25
Sep/20

AMERICAN DREAMS

25
Sep/20

The online audience gets to pick the winner in American Dreams

Who: Andre Ali Andre, Leila Buck, India Nicole Burton, Jens Rasmussen, Imran Sheikh, Andrew Valdez
What: Live interactive production of American Dreams
Where: Multiple sites online
When: September 26 – November 15, free – $30
Why: Since January 2017, America has been led by a reality TV host, a man obsessed with ratings. So it’s more than fitting that Leila Buck’s 2018 play, American Dreams, which is set up as a game show, is being reimagined for an interactive, online experience now that theaters are closed because of the pandemic. First staged at the Cleveland Public Theatre two years ago, the work is going virtual, with live performances streaming September 26 to November 15 through Working Theater, Round House Theatre, Salt Lake Acting Company, Marin Theatre Company, HartBeat Ensemble, the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, and University of Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Center, each one setting its own prices, from free to $30. Co-commissioned by ASU Gammage and Texas Performing Arts, the seventy-five-minute work is directed by Tamilla Woodard (Men on Boats, Yellow Card Red Card) and will be performed by Andre Ali Andre, India Nicole Burton, Jens Rasmussen, Imran Sheikh, Andrew Valdez, and Buck, with video design by Katherine Freer, virtual performance design by ViDCo, scenic design by Ryan Patterson, costumes by Kerry McCarthy, sound by Sam Kusnetz, and lighting by Stacey Derosier. “American Dreams is a play that needs to happen now as we are approaching an election,” Working Theater co-artistic director Mark Plesent said in a statement. “I think that the American Experiment is failing on so many levels. American Dreams offers us a safe opportunity, full of humor, to experience our individual complicity in the dangers facing our nation, and also points to ways to change course, beginning with ourselves.”

It is strongly advised that you watch on your computer, not your phone or tablet, and you can choose your own level of participation, with trivia and polls as you decide which of three immigrants gets to win American citizenship over the course of five rounds; there will also be live discussions about the play and immigration throughout the nation. “Though our theater buildings may be closed, the need to gather around provocative storytelling is still present,” Working Theater co-artistic director Woodard said in a statement. “With this unique partnership we get to do something we most certainly wouldn’t have been able to do before — create a national collaboration with nine institutions and theaters across the country to activate audiences in local conversations about immigrants rights, the power of the vote, and what it means to be a citizen. The agility all of the producing partners are able to bring to this collaboration is truly remarkable. Their appetite for innovation and invention is inspiring. This is the power of theater that makes room for radical access, radical inclusion, and a new model of collaboration.” Woodard knows of what she speaks; in 2013 she directed the powerful La Ruta, in which a small audience sat in the back of a truck, where they were made to feel like they were being transported illegally over the Mexican border and into the United States, danger at the ready. American Dreams might be more fun, but it’s no less relevant or important.