Quarantine Bake-Off

When we started circulating the original poster for our virtual playwriting challenge in March of 2020, we didn't expect 100 play submissions, let alone 2500. In four days, we had participants ranging  from toddlers to 90-year-olds, professional playwrights and theater-makers to people who have never seen a live play, teachers to students, novelists to poets, people who haven’t done theater since high school to actors currently starring on Broadway, kids whose school musical has been canceled and adults who find themselves out of work for the foreseeable future.  Our submissions came from all over the world: from all over the states, the UK, Japan, Ecuador, Indonesia, the Czech Republic, Japan, Australia, and more. Within just a few days, in the age of social isolation, a community was born. This led to another bake-off in the early weeks of April 2020 and one planned for May 2020.

So, where to now? Why the GoFundMe? After a successful second bake-off, we are excited to be hosting a live virtual reading of 9 of the plays on Wednesday April 29th. We are creating this GoFundMe to:

1) Pay our actors who are helping us do our live virtual reading.

2) Help pay for some of the costs of technology, subscriptions to softwares, and other costs that have helped us cater to a larger community.

3) Move forward and help fund future projects with the Quarantine Bake-Off.

In the future, we hope to do many things with these plays. We plan on publishing them on our website for all to read, but why not go further? We would love to continue these live virtual readings for as long as social distancing is recommended.  We have so many fantastic plays other than the 9 being read in our reading, and we want them to be heard! Then, we would love to start taking these plays and possibly develop them into stage productions once live theater is an option again. We are lucky in that we have an archive of 2500 plays that are a real time response to the COVID-19 pandemic and would love to be able to share this art with the world. We have created a community and want the community to continue on.

We understand that this is a difficult time money-wise for so many. Your support is enough, but, if you are able to, we would love if you could chip in even a few dollars to support some artists! We are so grateful for the success of the Quarantine Bake-Off so far and are excited to continue our journey to keep creating art in the darkest of times. Thank you!