A State College native with dreams of connecting communities from the stage is approaching her goal from a new angle due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kait Warner had plans to take her original play, “Take It Away, Cheryl,” to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one of the largest theater festivals in the world, later this year, but COVID-19 is changing all that — not without some positive outcomes.
Now, Warner is looking to still take her production to the festival in 2021, but for the time being, she and her production team are working on the play remotely while connecting entirely new communities through the power of the internet.
Warner wrote “Take It Away, Cheryl” as her senior thesis project at NYU and calls it “a flirtatious, attention deficit, tragic, comic trip through a central Pennsylvania kissing booth.”
“It’s very funny,” she says, “but it’s inspired a lot by some of the issues I saw growing up in my community.
“Ever since I went to the Fringe Festival with the [State High] Thespians as a high school student, I knew it was a dream of mine to go back. With this piece, there were two options — let it exist as my senior thesis performance and let it kind of live and die there, or continue to develop it and work on it and bring it to more communities. I felt like I wasn’t done telling this story and I wouldn’t be done telling this story until I followed through with my personal artistic mission of engaging rural, metropolitan and international communities.”
Warner put together a group of more than a dozen people, including cast, crew and production teams who believed in the play, and they began working to take the performance to larger stages. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the team to go their separate ways, many traveling from New York to their hometowns to be with family, Warner included. At that point, she says, the group had a decision to make.
“Initially, it was sort of a frightening decision… We saw a lot of theaters completely halting work or pausing and I saw a lot of my very good friends lose residencies and shows they’d been working on and entering a sort of grieving process over that,” she says. “It’s an incredibly difficult loss for artists right now. There were two options for us — halt work on the project or find a way to keep it moving. We were all united by the idea that creating in this time is one of the most hopeful acts you can do and one of the most healing acts you can do is provide a community space for other people. We all agreed we were going to find a way to make it happen.”
Now, the group is working together via Zoom, workshopping the play’s script and conducting weekly rehearsals. They’re also raising funds for the production, to pay team members and cover future travel costs, through online events.
“We’ve had online dance parties, we’ve had cabarets where we’ve invited other artists in for a night of performances and we’ve had people tuning in from all over Pennsylvania and New York and all over the world for these events,” Warner says. “It’s interesting that, as we’ve chosen to move forward with the project, we’ve been able to execute our mission even better with bringing together communities who probably wouldn’t be able to access these events if we’d stayed in New York. We’ve made them more accessible to a broader scope of people than I even thought we would be able to.”
The recent online cabaret included State College-based band Ma’aM and Warner says there will be additional online cabarets in the future, with more opportunities for local performers of all kinds to participate.
“I didn’t anticipate how well the first cabaret was going to go… We’ve gotten a variety of messages that were really positive and people say it was a much-needed morale boost,” Warner says. “I think we’ve decided we’re going to be doing that again. Bringing State College artists to a wider audience was also such a fun experience for me, to see these amazing performers I’ve always known and loved grow their communities as well. It was a great experience and I definitely plan on showcasing more folks like that.”
To learn more about “Take It Away, Cheryl,” you can check out the production’s Facebook and Instagram pages. The social media pages also offer links to the production’s GoFundMe page and provide more information about the team’s public online events.
‘Take It Away, Cheryl’ cast and crew meet via Zoom. First row, left to right: Olivia Hern (costume designer) Kait Warner (playwright/actor), Karma Masselli (set designer). Second Row, left to right: Nina Andjelic (sound designer), Ryan Sheehan (actor), Margaret Leisenheimer (actor). Third row, left to right: Madison Mayer (actor), Addie Guidry (actor), Danica Jensen (director). Photo provided
