#beyondtherealm

[playwrightsrealm]

Appointment with gOD: Visa Imbalance

Americans can travel to 177 countries in the world1 (out of 218) without applying for a visa in advance. In contrast, America only allows citizens from 382 countries to travel to the United States without applying for a Visa—30 of those 38 are European countries. For citizens from the vast majority of countries on Earth, the process for acquiring a visa to come to America is quite onerous and unpredictable.

Applicants must:

Fill out 40 pages of an application (DS-160, available at travel.state.gov)

Take a picture with the following specifications:

Taken within the last 6 months.

In color, with no shadows, on a plain white background.

Without any worn electronic devices. Except for essential devices such as hearing aids.

The US visa photo size must be 2 x 2 inches (51 x 51 mm).

One must be facing the camera, with a neutral expression and both eyes open.

One cannot wear a uniform. Religious clothing worn daily is allowed. The head must not be covered, unless the person wears a headdress for religious purposes. The full face must be visible.

One must not wear eyeglasses. If there is a medical necessity (for example, the person has had an eye surgery lately), a statement from a doctor must be provided.

Sized in a way that the head is between 1 and 1 3/8 inches (22 mm and 35 mm) or 50% and 69% of the image’s total height from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head.

Pay a non-refundable visa fee (in the case of a B1/2 category, visitor non-immigrant visa, $160) regardless of the outcome of the application.

Convince the consular officer that they are not traveling to the US with ill intentions or to live there illegally. The applicant has to provide other supporting documents including but not limited to:

Invitation Letter

Financial documents like bank statements for last 3-6 months, salary slips for last 3 months (if employed), Company/Organization returns if self-employed

Proof of strong ties to home country. For example, proof of ownership of property, marriage certificate if married, children’s birth certificates if any.

Proof of where they are going to stay (Hotel, or physical address of host)

After going through the entire process and gathering all these materials, many applicants are still denied a non-immigrant US Visa. Typically, applicants who are denied a Visa can try applying again, but they cannot appeal; they must start the process over with new paperwork and a new application fee.  

In many parts of the “developing” world, the number of US non-immigrant visas issued is minuscule. For example, in Togo, Senegal, and The Central African Republic, the refusal rate for visa applicants in 2017 were all above 50%3. In total for those four countries in 2017, only 7,453 people were given Visas4.

In contrast, Americans have a very different interaction with these foreign countries; they don’t have to set foot in an embassy or even apply for a visa. They just book their flights and arrive secure in the knowledge that they are welcome. Sources:

1“Here Are the Countries U.S. Citizens Can Visit Without a Visa” (lifehacker.com)

2“Visa requirements for United States citizens” (en.wikipedia.org)

3“Adjusted Refusal Rate - B-Visas Only By Nationality - Fiscal Year 2017” (travel.state.gov)

4”FY 2017 Nonimmigrant Visas Issued” (travel.state.gov)

[playwrightsrealm]

Appointment with gOD: A letter from the playwright

In a place of worship, everything feels sacred, holy and set apart. The rituals and interactions that happen there are revered by those who partake in them. In such a place, hope and faith are exercised, belief that there is a higher being listening to prayers, and supplications is at the centre of worship.

After September 11th the world changed tremendously. The way we move changed. The way we pack our luggage changed. The way we present ourselves publicly changed. What we once considered private has become public. In our daily interactions, we are suspicious of the other. We harden ourselves and close off any avenues for empathy and compassion. We are afraid and even resentful of anyone who looks different from us. We don’t see us in the other. We see past the other. Fear.

At a United States Embassy in a “developing country,” fear and anxiety cut the air. Silent prayers are too loud for unwilling ears. Breaths–deep, loud and soft–disappear in the wind. The unseen presence of a powerful being, a being that holds visa applicants’ futures in their hands makes the place feel sacred, holy and set apart. It is a temple. Are the visa applicants here to meet god? Are their lives going to be any better after this appointment with god?

Born in South Western Uganda, Asiimwe Deborah Kawe is an award-winning playwright, producer and performer. Founder of Tebere Arts Foundation, which co-curates and co-produces Kampala International Theatre Festival, Asiimwe has worked with Sundance Institute leading the East Africa initiative for 6 years. She received a B. A. in Theatre at Makerere University - Uganda, and an M.F.A. in Writing for Performance from CalArts. Recent plays include: Red Hills, Will Smith Look Alike, Cooking Oil, Appointment with gOD, to mention but a few. Asiimwe has been a writing fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and a guest lecturer/artist at Pomona College.

