Give It Away Now : How Dual Pandemics Changed My Writing Process

An Artist-Led Impact Report and Analysis

By Idris Goodwin with Jessica Kahkoska

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the advent of “shape notes.”

Shape notes were created to translate sheet music from orchestras and symphonies to more public, everyday use in religious communities. This allowed for “social singing” — for choir directors and pianists to lead their congregation in song — with opportunities for everyone to join in. In the arts, we talk a lot about “access” and “removing barriers to artistic experiences,” but oftentimes that phrase translates to subsidized tickets. I believe that “access” can also mean that we are more inclusive in the participation in the art itself.

Shape notes — and this conversation — are connected to the process of writing and sharing Free Play, a collection of open-source scripts I released with TYA/USA online this past summer. But first, some context:

Problem and Inspiration

A few months back I was living in Louisville. My son’s school had just reverted to fully online due to COVID-19 restrictions. Now all of us — me, my wife, my mother-in-law, my then 7-year-old, and a brand new baby — were inside.

For the past 8 years as a “professional” playwright, the dominant paradigm of theatre production positioned me as a writing specialist (working alongside other specialists of lighting, costume design, and acting) who only concerned himself with the script of the play, not with its distribution or impact. In this system, the mode of distribution is one where patrons purchase tickets from a theater, then sit in the dark watching the action for 90–120 minutes. And when it comes to creating new plays, there is a “tried and trusted” approach within this paradigm that comes with its own set of specialists who function as a development team.

However, as the theatres began to request short “zoom-ready” plays that could be both performed and shared online, this (now-irrelevant) paradigm fell away, and my family became my development team. In April 2020, I wrote a piece for Kennedy Center’s “Play At Home” program. My play — “A Dinner Theatre” — was literally workshopped around the dinner table with the family. In the years of overlap between growing my family and working as a playwright, I had never worked like this before. It was powerful. It truly felt like “the family business.”

After the triple blow of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, when the protests began and the Black Lives Matter signs began to sprout, so did the questions from my older son. As you can imagine, trying to explain these events to a child — watching their energy shift, watching them deflate — is a parenting experience that no one can prepare you for. But, I believe that through the arts, we can try and make the conversation easier. Never easy, but perhaps easier.

And somewhere between these dual pandemics, the light bulb went on. I had two earlier plays — #matter and Black Flag — that were written in the wake of Eric Garner and Mike Brown across 2014 to 2016. At that time, I was teaching disheartened students as a college professor; I saw a need for drama that could spark dialogue and speak to what we were all experiencing. In 2020, we had the same need, but everything was different. There were no theatres open, no performances happening. And yet, people needed plays that were relevant, timely and accessible. And they needed them now, not after exhaustive “new play development” steps and the often-glacial process of theatre production.

So I took action. I contacted Jonathan Shmidt Chapman, the Executive Director of Theatre for Young Audiences/USA and said, “I want to write some short plays for anyone with wifi to download.” The rules would be simple: anyone — student, teacher, child, adult — will have my full-throated blessing to do what they wish with the plays, whether that be an educational performance, creating a new ensemble, or gathering a family around the kitchen table.

Per usual, Jonathan offered his full support, and, as luck would have it, the team at New Victory Theatre were already developing programming to coincide with the observance of Juneteenth.

And thus, we were up and running — and Free Play was born.

What is Free Play?

Free Play is a series of five short plays — The Water Gun Song, Act Free, Nothing Rhymes with Juneteenth, #matter, and Black Flag — intended to spark conversation and serve as a catalyst for action. Each of these short works, written to be read across the multi-generational spectrum, offer different insights about disconnects in racial conversation and the Black experience in America. You can learn more about the project and read the plays on the TYA/USA website, where the open-source scripts can be downloaded by anyone and produced across communities.

The Process / A Stylistic Return:

For me personally, there were a few questions guiding the process of creating Free Play. The central one was: “How do I create something that is easily downloadable — that anyone could do in their living room — but that also helps people discuss these giant, glaring issues that our nation is going through?”

The title of this article is about how Free Play changed my writing process, but it’s not so much that it’s changed. Free Play has actually been a return to the values and style of theatre that I practiced earlier in my career. I got my professional start working in the storefront theater scene in Chicago and arts educational spaces — free street programs where I worked with area youth to create original pieces. The work wasn’t about teaching them Shakespeare; we were doing writing exercises, contact improv, and creating wild shows about their daily lives inspired by their own experiences.

At a point, I began to emphasize that work less, and instead focused more on the traditional theatrical model I mentioned above: being a commissioned playwright working on formal new play development. Of course, this work has taught me a lot, and I am grateful that I have a career in that space. However, I have found that this moment of pandemic and uprising has required a different artistic skill set or me — one that I haven’t accessed in a long time. It has asked for a more direct response. It reminds me of the fundamentals of hip hop as I practiced as a younger artist — the importance of relevance, timeliness, access, acknowledging your audience, and actively including them in the event.

