"How I Spent My Summer Vacation" - a digital theater piece - TEASER
Dear fam,
Let's all take a deep breath, yes? Man, I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy right now. This new situation has forced us to connect in new ways with others and ourself.
I have been holed up in my apartment creating a video project as part of Center Theatre Group's Community Stories Series. I've been working with my longtime-collaborator, director Benjamin Byron Davis. It's maybe the most amount of work that I've ever created in such a small amount of time. I've been writing, shooting, acting and editing a digital theater piece about an artist in isolation and we are premiering it TODAY! Click here to watch it starting at 10am PT! Below is Ben's Director's Note.
Stay safe.
Love,
Joe
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
I have been collaborating on theater pieces with my friend Joe Hernández-Kolski for over twenty years. In many ways, for much of that time, he has been the thread keeping me connected to the vibrant Los Angeles theater scene, even it turns out, in a moment when all of our theaters are closed.
Joe approached me at the beginning of quarantine with an exciting proposal: develop a solo theater piece for a series of Community Stories commissioned by the venerable Center Theatre Group. Given the pandemic - this particular theater piece would have to be a digital one.
The challenge - to my mind - became what distinguishes a “digital theater piece” from a short film? Once we are digesting the work on a screen is it even theater anymore?
I’m not sure I know the answer to that question - but Joe’s “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” is our (sometimes) earnest attempt at a reply.
As we have been forced to move much of our life into isolation and much of our interaction into virtual spaces, I have taken solace in and inspiration from theater artists around the globe who are finding novel solutions to keep us connected to each other as they keep searching for deeper truths through artistic expression.
For all the challenges we are facing at this moment as individuals, as communities, as nations and as inhabitants of this small planet there is - it seems - a thread of anger and frustration coursing through us all that is unlike any other moment I remember.
That Joe’s introspection has yielded such a joyful response to such a challenging interval is precisely why I have been proud to work with him for all of these years.
I have more to say about the theater and how essential it is and will continue to be whenever we get back to sitting alongside each other as the lights go down - but I fear I have already become (as Joe says of his dating profile) “so fucking pretentious,” so let’s get on with the show…
