Summer playwriting project goes virtual 

Students playwright project goes virtual

Alliance Theatre's Palefsky Collision Project looks a little bit different this year, but the students important remains the same.

ATLANTA - “The middle of a crisis is not the time to stop doing the work that you do.  It’s the time to work harder.”

Pearl Cleage is talking about this year’s Palefsky Collision Project, a program with which the Alliance Theatre Playwright in Residence has been involved for the past decade.  The annual summer intensive challenges Georgia high schoolers to explore a classic text, and create an entirely new show out of those discussions.  Held in-person at the Alliance for nearly two decades, this year’s project is being done entirely through Zoom.

“We wanted so much to do the project this summer, and this was the only way we could do it,” says Cleage.

This year, the 19 hand-picked Georgia students are exploring the award-winning young adult novel White Rose by Kip Wilson, which tells the true story of young people who resisted the Nazi regime in 1940s Germany.  Says Cleage, “The important thing for us about this work is that it shows young people being active citizens at a moment of great transition and crisis for their country.”

Rising Pace Academy senior Alivia Wynn says she knew right away she wanted to be part of the program — even if it was in a virtual way.

“I immediately looked into it and was like, ‘This is something I want to do,’” says Wynn.  “Since school was on Zoom for the last semester, it was a lot easier to transition this art form over.  There have been new ways to use the camera and, just, the creative ideas that come out of it.”

And, of course, students say creative ideas also come from what’s happening around them; not just living through a pandemic, but also the current conversations about justice and equality.

“That’s kind of the awesome thing about Collision,” says Ari Isenberg, a recent graduate of The Galloway School.  “These amazing texts…they really fit with any moment in time, but when we come to these texts, they feel so perfect to the time we’re living in.”

This year’s project showcase will be streamed online for free this Saturday at 2:30 p.m.  For details on where to watch, click here.