In that vein, the writing of Free Play was actually very organic. #matter and Black Flag already existed. And the other three burst out of me very quickly once we had the framework for the project. Water Gun Song is based on conversations I’ve been hearing around my own household, as my son grows up and discovers Star Wars, gun fare, and other entertainment in that genre. His friends want to play with water guns and have water fights, and my wife and I are finding ourselves forced to negotiate what that means for us — figuring out how we can help him contextualize and understand what that is.

Where We Are Now

It’s now December 2020. In the six months since we released Free Play, the scripts have been presented by entities ranging from Dallas Children’s Theatre to The Young People’s Theater in Toronto to the educational division of health care provider Kaiser Permanente. Many academic institutions have found use for them as well, and in a few cases, brand new social justice theatre collectives have been founded to perform the plays.

Looking back at the last six months of Free Play and ahead to future possibilities for open-source storytelling, it’s a good time to check in on the success and the impact of the project — starting with how we think about success for a project like Free Play.

Defining Impact

Free Play is — as the title suggests — free to the public, available to anyone with wifi. If we are making theatre that belongs to the people, then we also need to assess it with the same values and goals with which it was created.

In a traditional theatre context, an “evaluation” or “impact report” has a pernicious connotation: a long history of assessing work through the lens of a regional theatre model, which centers the interests of a subscriber audience and prioritizes the comfort of the board. It is a system that is built to uphold the status quo — especially when it comes to a distribution model where only paying regional audiences can participate in the work. Let’s be honest: this system doesn’t work at the best of times. And on a basic level, it has no way to serve us and our basic creative needs right now.

With this in mind, when it comes to Free Play, I’m a lot less interested in assessing if we “achieved our desired outcomes.” Instead, I’m asking questions in the spirit of participatory practice like:

What are the ways we can say that Free Play is having an impact, and that there is a need for this work?

What are the different communities that have found this work useful?

And what are the new opportunities, collaborations, or changes that folks have had because of it?

As a result, we’re also discovering new ways that we can think about, collect, and analyze “impact data.”

Simply put: in the same way that Free Play challenges and innovates on the dominant models through which theatre is made and distributed to audiences, so must our modes of assessing and communicating about its impact.

What We Know

Free Play also generated some buzz in the press. The project was the subject of 20 articles by publications like American Theatre Magazine, BroadwayWorld, and NBC. It was covered by regional news outlets across the country, including the Boston Globe, Colorado Springs Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The plays were described as “powerful, evocative” (BroadwayWorld), “bittersweet” (City Pulse), and “providing frameworks and vocabulary to talk about subjects with new perspectives” (Lansing State Journal). NYU News wrote that Free Play “not only centers Black lives, but they give us room to actively reflect on how systemic racism is expressed across generations and in our own homes, challenge what it means to be in solidarity, and offer examples of joy alongside conflict.” The Ohio State Lantern said, “they’re a great tool for people to be able to watch them (…) with young people in their lives and use them as a jumping off point to talk about race in America.”

When we concocted Free Play, I did not expect this type of response; I’m obviously pleased by these metrics and media conversations. But even these traditional quantitative ways of measuring engagement are inherently biased toward more “formal” presentations and theatre events, especially ones produced by brick-and-mortar theatres and formal training programs. And yoking a project’s success to its press mentions reinforces the idea that artistic value is something that is transferred from an outside power structure onto a project, rather than offered to the community by the piece itself.

The biggest shortcoming in assessing the project’s impact through these avenues is that Free Play is designed for a wider range of engagement than can be captured by media and brick-and-mortar performance metrics. It’s built for both formal and informal readings (and everything in between!) — from a classroom to a proscenium stage to a family at a table.

Non-Traditional Impact Reporting

If we want to understand how Free Play is being used and what impact it is having outside a traditional theatre production context, then we must start new dialogues with the organizations who have presented the work in new and online ways.

Dallas Children’s Theatre described the scripts as “sensitive and vividly human stories,” remarking that the theatre company “could not be more proud to have the opportunity to use them to open doors to candid and meaningful conversation.”

Mad Cow Theatre Company reported that, “The experience was one of growth and partnership and connection. We’d highly recommend this grouping of plays as a great way to start a conversation on antiracism with a community.”

In September, I gave a keynote address at the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) Virtual Conference, including a showing of a filmed version of #Matter, one the scripts included in Free Play. The address was attended by 471 registrants, one of the highest totals for any of the event’s sessions. According to Jim Palmarini, former Director of Educational Policy of The Educational Theatre Association, “EdTA is currently engaged in a reset of its relationship with its members and the field of theatre education, regarding racial equity and inclusion. Goodwin’s #Matter, along with his remarks was and remains an important touchstone for this work.”

We can also gauge Free Play’s impact through a mental health lens, thanks to the insights of Dr. Tanya Menard, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at Kaiser Permanente. Dr. Menard shared that she, “found Free Play to be thought provoking on so many levels. [The project] allows for deep, open and honest dialogue and education when speaking with friends, family and colleagues. (…) During these unprecedented times, it is important to remain connected to others around you, close or distant, and to say, “Look at what is in front of you and experience this moment.”

