Philadelphia Theatre Company is teaming up with Missing Bolts Productions and University of the Arts to present “After Orlando,” a staged reading of short plays written in response to the nation’s worst mass shooting.
The show about the June massacre at Pulse, an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Fla., takes place Nov. 21. “After Orlando” is being performed in cities all over the globe in varying formats; the local production showcases 16 plays, each only three-five minutes in length, and includes works by local and international playwrights.
Patience Carter, a local survivor of the tragedy, will make a special appearance at the Philadelphia show to read a poem she wrote about the experience. Following the reading, Philadelphia Theatre Company will host an open community conversation.
Carrie Chapter, the literary manager and dramaturg at Philadelphia Theatre Company, is the curator for the Philadelphia performance.
“There are over 75 plays that they’ve collected and each theater gets to curate their ideal order of shorts they would like to present on stage,” she explained about the format. “So what is happening in Philadelphia will be very different from what is happening in New York or Long Beach, Calif.”
Chapter added that she chose the plays for the Philadelphia stop that she thought best fit the purpose of the “After Orlando” project, as well as the artistic goals of Philadelphia Theatre Company.
“I was really trying to go back to the mission statement of the Philadelphia Theatre Company, because we focus on the American experience,” she said. “We look to something that is going to fire up one’s intellect, while also touching one’s soul. So in the plays I was choosing, I wanted to make sure that in addition to the more political pieces that we are also having something that was just very real, naturalistic interactions between two characters. There’s a variety of that in the different short plays that are going to be presented. We wanted to have a full expression of a myriad of voices.”
The diversity of the playwrights supports the overarching goal of paying tribute to the diversity of the 49 victims of the shooting.
“The super-objective for the project is to make sure that, in that demonstration of having many playwrights participate, that there is that expression of the importance of many voices being heard and valued, much like the effect of those that we lost in the tragedy. There is that echo,” she said. “There are many points of view. There are many different calls to action that take many different forms and styles. It is to be evocative of that point. It’s an international theater action so these are playwrights from all over the world. There is one collection of playwrights from the Orlando area but there are other playwrights from other parts of the country. Also there are playwrights from Australia and the U.K. They’re coming from different places. These benefit readings are occurring all over as well.”
One local playwright whose work is being featured in “After Orlando” is MJ Kaufman.
“I used a short scene from another play that I had written,” Kaufman said about her contribution to the project. “It’s about a trans teenager who travels back in time to relive parts of the journey of Joan of Arc and while there they fall in love. I wanted to make sure that queer and especially trans voices were a part of it because that’s the population that was impacted by this tragedy and, as a trans playwright, I was like, If this happens, I don’t want it to be just straight people writing it. I want to be a part of it too.”
While Kaufman didn’t know any of the victims of the Orlando shooting, the effect of the tragedy was felt in LGBT circles far and wide.
“The queer community is really small and tight-knit,” Kaufman said. “So even as someone who doesn’t live in Orlando and personally didn’t know any of those people, I felt this loss and had so many friends and friends of friends who lost people connected to this huge tragedy. I felt it really personally.”
New York-based actor and playwright Arturo Soria contributed a piece entitled “Pulse,” which gives voice to another community not often heard from.
“As a queer Latinx actor/writer, I felt it was important for me to contribute to the stories of my people,” he said. “I wanted to write a short play that zoomed in on the internalized homophobia that many queer Latinx men suffer from. It’s a play about the violence that we sometimes subject ourselves and our own people to. It’s something I can empathize and relate to and also something I want to challenge. So often, the voices of queer Latinx men and women get silenced or omitted from the canon of the American theater. We are here, we exist, we will not be erased.”
Soria added that in the aftermath of the recent presidential election, it’s especially important to keep people motivated on the path of acceptance and equality.
“The country and the world are at an interesting point right now,” he said. “We’re unsure of what the next four years are going to look like. I want people to leave ‘After Orlando’ ready and motivated to continue the fight for a more empathetic society, for the rights of all our people. We have the power to change and to build a better world. So let’s mourn together and then fight together.”
Another area playwright contributing to the Philadelphia performance is Ken Urban, who wrote “Claim.”
“I wanted to write something that captured the aftermath of the shooting,” he said. “One of the things I was thinking about was the kinds of conversations [of] people that felt alienated by their own families and what that conversation might sound like. That was the starting point of the play.”
Urban said he drew inspiration from his own struggles with seeking acceptance from his family about his sexuality.
“I always think that it’s not something that happened to me personally so I try to figure out my way into the story I’m trying to tell. For me, I grew up in the Philadelphia area and I had a very rough time coming out to my family. I didn’t speak to my father for almost a decade as a result of being gay,” he explained. “That was initially my way into the play. I had read somewhere one of the bodies [at Pulse] was never claimed because his family wanted nothing to do with him because he was gay. That was my hook into writing the play.”
Philadelphia Theatre Company presents “After Orlando” for one night only, 7 p.m. Nov. 21, at Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St. Admission is free but donations will be accepted at the door to benefit Pulse of Orlando, an Orlando-based nonprofit that provides immediate financial assistance to survivors and families. Reservations are required. For more information, call 215-985-0420 or visit philadelphiatheatrecompany.org.