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Stage Raw’s International Digital Play Festival
Intercontinental Pipeline
By Steven Leigh Morris
No, we’re not sending oil across continents, we’re sending theater.
On Saturday, March 21, 1 p.m., Stage Raw premieres its International Digital Play Festival, a year-in-the-making theater-exchange between artists and audiences of Los Angeles, California and Warsaw, Poland. The event takes place at The Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Avenue in Pasadena – and simultaneously at Teatr Studio in Warsaw, which will be linked via webcam to the Pasadena theater. The Pasadena audience is invited to partake in a Polish-style reception.
The afternoon will include live concert readings of five-minute playlets (broadcast directly to Warsaw) by U.S. writers John Michael Johnson, Nancy Keystone, Brian Polak, Brian Sonia-Wallace and Alicia Tycer. These works are in response to full-length new Polish plays posted on the Digital Festival platform of Stage Raw, which were selected curated by Joanna Klass of Warsaw’s Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
(Each of these full-length plays — by Wojtek Ziemilski, Magda Fertacz, Szczepan Orlowski and Darota Maslowska — is receiving some form of live presentation in Los Angeles as part of Culture.pl and the Polish Consulate-Los Angeles’ city wide festival, Polish Theatre Month, Los Angeles.)
Warsaw Playwright Wojtek Ziemilski
Meanwhile, interspersed among the Pasadena-based live readings, Warsaw will broadcast five-minute Polish playlet-responses (super-titled into English) to the Pasadena theater. These playlets are responses to four new U.S. plays posted on Stage Raw. (These are plays by Sheila Callaghan, Lucas Hnath, Robert O’Hara, and Alice Tuan, and were selected by Pier Carlo Talenti, Literary Manager of Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.
The International Digital Play Festival is a laboratory experiment in how creative rather than critical responses to larger work may open a new window of comprehension into the original full length plays as well as how they’re being received on a different continent. The Pasadena event is being produced by Mark Seldis, with technical support by Luis Reyes.
Tickets to Stage Raw’s International Digital Play Festival in Pasadena are free. Please RSVP here.