And we received the following anonymous emails:

“[Free Play] was an excellent immersion into conversations exposing me to thoughts and experiences that I have not ever had before. It allowed me to see different perspectives.”

“This is such an important form of artistic expression and community building. I believe in the power of this work to start conversations that can begin or continue change in the direction of awareness and action taken to right our history of wrongs. Thank you! More please!”

“Stories and performances like [Free Play] are so necessary to this world. I left a different person than when I first started watching.”

“As a student that has graduated from a white high school with very few black students, this has helped to open my eyes even more to experiences that I would have never known otherwise, as well as to the privileges I have and what I can do to be an ally.”

If the goal of Free Play was to spark conversations and catalyze future action, these dialogues are an indicator of success.

An unconventional way of assessing the impact of Free Play is to look at the new collaborations — the novel collectives, ensembles, and partnerships that have formed in order to produce these works.

In New York City, NYU Steinhardt Master’s in drama therapy program has launched a new theatre company named CollideOscope Repertory Theatre Company (CRTC). CRTC’s mission is to advance racial justice and healing through performance, as well as to create a space of belonging for students, alumni, and artists who identify as Black, indigenous, and people of color. For their debut performance, they chose to produce Free Play, reading all five plays in the collection.

In Orlando, Florida Mad Cow partnered with Black Theatre Girl Magic to produce the events — a new partnership created specifically for the performance of Free Play. Mad Cow remarked that this “will be a sustaining and long term relationship that will connect Mad Cow Theatre to more Black artists. And this was [Black Theatre Girl Magic’s] first fully produced theatrical series. They are able to use it as a model for future collaborations and partnerships.”

Open-source Scripts and Possibility for the Future

One thing I’ve realized by releasing Free Play is that this open-source distribution model facilitates a fundamental redistribution of power and ownership that puts the work back in the hands of the people who gain the most from it.

In the traditional regional theatre paradigm, the stakeholders of a production include the theatre, the artistic director, the subscribers, the donors, et cetera. The stakeholders in Free Play — even the way we think about stakeholders — are different. Because the scripts are free to the public, in its most basic form, Free Play belongs to everybody. And that makes the idea of who is a stakeholder bigger — to the point that we’re talking about humanity.

This can also change how we think about returns and the directness of the relationship between playwright and community. To me as the playwright, an open-source model doesn’t only mean the scripts are available for anyone with wifi to download or perform. It means that my “return” on this project is different from a traditional financial return, definition of success, or any scenarios that might happen if I write a play for a theatre.

Think about it this way: most people have youth in their life in some way — they’re educators, mentors, aunts, uncles, community members, and more. We also have elders to take care of and connect with during a year where it’s incredibly complicated to visit and share space. And then there’s the responsibility that those of us in between: to care for both older people and our younger people. And for me, Free Play is my contribution as a human being, to do just that. So in this way, the return for these open-source scripts is providing endless opportunities for different communities to make theatre in a time where it’s difficult to do that, on a range of platforms, and with a lot of different types of actors.

Looking ahead, ultimately what I’ve learned from Free Play is that we still have so much to learn about the possibilities that open-source storytelling holds for the future. It’s clear from our impact-gathering process that this type of work harnesses massive potential to bring people together, expand how we think about performance, and make theatre happen outside of the regional theatre model. And we’re at the very beginning of that exploration.

Conclusion / A New Relationship with Community:

All this brings me back to shape notes, and how these allowed for songs and music that had been previously inaccessible — reserved for only professional musicians — to become a collective activity that included everyone.

I am in a lineage that goes back to Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Jacobs, black writers responding to the both age old and right now struggles of being black in America. I am in the lineage of writers seeking to expand upon the dominant cultural narrative and the attempts of erasure of black folks from the American story. As long as there is still a collective feeling of anxiety, fear, and trauma among us, it will show up in the art. We don’t have time to get into the politics and complexities of black writers being platformed by non black institutions and organizations. That being said, Free Play is purposely designed to remove as many sorts of access barriers as possible.

My career has taken me to a lot of places that I value; my story extends to creative, educational, and community-based families all across the country. I serve on two boards that advocate and support theatres for young audiences, and I made impact in the literary space, most significantly as a co founder and member of the breakbeat poets movement. I’ve also worked as a commissioned playwright in regional theatres across the US. But there’s something about this project that feels like returning to my fundamentals with more knowledge and a bigger network. Ultimately, this project is inspired by and in dialogue with all these experiences and the needs of all my extended communities — a way of me saying, “Here’s something for you all. I hope you can use it.”

Free Play is about creating theatre as the people’s playwright, creating work with the belief that drama and performance is something that everyone wants and deserves to do. Everyone has creative impulses, everyone has the instinct to tell stories, share experiences, and respond to the world around them through art. That’s where Free Play comes in: to break down the traditional structure between playwright, community, audience and theatre with open-source scripts that sends a clear message: these plays belong to you.