 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. Welcome to your 21st century play experience. Please take this time to turn all phones to their utmost loudest and most obnoxious volumes and vibrations. I have permission as a narrator to explain why we're all here. Some as paying customers, others as willing listeners. There's always a balance as well when you try to do a project as to the rewards that you get and what is capable and what people are interested in. Behold the thesis. 21st century theater is dead. Dead like disco. My name is Jeremiah Lind and I am the director, producer and playwright of 21st century play. But to imagine a time so far in the future that our time is as relevant to them as the past is to we here in the present. Present! 21st century play really began after I finished taking a playwriting class at the college I was attending. And within the class I had to write a short piece that fit within the conventions of Aristotelian Method. Which is to say it had to be a drama or a tragedy or a comedy or a melodrama that fit within the formula of plot or typical climax. And just a lot of the structure that goes into writing a successful play. And after I got done writing it, I wanted to write something that broke all of those conventions. I wanted something that challenged the audience. I wanted something that broke the rules. And so I started writing a piece about a theater teacher in the far future. I'm very passionate about theater. It's something that it's a lifetime pursuit for me. But it's a very difficult time to be a theater artist, especially outside of a major metropolitan area. And so I wanted to sort of expose that from the hindsight of the future where theater has failed to make it. It was a long time in writing. Oftentimes I'll write something and just walk away from it and call it good. And this time I wrote it and I solicited feedback and I will admit that a lot of the feedback was discouraging. One of the fellow classmates from my playwriting class referred to the piece as virtually unreadable from the first draft. I took that criticism and I tried to create a stronger piece out of it. And so it was over a year of trying to just edit and revise and polish it to the point where I felt comfortable enough that I could produce it. One advantage of being a playwright knowing that you're going to be producing something without a lot of money is being able to not write a bunch of things that would cost a lot of money. And so that was to my advantage. And I really tried to utilize that and create a sort of minimalist and absurd piece. And as it happened by the time I had finished it I was coming towards the end of my year of trying to get Kickstarter funding. Luckily I was fortunate enough to be able to get the funding that I required to produce it. Because even if you can only just write your name, English is an art. And that makes you an artist. Not a good one perhaps. 21st century play centers around Dr. Leroy Brown Jenkins who teaches theatre history in the far future. The play begins in 2095 right at the end of the 21st century. And at that point theatre has turned entirely academic. There are no live performances anymore. It's just something that's taught like archaeology. I'm leaving you for a robot Leroy and I'm taking the robot doll with me. It's sort of my germinal idea for the entire thing. Something I took away from out of the hat was creating a piece based entirely on one line. And the one line that I wanted was I'm leaving you for the robot. And that idea sort of took it in and I just had to evolve it and try to create a piece sort of around it and entend it to it. And so the conflict very early on for Leroy is then what would normally just be him monologuing for his first opening lecture class is instead incredibly complicated by the fact that he's being abandoned by his wife. Something that just destroys his life and yet he has to be able to plow through. Everything in the future is online education and so that's sort of part of inviting the audience in. You're all part of the class and you're all stuck here. Okay like this part and then you die and then generally you're either burned or they put you in the space pyramid. Yeah the first act focuses primarily on Leroy Jenkins just getting through his lecture just trying desperately to get through his opening lecture while also trying to maintain his dignity and trying to show his students why this is important to him. I'm sorry I haven't seen other people in a long time. We're all going to die. The second act occurs on Mars and one of the conventions of utopian future society is that we've defeated death and so although Leroy has committed suicide a number of times he's been unsuccessful because they keep just bringing him back and so he ends up retiring to Mars in order to be able to mine and solitude at which point his former wife and man bought a derby and again ruined his day. Oh what is that? It is my very little knife. It's so tiny. Yet so sharp. It could be called like Leroy Jenkins very bad no good several centuries because it falls into deconstructionist theater quite a bit in terms of just seeing Leroy suffer and then the final act takes place on Venus and by the time we've arrived on Venus sort of the wheels have come off the bus the internal plot has sort of disintegrated and at that point we're just trying to be able to create something that the audience isn't going to be angry at us for and it really really creates that interplay of what is the audience expecting from this and what are we trying to deliver to the audience at this point in the game because we've made all of our reticent points probably already so how are we going to finish this? And we end up tiny-timming the end. We tiny-tim it. But it's all a lie because there are no ghosts or angels. Whatever we're doing this. The broad reason for writing any piece is to try to communicate a message and with 21st century play I think the most important thing for me was to try to communicate that if theater is to survive then we have to be willing to help it survive. And there are people all over the world but in particular in Bemidji who really strive on a daily basis to try to keep theater as an essential component for our community and they need our support I think is the most important thing. I don't think we ever want to be in a future where we look back and see that we allowed theater to die as a relevant means of cultural expression. As opposed to the piece being a dire prediction really what I wrote it as was a call to arms. It's saying if you value theater if you think it is important then you need to help support it in whatever way that is to be able to bring people together around a story I think is such a valuable and important thing to let it die because of a lack of support. Ah! The end! 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