The coronavirus shutdown has hit the theater community hard, so Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, is stepping up to create a new web series to employ D.C. artists.
“Homebound” premieres Monday with a 10-minute episode on the Round House YouTube channel. It’s the first of 10 episodes that will be posted every Monday through June 29.
“‘Homebound’ is a 10-episode web series about life under stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus outbreak in the nation’s capitol,” Artistic Director Ryan Rilette told WTOP. “We have hired 10 D.C. area playwrights and given them prompts, but they have full control over where this script goes. … Each one picks up on the prompts from the writer before.”
The web series will star resident artists Maboud Ebrahimzadeh and Craig Wallace.
“There’s so many different reasons why we ended up choosing Craig and Maboud,” Rilette said. “It’s a combination of them both being really great actors [and] they both have kind, open, playful spirits. … They are game to try anything to find out how to make it work.”
Rounding out the cast are seven other local actors who were originally slated to appear in the three shows of the recently canceled season: Alina Collins Maldonado, Yao Dogbe, Helen Hedman, Maya Jackson, Chinna Palmer, Lynette Rathnam and Jamie Smithson.
“We very purposefully chose local actors who had lost work with us as a result of our cancellations,” Rilette said. “They’ve had basically an entire half a season of work taken away from them. They also only get health care for each week that they work, so we wanted to do everything we could for artists when we had to shut everything down.”
Rilette will remotely direct the series with Associate Artistic Director Nicole A. Watson. Sound designer Matthew M. Nielson will compose the music, lighting designer Harold F. Burgess II will advise actors on home lighting, costume designer Ivania Stack will advise actors on wardrobe and projections designer Jared Mezzocchi will create the credits.
“Because we can’t take camera crews into people’s homes, everything is shot by the actors using their phones or computers,” Rilette said. “The designers and actors talk through what they have in their closets to wear, what props they might have in their house. … The actors send everything they tape to our server, then we start editing it from there.”
That’s a lot of pre-production, production and post-production in a short span of time.
“Two weeks to write, film and edit a 10-minute theme is not a ton,” Rilette said. “It’s a very condensed effort, so each week you’re not just watching the story and seeing how the next playwright picked up the story, but you’re also seeing how this team of artists responds.”
The plot will unfold as a chain story, with each episode playing off the previous one.
“Craig’s character is getting ready for a Zoom work call, and he’s made a tragic mistake,” Rilette said. “He calls his friend Maboud to help, but Maboud also has recently been to a conference where someone was sick and has a slight cough and is a little worried about himself. The whole thing is set back on March 16 right as we all started to quarantine.”
Episode 1 is penned by Alexandra Petri (“A Field Guide to Awkward Silences”).
“She is a humor and political columnist for The [Washington] Post and is also a phenomenal playwright,” Rilette said. “She was also a member of The Welders.”
Episode 2 is penned by Karen Zacarías (“The Book Club Play,” “Destiny of Desire”).
“One of D.C.’s best known playwrights,” Rilette said. “She has had numerous plays down at Arena [Stage]. We have produced her work in the past. She was having, right before this, one of the best years of any playwright in the country, getting produced all over.”
Episode 3 is penned by Farah Lawal Harris (“Silence is Violence,” “America’s Wives”).
“Farah is the head of Young Playwrights Theater in town,” Rilette said. “She’s a Nigerian-American playwright and a member of The Welders as well.”
Episode 4 is penned by Liz Maestri (“Sinner-Man,” “Owl Moon”).
“She is a member of Playwrights Arena and Playwrights Collective,” Rilette said. “She’s just recently gotten her MFA, but she’s a playwright that we really love her voice.”
Episode 5 is by Psalmayene 24 (“The Freshest Snow Whyte,” “Cinderella: The Remix”).
“Psalmayene is an actor, director, playwright whose work is done all over the country, including hip-hop reimaginings of children’s stories for Imagination Stage,” Rilette said.
Episode 6 is penned by Tim J. Lord (“We Declare You a Terrorist”).
“He was working at the Playwrights Center in New York as a Jerome Fellow,” Rilette said. “The play was originally workshopped in New York, then we commissioned him to remake it, because it’s about Putin’s Russia and we thought it was a great time to redo that play.”
Episode 7 is penned by Audrey Cefaly (“The Gulf,” “Alabaster”).
“[She’s] a phenomenal playwright, a seminal Southern playwright whose work has been done all over town,” Rilette said. “She had a production not long ago at Signature [Theatre] that was a beautiful production. She’s getting produced around the country as well.”
Episode 8 is penned by Dani Stoller (“Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes”).
“[She] is better known at this point still as an actor, but she had her first major play running at Signature when everything had to be shut down,” Rilette said. “It was a wholly sold out, really hysterical production. I love her voice and I’m super excited for her to be involved.”
Episode 9 is penned by Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi (“For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss A Motherf***** Out When Snatching An Edge Ain’t Enough”).
“[She] is just well known in the D.C. market as [an] actor, director, choreographer and playwright,” Rilette said. “We have been long admirers of her work in all of her different disciplines, so we’re super excited about her being part of this.”
Finally, Episode 10 is penned by Caleen Sinnette Jennings (“Queens Girl in the World, Queens Girl in Africa”).
“[She] was a longtime professor in town [and] a former member of The Welders,” Rilette said. “It’s a really, really amazing group of playwrights we’re very excited to have.”
The 10 episodes will supplement the three stage productions that Round House had to cancel as part of its 2019-2020 season: “Cost of Living,” “Big Love” and “Hatef**k.”
“We do a six-show season and we finished the first three shows,” Rilette said. “We were in rehearsal for the fourth show when we had make the decision to shut that show down. Then maybe half a week later we made the decision to just cancel the entire season.”
Will the canceled shows ever return to the stage?
“The hope is to bring those shows back, but until we know more about whether or not next season is going to be a fully produced season or whether we’ll have to cancel those shows, we just don’t know exactly what the dates of those shows will be,” Rilette said.
Either way, Round House is doing everything in its power to keep its artists working.
“We want to provide ways for theater artists to be able to respond to what is happening,” Rilette said. “Our art form as a whole has a lot that we can give and a lot of the processing that we will need to do over time to deal with the trauma of what we’ve all gone through.”
