The local award-winning Latina theatre company, Breath of Fire, has risen to the challenge during this pandemic year of lockdown and loss. Their visionary project, the COVID-19 Monologues, profiles, pays tribute to and chronicles the loss experienced by so many during this time - and benefits Doctors Without Borders.
BoF literary director and playwright Diana Burbano describes the project this way in Orange Coast magazine
"Visibility is important, and putting faces and names to the numbers. So I decided to do what I do best and organize playwrights and ask people to send in monologues honoring people who died from COVID-19. And I got a great response from around the country and even from other countries. We had actors volunteer their time to perform the monologues on video as well. They’re about three to 10 minutes long and people from all walks of life...It’s important to me that we not pass people by. The numbers are getting so huge, but every number is an individual, and the least we can do is remember them."
Now the second round of monologues will debut this Wednesday May 19 at 7 PM at Chapman University's Musco Center for the Arts. Tickets are free for this hour-long livestream.
Rebel Girl is pleased to have a work selected to be part of such a powerful project. Her monologue, "Joe, also known as Mossayeb," honors her brother-in-law who passed away in January. It is performed by actress and noted audio book narrator Janet Song.
So join us this Wednesday if you wish, if you can, to honor those we lost as we begin to join the world again.
Rebel Girl just wishes we could be all be together at the theater.
She'd buy a round of drinks and make a toast.
