Plays in Place Pandemic Update

Plays in Place operates at the intersection of theatre and the museum worlds, and both sectors have been hit especially hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.  For 2020, we had planned for a revival of Blood on the Snow at the Old State House, a production of Patrick’s new play for the Roosevelt Cottage on Campobello Island, 180 performances of Miranda ADEkoje’s new play about Crispus Attucks at Old South Meeting House in Boston, and a concert reading/production of Moonlight Abolitionists at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Alas, none of those events were able to happen, much to our disappointment. It was going to be a busy year, with the potential of reaching many thousands of audience members with some terrific theatre (and employing many artists).

On the plus side, some of those projects were merely postponed. We still have high hopes for a production of Beloved Island: Windows on Campobello next summer in New Brunswick, Canada. I Am This Place, Miranda’s play, will get a workshop and ultimately a production, once we’re able to gather audiences at Old South again (middle of 2021?). We have a tentative date of late April for Moonlight Abolitionists, though that might shift, depending on the pandemic. And The Mount Auburn Plays book is now published in a beautiful new edition from Mount Auburn Cemetery.

In addition, Patrick has been commissioned by Revolutionary Spaces to write a new full-length play for Old South Meeting House, and we’ve signed a contract with the National Park Service to begin research and development for three new site-specific plays in Boston about Women’s Suffrage and the intersection with abolition and race (the overall project is titled Suffrage in Black and White). History at Play has licensed Cato & Dolly and will begin touring and streaming a production of the show sometime in 2021, and we’re very excited that audiences will continue to learn the stories of these two great characters.

And we’re always in conversation about other projects, so you never know what else might be coming down the line.  (Sign up for our mailing list, so you don’t miss anything.)