#GivingTuesday & PlayGround-LA Year-End Campaign

A Letter from PlayGround-LA Alumnus Vincent Terrell Durham, Author of “Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids”

Dear Friends,

Theatre lives on. Despite the worst pandemic of our lifetimes, the closure of performance spaces across the globe and record unemployment among theatre-makers, theatre is still alive. Barely, perhaps on life-support, but still alive. It continues to serve us – reflecting back our common humanity, showing us where we must strive to do better, revealing our foibles and letting us laugh at ourselves.

How do I know? I bear witness.

In 2014, I joined PlayGround-LA and began writing short plays for the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series. Over the next five years, I developed more than a dozen short works with PlayGround-LA and ultimately received my first full-length play commission in 2017, to adapt and expand one of those short works, a deeply personal play entitled Shooting at the Universe about a clash between Black Lives Matter and the environmental movement. Over the next few years, that full-length play took shape and, with the support of PlayGround and co-commissioner Planet Earth Arts, I received developmental workshops and public staged readings at PlayGround’s Potrero Stage and a student production at Stanford Repertory Theater in 2019. I hoped to see this work reach the stage for its premiere in the coming years.

And then COVID-19 hit. Theaters closed. Seasons were postponed. And then George Floyd was murdered. And the world exploded. People were looking for answers, for ways to channel their anger, to understand how this could keep happening.

It was in this context that PlayGround Associate Producer Aldo Billingslea approached me about using my play, now titled Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids, to promote and celebrate Black voices, address systemic racism in the theatre industry, bring the community together, and help raise much needed funds in support of Black Theatres around the country, through his newly-launched Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project. With the support and leadership of Aldo and PlayGround, my play received more than half-a-dozen online staged readings involving more than sixty nationally-recognized theatre producing partners, from American Conservatory Theater to Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and from Eugene, Oregon to Tampa, Florida. On June 19, 2020 and the weeks that followed, the play was seen online by more than 10,000 households and an estimated 20,000 viewers. And the Black Theaters Go-Fund-Me campaign raised nearly $150,000 from several thousand donors across the country.

Theatre is still very much alive.

But we can’t do it without your help. Even through the pandemic, PlayGround and PlayGround-LA continue to support new voices, create opportunities for artistic collaboration and ensure that everyone is paid at professional levels for their work, with a deep commitment to uplifting historically marginalized voices, including BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists. To ensure there are more such opportunities as the Juneteenth performances of my play and that theatre can be a tool for dialogue, understanding, and healing, please consider making a contribution this #GivingTuesday in support of PlayGround-LA and their year-end campaign. These dollars go directly to supporting dozens of local playwrights, actors, and directors in the development of nearly forty short plays and full-length plays, plays that tell stories of our community, celebrate our successes, mark our failures, and help us strive to do better.

You can donate online at https://playground-la.org/contribute, by phone at (323) 992-6766, or by mail to: PlayGround-LA, 3286 Adeline St #8, Berkeley, CA 94703-2485. You can also donate via Facebook at PlayGround’s Facebook page, https://facebook.com/playground.losangeles.

Thank you for your generosity and continued support!

Regards,

Vincent Terrell Durham
Playwright