Let the record show that Assemblywomen was slated to be staged on the south lawn of the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University on the evenings of May 6th, 8th, and 9th. Sixteen performers would have spoken the words, sang the songs, and danced the dances; six designers would have stitched the costumes, built the sets, hung the lights, made the props, and engineered the sounds; three stage managers would have called the cues, two instrumentalists would have played the music, and two dramaturgs, one assistant director, and one choreographer would have taken notes. One hundred and eighty people would have sat in the audience. We hope they would have laughed.
But they will not do so—not this year. The cast and team of Assemblywomen is now scattered across three continents and five time zones, finishing the schoolyear via distance learning as the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the globe. We were exactly halfway through our rehearsal process when the University announced, on the fifth day of spring break, that the campus would be closing for the remainder of the semester, and asked students to pack up their residences and return home. Given that we couldn't stage the production anymore, we wondered what it would mean to continue our work. How should one approach a play about assembly in a time when we cannot assemble? An imaginary revolution, in a world where revolution seems imminent if not already underway? We thought about the sense of confusion and conflict in both the play and in our world, about the experience of radical change, about watching political establishments fail, and above all, about the desire to find ways to assemble despite the mandate to socially distance. So assemble we did. We met weekly as a whole group, via Zoom, to check in with each other and collaborate on the project. Assemblywomen continued to grow, albeit in different directions than any of us could have anticipated; we wrote poems and made collages, recorded songs and rewrote monologues, combed through the archives of rehearsal footage, and released from the practicalities of production, imagined impossible costumes and sets. We found new semblances of something we imagined in the old world. A time may come—although at present, we can’t say when—in which all of this will translate back to a real, live production of some kind. But until then: let the record show that our assembly stayed alive. The Assemblywomen Variations represent the collective efforts of Aby Crystal, Lily Spar, Christina Xu, Rowan Hair, Abby Nicholson, Joanna Gerber, William Mahoney, Jace Arouet, Gabby Baba-Conn, Hannah Caroll, Allie Godwin, Matt Cross, Frankie Morales, Elam Grekin, Eli Solomon, Uresa Ahmeti, Sanidhya Sharma, Harrison Tan, Pryor Krugman, Jonesy Moore, Luna Mac-Williams, Anna Hauser, Melissa Srun, Anna Tjeltveit, Dimitri Fulconis, Tessa Zitter, Hannah Gearan, Sanni Zhang, Mary Johnson, Audrey Mills, Karen Xu, and Maggie Rothberg. |