Brad Poer, professor of theater and humanities at Kellogg Community College, has written a play that premieres Mar 15 in the Binda Theatre on the KCC campus. Next year, he’ll lead a group of players to the famed Fringe Festival in Ediburgh, Scotland to perform it there as well. It’s called “Pando.” He spoke with Cara Lieurance about the play’s unique design and adaptability.
“In an acting class, sometimes you do what are called open scenes, where they give you a sheet of paper and it just says A says this, B says this, and anybody can go back and forth about these super generic conversations,” Poer says. “And so the idea was to try to create a show that was basically one gigantic open scene where any one of any age, race, gender, cultural, background, ethnicity could play any particular given role.” He adds: “The way that this show essentially works is it’s six mini one-acts and each individual scene is a different video game universe that's loosely based off of random video games that exist in real life.” Video games are a way for people to experiment with and build their own characters, he says. "We might not have an exact equivalent of wielding that sword and killing a dragon in real life, but we still learn about how to approach problems from different angles, how to play within the box that a game gives us and be creative within the confines of that world."
”Pando” will run Mar 15 - 24 at the Binda Theatre at Kellogg Community College. For tickets and more information, follow this link.
