MultiStages will present "SPEAKOUT: Protest Plays & More," a virtual festival of multicultural multidisciplinary commissioned works, live on June 21 and recorded from June 22 to 25. Conceived and curated by Artistic Director/activist Lorca Peress, the program is a 90-minute turntable of short plays, dance works and poetry exploring the essence of protest and activism in the modern period since the killing of George Floyd, the pandemic, the surge in hate crimes on Asian-Americans and more.
Since 1977, MultiStages has organized collaborations between playwrights and artists of other disciplines to develop multidisciplinary works. When George Floyd was killedand the BLM message exploded, veteran artists of MultiStages took to the streets. The streets were their theater, where the screams were real and the pain was palpable. In deciding what they could do to support this movement and to protest attacks on Asian Americans, Artistic Director/activist Lorca Peress, created the idea of a multicultural, multidisciplinary call-to-action festival. She commissioned five MultiStages alumni playwrights (three New Works Contest winner and two Script Development writers) to create short new works addressing what they needed to speak out about today. She then assigned choreographer Jennifer Chin, a long-time collaborator, to create new dances based on these themes. The dances were to be interwoven with the plays and illustrated with lush visuals. What emerged were not topical presentations, but insightful treatments of the human condition in times of protest, with a uniquely universal perspective on the feelings and thoughts of activists today.