[playwrightsrealm]

Block Association Project: the play that starts online

As part of our #BeyondTheStage programming of Michael Yates Crowley and Wolf359's "Block Association Project," we sat down with the team to discuss how they created an immersive experience that starts the moment patrons buy a ticket.

Step 1: the software defines and creates the email address for each character in the show.

What is Wolf 359?

Wolf 359 is a New York City-based company of narrative technologists that worked collaboratively to create tonight’s show under the auspices of The Playwrights Realm. Besides Michael Yates Crowley and Michael Rau, its founding members, the Wolf 359 team includes Chas Carey, Sara Walsh, and Asa Wember. Since the company’s founding in 2007, Wolf 359 work has been shown in Berlin, Dublin, Edinburgh, Chicago, and many other cities and city-states.

Step 2: this script tells the software when to send each message – getting the order right is crucial to the story!

How did Block Association Project come to life?

Even before the story was written, the team knew that they wanted the audience to be involved in the narrative from the moment they reserved their seats. Texts, e-mails, social media posts – patrons should go through an experience as close as possible to that of joining a real-life block association (which the playwright actually did).

The challenge: how to send hundreds of messages, in the right order, and handle whatever responses came in from audience members, without having a full-time staff on board? The team turned to a piece of custom-written software created by Michael Rau, repurposed from code he’d written for an earlier Wolf 359 project (Temping, which was performed at Lincoln Center).

Once patrons made a reservation, they got a form to fill out with their contact information, which was in turn fed to the software. Once deployed, the technology started sending out messages, making sure the story was told in a cohesive manner.

While this is only part of the piece (and the team wanted people to be able to enjoy the show regardless of their previous interactions), it opens a very exciting path for live performance– one that’s not tied to a stage.

Putting together a piece of interactive theater is not easy, and requires more than a playwright and a director - in this case, it required the company they founded together, Wolf 359.

Step 3: the server stays active throughout, making sure to keep the show online and all communications flowing.

[playwrightsrealm]

Block Association Project: a letter from the creators

When does a play begin?

Does it begin when the lights go up? When the curtain opens? When you enter the theater?

What if it began before that, when you left the house? Or when you got up that morning? Or when you bought the ticket?

These are the questions we began with, when we started Block Association Project. Our goal, in this and in our past work, is to expand the theatrical moment. We use technology to tell stories in new ways, and we use live theater to do what technology can’t: put us in a room of strangers, breathing the same air, listening to the same voices, for a few brief moments, together.

The story we’re telling in this project is one about community: what makes a community, and what breaks it. We chose the block association because it’s one of the few communities that, at times, cuts across lines of age, class, race, and gender. In other words, it’s a place of hope for forging stronger connections among us. And, at the same time, a symbol of the way strengthening some connections can mean cutting off others.

This project is still in its early stages. We invite you to join our block association, meet your new neighbors, and participate in this community we’re building.

Michael Yates Crowley’s works for theater include The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B Matthias (Playwrights Realm at The Duke on 42nd Street); Gunplay: A Love Story (developed at NYTW and Ars Nova); Song of a Convalescent Ayn Rand Giving Thanks to the Godhead (American Repertory Theater, Joe’s Pub); temping (premiered at the 53rd New York Film Festival, A.R.T.); Evanston: A Rare Comedy (2013 O’Neill NPC selection); and The Ted Haggard Monologues (published by S. Fischer Verlag; filmed by HBO). He is a member of Ars Nova’s Play Group, a former NYFA Playwriting fellow and member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program at Juilliard. Together with the director Michael Rau, he founded the narrative technology company Wolf 359.

Michael Rau is a director specializing in new plays, opera, and digital media projects. He has worked internationally in Germany, Brazil, the UK, Ireland, and the Czech Republic. He has created work at Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, and Ars Nova. Regionally, his work has been performed at A.R.T. in Cambridge MA  and he has developed new plays at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and the Kennedy Center. He has served an assistant director for Anne Bogart, Les Waters, and Ivo Van Hove. He is a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect and a professor of directing at Stanford University.

[playwrightsrealm]

Witness: a letter from the playwright

WE ARE INNOCENT WE ARE INNOCENT WE ARE INNOCENT - Diamond Reynolds

The stories of Black Women warriors are parables. These parables hold aspects of the Black experience that are critical to our time. These women are our Goddesses.  They have suffered and shown so we can know and see and fight.

