’s and Jeff’s lives in comparison; Kruse hopes to develop it further by interviewing queer individuals with similar family discoveries with a focus on Midwesterners.
Mansoor shared part of his work Amm(i)gone, a loose adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone that has developed out of conversations with his mother. Prior to the project, Mansoor’s mother discovered her son’s queerness via a third source: the internet. Following the discovery, she turned to her faith to pray for her son in hopes of saving him in the afterlife. Mansoor came up with this project and asked his mother to collaborate with him on the adaptation in an effort to heal. His vision for the play evolved as they worked, shifting as the conversations with his mother about the adaptation became inspiring creative material. The result is a one-man show Mansoor calls “an apology to and from his mother” that explores queerness, faith, love, obligation, and the afterlife; it combines the original Antigone with other texts, Islamic belief, and recordings of the conversations between Mansoor and his mother. Amm(i)gone is still in development and set to premiere in the spring.
The informal presentations of shows in the festival allowed for a blend of artist conversations, spotlights on theater groups’ works, and performances across stages of development. Alongside these organic offerings were the Segal Talks featuring New York-based and internationally-based artists and curators. Finally, this year offered multiple panels for audiences including “The New New York Theater Criticism,” “Contemporary Indigenous Performance,” and “International Cultural Services, Centers, and Institutions in New York.” By balancing formal and informal presentations, the festival effectively captured a snapshot of communing through theater in a way sometimes difficult to achieve through digital programming; and by using digital space to share the events for free, the festival widened its accessibility as theater shifts back to physical spaces and more localized audiences. Though the festival ended on October 31, it remains available via the Segal Center’s YouTube channel where you can engage with a selection of the performances, talks, and panels via their Prelude Festival 2021 playlist.
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