Creative refuge amid the pandemic
A local theater education program in New Orleans fosters collaboration between students and professional actors.
A forest filled with chirping birds and blooming flowers appears on the screen. A bundle of blue hydrangeas and lush foliage frame the narrator’s Zoom window, and a white toga draped around her shoulders, fastened by gold clasps, matches her headband.
“Welcome to the story of Pandora’s Box,” the narrator says, introducing a play authored by a middle school students at the International School of Louisiana, and performed by professional actors.
Pandora, the star of the play, appears in the top-right window on the screen and announces her refusal to marry Epimetheus. “I’m only 17. I can’t marry someone I don’t love or even know. Later,” she says, flashing a talk-to-the-hand motion. The narrator continues to pressure Pandora, but a staring contest with her betrothed strengthens Pandora’s resolve: “My body, my rules. You can’t control everything I have.”
Suddenly, Zeus appears, with lightning as his Zoom background, his face hidden by a colorful beaded visor. He ends the engagement, and the performers celebrates with a rap song about Greek mythology.
Pandora’s Box: A Parody is just one of the students’ scripts performed in Play/Write’s annual showcase. This production marks the end of the 20-week theater education program based in New Orleans. Normally, there would be a performance in an auditorium crowded with family and friends. In 2020, the showcase debuted on a Vimeo recording.
When Covid-19 swept the country back in March, Play/Write, an immersive playwriting program for fifth- and sixth-grade students, shifted online. Designed to satisfy common core requirements, the program has students write six to nine short scripts during the school year, then develop one into a 50-line play for the showcase. The final script is then handed over to professional actors.
But the transition to virtual learning brought a unique set of challenges, as almost a third of the program’s 350 students lacked reliable access to a computer at the start of the pandemic. “A lot of people here rely on cell phone data to connect to the internet, as opposed to having a stable WiFi connection to their house, or they rely on the library,” said Mary Guiteras, the program’s education director. “So those first few months of trying to transfer the program online, a lot of kids kind of vanished. Suddenly, we’re having a really hard time getting in touch with students that at the beginning of the year were really engaged, prolific writers.”
Play/Write, a nonprofit founded in 2009, had to rely on individual schools and the city to coordinate technology access, Guiteras said. To accommodate students without computers, teaching artists and program directors eliminated deadlines and answered emails around the clock.
Although the city expanded internet and computer access for the 2020–21 school year, Guiteras said Play/Write’s enrollment dropped to 300 students. Still, program leaders learned to use virtual spaces to their advantage by incorporating backgrounds, makeshift props, and filters, said April Louise, ensemble member and arts administrator at Young Audiences Charter School.
“I set up a little green screen here in a corner of the house and found random things around the room to try and convey what the students wanted to say,” Louise said. In one script, Louise played an avocado alongside her colleague, Jessica Lozano, with whom she’d acted in a play about an interracial relationship during the yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans.
“I definitely remember that [scene] just because of the way she kept saying avocado different every time,” Louise said. “It’s really fun to step out of certain roles and just be playful and still completely professional.”
In their virtual sessions, teaching artists replaced the usual interactive exercises with a mix of brainstorming activities, such as captioning images or writing pretend text messages to objects displayed on the screen, said co-artistic director Chris Kaminstein.
“We really like going back and forth between the intellectual and the physical. As theater artists, that’s something we believe keeps people’s attention, and then you create opportunities for learning,” Kaminstein said. “We’re trying to create that same idea, that sort of back and forth between different parts of the brain in the virtual space.”
When he co-founded the program, Kaminstein hoped to foster an intergenerational connection using storytelling techniques. “Hopefully they’ll do something wonderful and new that I could never expect,” Kaminstein said. “But to start, we get to say here are some basic principles that will help make an engaging play, and, through those principles, tell the story you want to tell.”
Amid the pandemic challenges, Play/Write has found ways to expand their mission beyond current partner schools. Requests from parents prompted program directors to introduce a five-week virtual course, which attracted the attention of two private schools in the area and a school in Augusta, Georgia, Guiteras said.
In February 2021, Play/Write began to reenter some classrooms, armed with lessons from the last year and a resolve to continue inspiring the next generation of artists. “I have learned personally not to give up on creativity,” Guiteras said. “Creativity does find a way.”
