Together in Development

Look around you right now. Try to make eye contact. You can’t because everyone is staring, zombified, into a tiny black screen, their smartphones. This is what MIT professor Sherry Turkle calls being “alone together.” Nowadays, we seek connections through our devices. We are uncomfortable with solitude. We are in danger of losing the very thing that makes us most human: our empathy. So it’s more important than ever to be talking about what it means to be together.

Theatre – a mode that is live, beyond our control and very much IN the moment – is the ideal forum to explore radical togetherness. Playwright Alexandra Collier and I are creating TOGETHER, a piece where you are inspired to undertake radical listening, radical connection. And we want to use the live, interactive and unpredictable nature of theatre to explore and reflect these issues that compel us as a society.

We are building a play that started with a monologue written by Alexandra Collier, titled Pilgrimish. In this “sermon” a secular preacher speaks to the audience, sympathizing with the horrors of life in the big city “where your neighbors are moving furniture at all hours above you”. He rallies the audience to look each other in the eye, shake each other’s hands and say “We’re here”, urging them onto their feet to sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame. The monologue is irreverent, absurd and invigorating. When performed recently at Rattlestick Theatre in New York, the audience roared with laughter and stood in recognition because the theatre – not any prescribed religion – is the church of togetherness.

We are taking this monologue and developing it into a full length play with movement. Set in a big city and inspired by the structure of Sarah Kane’s play Crave, TOGETHER will be non-linear, rhythmic and will incorporate audience participation and humor. We will explore the theme of “disconnected togetherness” and digital dependency. We will investigate our interconnectedness: like a set of Russian dolls, one character will open a door leading to another world as the play unravels into the center of the city where everyone is seemingly separate but actually deeply connected. Each world will echo the previous one and resonate in an exploration of who we are today.

Photograph by Matthew Pillsbury