Last Chance for #RIFT: "an extraordinary multi-sensory experience"
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"From your phone, watch interactions unfold between
two real-life brothers—one, a liberal playwright, and the other, an
alt-right convicted murderer..." — NJMonthly
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"For exactly half his life, my brother has been
in prison and in December he’ll be up for parole.
My name is
Gabriel Jason Dean. I’m a playwright and this is a mostly true story
about my brother and me.”
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#RIFT is a three-part project
exploring whether it is possible to bridge fundamental political
divides.
The first phase is a virtual experience: a durational
play delivered over text message. Playwright Gabriel Jason Dean,
familiar to Luna audiences as the writer of 2019’s Heartland, is
investigating a deeply personal landscape.
Dean’s brother is a currently-incarcerated member of the
alt-right, and the two had barely spoken in 10 years. In creating
this piece, Dean reconnected with his brother to explore the roots of
their ideological differences and see if there was any way to find
common ground, and to try to understand what love means in this
context.
In addition to receiving a fictionalized account of
Dean’s correspondence with his brother, audience members will be
encouraged to reach out across divides that seem unbridgeable in
their own lives, and to share the experiences of those interactions
with the artistic team via a virtual platform. We hope to integrate
some of our audience reflections about rifts in their own lives into
the design of the final chapter of this experience, a play that will
be performed live and live-streamed.
We believe that this deep and ongoing engagement with
the creative process will allow audience and artists to become
collaborative partners, grappling together with how we understand our
past and imagine our future.
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#RIFT is supported by the Venturous Theater Fund, a fund
of The Tides Foundation.This event is part of the New Jersey Theatre
Alliance 2021 Stages Festival, made possible by support from the New
Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National
Endowment for the Arts; Bank of America; The Horizon Foundation for
New Jersey; OceanFirst Foundation; the George A. Ohl, Jr. Trust; New
Jersey Historical Commission; and Fund for the New Jersey Blind. www.njtheatrealliance.org/stages
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