Congratulations to The LAB LV for launching their 10-Minute Play Project! Their first offering included two of my pieces; an original and a translation. The original, “Letter to a Clone Manufacturer” opened the show which was viewable live via ZOOM.
This reading offered me the valuable opportunity to cast and rehearse the play, and build upon the positive feedback I’d received from the cold reading at A Public Fit Theatre Company’s Playwright’s Tirade.
Having the reading online due to the Coronavirus pandemic brought new challenges and new possibilities. The 10 minute play format worked well to counteract the fatigue that comes with prolonged online meetings, and the chat feature encouraged audience engagement. Rehearsal allowed us to overcome the drawback of actors not being able to see their scene partner in ZOOM. The possibility of integrating the chat feature with the AI fembot character’s internal monologue excited me, so we experimented with that. And I was quick to take advantage of the online platform’s global accessibility by casting actors on four different continents, and inviting a global audience.
The reading was well attended, the actors did a fabulous job, and the feedback was great! Within the chat, several audience members described the play as “chilling!” One viewer from Venezuela went so far as to write the following review.
The quarantine has challenged everyone and has taken their creativity a little further, in this case it was a group of theater actors and writers who decided to present their stories via Zoom, technology did not prevent them from making us feel their words as if we were sitting in the front row in a theater, there were 4 10-minute stories including Letter to a Clone Manufacturer by Gigi Guizado, I thought it was great because she included representation and text in the chat (this is what I mean by taking creativity further) set in the near future it reminded me of the movie Ex Machina about artificial intelligence. For those who missed it, I think they will continue to have meetings like this that they are posting on their instagram page @thelabtheatrelv, I recommend them.
- Gabriela Guilarte
And so it happened that a journal entry I wrote back in 1998, to work through my feelings on ageism, sexism, and the socially accepted practice of men replacing their aging wives with younger ones, came to be read before an international audience.