In early March, even before officials issued the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, theaters had been suspending shows and shuttering their doors due to the coronavirus.
Within the chaos, a small bright spot appeared on social media. Local luminary and popular playwright Lauren Gunderson announced a playwriting seminar on Facebook Live, completely free, for anyone who cared to tune in. It was the sort of generous act that one might expect from a theater-maker who’s built her career on connecting to audiences through empathy and triumph over adversity. With Gunderson as cheerleader and coach, her videos are now archived and viewable on her public Facebook page.
Gunderson is one of a handful of Bay Area theater figures offering free workshops online. For people whose careers are built on the act of gathering together, creating opportunities for others has been a key part of their pandemic response. Audiences may not know when they’ll be able to see another one of their shows in person, but in the interim, learning their techniques is a great way to stay connected to their work—and to our own innate need for the arts to sustain us.
Creating Community
In her one-hour classes, Gunderson steers participants through four informative lecture-style sessions, covering how to write emotion, conflict, comedy, beginnings and endings, and the “business” of playwriting. She punctuates her lessons with personal anecdotes, good-natured “rants,” and a comforting optimism.
What’s more, as the days have stretched to weeks, Gunderson’s Facebook feed has become a treasure of community-minded content. She hosts exclusive chats with theater-makers such as Broadway actor Reggie D. White, dramaturg Martine Greene-Rogers, and CalShakes artistic director Eric Ting; there’s also a modified playwriting class for teens, and a theater book club.
“For me it’s just the act of gathering virtually and creating community that feels good and real and necessary,” Gunderson tells me. “Especially meaningful are the students who have reached out whose writing class or writers groups were cancelled. If I can’t make a ton of theater right now, I sure as hell want to talk about theater…as long as we’re stuck inside I plan on doing and sharing something theater related!”
Advice and Reassurance
Just a couple of days after Gunderson announced her virtual playwriting class, acclaimed experimental playwright and current Stanford Professor Young Jean Lee offered a one-time, three-hour workshop via Zoom to the first 1,000 people who signed up. The full workshop, which has been posted at Vimeo, gives prospective playwrights a taste of what Lee’s students have been getting for the past year—minus the Stanford tuition cost.
While many of Lee’s renegade works—interrogating death, feminism, religion, race, and privilege—have been created ensemble, she promises her workshop method is one that “works very well, especially for people who are less experienced at playwriting.” Through a measured sequence of writing prompts interspersed with writing time and Q&A, Lee leads her virtual workshop with a refreshing directness.
