Friends!
Only 1 more opportunity to see my short play, NEAR KISSES, as part of the Zoom festival, Our Stage, Your Screen. I very much enjoyed writing the piece and feel grateful for the actors, directors, playwrights, and SEED Art Share team for making virtual theatre that brings us closer in pandemic times.
When I saw all six plays for the first time, I felt less lonely. All of the pieces were written for Zoom (totally embracing the Zoom-ness we’ve all felt) and captured the ups, downs, and in between of this extended virtual liminal space. And even more fun (for a playwright nerd like me), all six plays had variety and distinct personalities.
Grab tickets to the final performances of Our Stage, Your Screen on Saturday, Feb 27.
Big thanks to Aurelia Belfield for the excellent graphics with pull quotes above.
Aren’t reviews fun?
Here’s the review from Chatham Life & Style: Seed Art Share Uses Zoom to Bridge the Gap
An excerpt about NEAR KISSES: “In Tamara Kissane’s passionate and devastating Near Kisses, Zachary (an honest Kahlil Garcia) looks into our eyes as he yearns for closer sexual proximity with his quarantined love. That gaze enters our mind and heart before we pass it along to Mariah (a vulnerable Carly Prentis Jones), completing the circuit. Director Aurelia Belfield ensures that when one character disables their camera to avoid emotional exposure, we must stand in their place and accept the outpouring. “
Here’s the review of Our Stage, Your Screen: Review: Has Seed Art Share Figured Out the Antidote to Zoom Fatigue? Maybe.
An excerpt about NEAR KISSES: “Not all of the plays of Our Stage, Your Screen utilized the Zoom format as well, however. In its attempt to be topical and heart-wrenching, “Near Kisses” – written by Tamara Kissane and directed by Aurelia Belfield – fell short of the mark in convincingly dealing with the direct and indirect effects of COVID-related survivor’s trauma. Kissane and Belfield clearly have good intentions, but the play has all the stilted and compressed sentimentality of an afterschool special. Much of its dialogue is repetitive and glib, ultimately failing to achieve a convincing tone in its short duration.”
If you’d like to read my reaction to the RDU on Stage review, then hop over to Patreon and become a patron. I sent a message specifically about it.
[This is super important, and I hope you already know this about me: I absolutely believe that people have a right to their opinions, to express those opinions freely, and to have different tastes. I love the people at RDU on Stage and Chatham Life & Style, and I’m not interested in snarkiness directed at theatre critics, most of whom love theatre, are doing the work for little or no money, and are learning their own craft at the same time that playwrights are learning theirs. It’s cool.]