The Dark Girl Chronicles is a play cycle set in a multi-temporal galaxy, and erected in honor of black women warriors against state violence. Part Yoruba ritual, part collective-manifesto, and part documentary-theatre, each play in the cycle focuses on the interiority and necessary dignity dark girls are so often robbed of int he public arena.

WITNESS, the first part of this cycle, cites and is inspired by two major existing texts that it is important to uplift, honor, and acknowledge:

1. A creation story from the Odu Ifa, the corpus of sacred oral literature from the Yoruba people of Nigeria that, if written, would exceed 4,000 pages.

2.  Transcripts of Diamond Reynolds, primarily drawn from the Facebook Live posting she made after her fiancé Philando Castile was shot. Also drawn from the investigation video during which she was detained at the police station for 8 hours while Philando lay dying in the hospital. He died while she was being questioned, so she was both robbed of her fiancé and robbed of the opportunity to say goodbye.

What happens when these stories slam into each other?

Nia Witherspoon is a black queer writer, theatre-maker, vocalist/composer, and cultural worker. Described as “especially fascinating” by Backstage Magazine, Witherspoon’s work creates contemporary ritual-space grounded in African-diaspora sensibilities to speak to the issues of our times. Currently in residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Witherspoon has received New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, BRIC’s Premiere Residency, Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund Grant, Downtown Urban Theatre Festival’s “Audience Award,” Lambda Literary’s Emerging Playwriting Fellowship, and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Her staged works, including The Messiah Complex, YOUMINE, and SHE, have been developed or featured at BRIC, HERE, NYTW, National Black Theatre, BAAD, Dixon Place, The Kraine, and Movement Research. Witherspoon holds a PhD from Stanford University, and is currently a Playwright-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts (Amherst). She currently has works commissioned by The Shed, La Mama ETC, and JACK.

[playwrightsrealm]

Double Atlas: 6 Great Queer Horror Stories

As part of our #BeyondTheStage programming for MJ Kaufman's "Double Atlas," we're diving into the horror canon! According to MJ, "queer vampire narratives draw on a complicated history of iconography that is both problematic and reclaimed. The following is a list of great queer horror stories!"

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1871)

Dracula's Daughter directed by Lambert Hillyer (1936)

Blood and Roses directed by Roger Vadim (1961)

Vampyros Lesbos directed by Jesús Franco (1971)

Daughter of Darkness directed by Harry Kumel (1971)

The Hunger directed by Tony Scott (1983)

[playwrightsrealm]

Double Atlas: a letter from the playwright

Last year I wrote for two seasons of a horror TV show. Uncharted terrain for me, I had to get up to speed on the horror cannon. I would leave the writers’ room each day with a list of horror films to watch that night. Soon I had fallen in love with the genre. But not with its transphobia.  Horror, it seemed to me, had a habit of using trans characters to exploit viewers’ discomfort with gender and sexuality, particularly their fears and biases around misogyny, transphobia and homophobia. Trans characters showed up rarely, and when they did, they were problematic villains or helpless victims, their stories centered on cheap reveal plots. Also they were almost exclusively transwomen. Like a microcosm for our larger culture, horror had almost no trans representation, and what it did have was deeply harmful.

When you have no good models of who you are (because you are trans or gender non-conforming), how do you figure out how to be? What to look like? How to act? I started writing this play because I wanted to explore the line between self-discovery and narcissism. When you have to be your own model, falling into narcissism is a dangerous trap. I also wanted to explore the complexity of long-term queer relationships–how much partners come to rely on each other for the validation the world does not provide. When there is so little validation for gender non-conformity in our world, where do we find it? Through gazing into the water at our own reflection? And how do we avoid the terrible fate of Narcissus?

This story emerged full of the conventions and tropes of horror that I was steeped in while writing it. A fully produced version would delve more deeply into the visual language of horror onstage.

MJ Kaufman's recent productions include Masculinity Max in the Public Theater Studio program, Sensitive Guys at InterAct Theater and A Walrus in the Body of a Crocodile at Clubbed Thumb. MJ’s work has also been produced and developed at WP Theater, Colt Coeur, New Conservatory Theatre Center, NAATCO, New York Theater Workshop, the New Museum, Yale School of Drama and Lark Play Development Center as well as in Russian in Moscow. Along with Kit Yan, MJ co-founded Trans Lab, a fellowship for TGNG theater artists. Recently MJ was a staff writer on Netflix’ "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina."

[gobeyondtherealm]

A set from them dudes at SH killing all of it