![]() ![]() I’ve been leading standard talkbacks for years and, while they work very well for some projects, I wanted to break away from that model for this play. The play tackles an urgent question facing our community: in an increasingly polarized society, where is our unified American song? Told from the perspective of the father of the perpetrator of a school shooting, the play address issues of gun safety, parenting, and education. We had a world premiere commission coming up- American Song, an 80-minute play by Joanna Murray-Smith. We started a new Community Conversation program to create a city-wide dialogue around themes related to a play in our season. Over a quarter of audience members attend our pre-show talks that we have been offering for over seventeen years at every performance in our two largest spaces we had the resources to create positive change with a large reach. (Jack) Lewis New Play Development Program, a history of outreach programs in schools and community centers, and an audience excited about investigating plays on a deeper level. In one of the most segregated cities in America, how do we create platforms for people from different neighborhoods to talk to each other, hear each other’s stories, and discover commonalities? How do we get audiences in our theatres to think critically about the world around them, and ask themselves what they want their community to look like? My position as Director of Community Engagement at Milwaukee Rep was brand new, and I took stock of the resources we had and started to dream about what we could do. American Song by Joanna Murray-SmithĪ little over a year ago, Milwaukee Repertory Theater embarked on a new mission to create positive change through world-class theatre experiences that provoke meaningful dialogue amongst an audience representative of Milwaukee’s rich diversity. Each voice fills its own house but cannot reach, any more, into the houses of its neighbors, its township, its city, its land and over its borders into the great stretching domain that is America. ![]() What happened to Whitman’s America? Where is the boatman and the shoemaker and the woodcutter and the ploughboy, the young wife and the girl sewing? I don’t hear them singing separately-intent, focused, individual-yet gathered also in some unified song. Alli Houseworth, Series Curator James DeVita as Andy in the World Premiere of American Song by Joanna Murray-Smith at Milwaukee Repertory Theater. In this piece, Leda Hoffmann, Director of Community Engagement at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, discusses their audience dialogue initiative called Act II, a collaboration between Milwaukee Rep and the Zeidler Center for Public Discussion. This series will share best practices in audience engagement and question how we define the relationship between artists, theatre companies, and audiences. Now in phase two, Triple Play is midway through 300 interviews between playwrights and audience members around the country. Triple Play is exploring the crucial triangular relationship between playwrights, theatres, and audiences with the hope of creating a paradigm shift in the way the field thinks about audiences and the way audiences experience new work. This week on HowlRound, we continue our series on Triple Play, a consortium project between Theatre Development Fund and Theatre Bay Area.
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