Directed audio play, Zoom workshops, & more - 2020 Recap

created by actress Sarineh Garapetian as part of a collection for Armenia Fund 2020.

Whew. It’s been a year of reflection and transformation and real difficulty. Something I’ve been thinking about through this awful time, is how quarantine and isolation have made theater-making just a little bit more accessible now with virtual options. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a few projects as a creative leader since the shutdown - as director, producer, and associate. Two of the main ones below:

In the fall, I directed a workshop of a play called On Intimacy of Doors by Jane Galstyan about her immigration “commitment issues,“ disguised as a relationship play. We have been overhauling the script for some time now, and so it was nice to hear it aloud over a month-long process with a group of actors. It was tough and prescient being that the Armenia and Azerbaijani war over Artsakh land broke out during the course of our work.

Immediately following, I began work on a campy sci-fi audio play, Testing Dunleavy-Grove by Jonathan O’Neill. It was my first time working on a recording and editing process, having only worked in live theater before, and it was immensely rewarding. Thank you to everyone who lent their talents or listened in over the course of our 10 episodes.

While certainly not heavy handed in the slightest, the core question I kept thinking about during production was “how will I know when I’m happy?” And when I thought that question out loud for the first time, it was a gut punch. The story is deceptively wrapped up in a big old Hallmark romance narrative, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that serious question as this country continued down its misery spiral in late 2020. Lives and careers continue to be put further out of reach for so many of us for whom it was already oppressively inaccessible. Happiness seems far off. How do I reach for it? Who will tell me when I’m (allowed to feel) happy when it looks nothing like I want it to?