INTERVIEW: Ice Factory Festival may have moved online, but there’s still ‘Jubilation’
Photo: Mona Mansour is the writer behind the new play Beginning Days of True Jubilation. Photo courtesy of Layla Sharabi / Provided by DARR Publicity with permission.
The annual Ice Factory Festival hosted by the New Ohio Theatre has moved their programming this summer completely online. But overcoming any technological odds, the festival is ready to showcase four new works presented over four weeks, beginning with the July 24-26 presentation of Beginning Days of True Jubilation, conceived by the Society theater company and written by Mona Mansour.
Scott Illingworth directs the production, which will be live-streamed. The show centers on a visionary who sets out to create a new life-changing invention, one that will impact the world and make money for everyone on the development team. Then, as these things go, everything goes horribly wrong. The play serves as an uproarious satire of capitalism, startup business culture and the cult-like qualities of groupthink.
“In 2017, I put together a workshop at New Dramatists for a program called Playtime, wherein you basically get paid for two weeks to do whatever you want toward a new work,” Mansour wrote in an email to Hollywood Soapbox. “Scott Illingworth was my co-creator/director, and we had an amazing group of actors. And during that time, we basically pretended we were a theater company, and we were creating a new play using the joint stock method of research, interviews and, particularly in my case, improvisation. After that, a few of us were so turned on by this brief foray that we decided to do the very unwise thing of starting a theater company, with the goal of creating a new play every year this way. Thus Society theater company was born, [and] Beginning Days of True Jubilation is our first production.”
There have been challenges with developing and presenting the Zoom-ified performance. Mansour likened the online platform to the MTA: “you use it because there’s nothing else.”
“I realize that sounds very negative, but it’s just a medium,” she stated. “The challenges of creating work this way, for me, are outweighed by the ability to keep creating, to keep gathering and the ability to invite people to watch our creation. I should also add that there’s a definite irony in our play — a satire about Silicon Valley startups — being transmitted on one of its creations.”
Much of the rehearsal and development process of the new play was accomplished in person more than a year ago. The company members had a visceral knowledge of one another, and they built a collective trust. This helped when everything moved online.
“I think if you had a group of people who didn’t know each other at all, you couldn’t do this kind of process digitally,” Mansour wrote. “Scott has talked about how what’s missing right now are those ‘off’ moments, grabbing tea, walking out of rehearsals together, etc. — the breaks where you see who eats what for lunch, hear about someone’s morning and basically get to check in with each other. Those moments are gone. … I think everything has been changed forever, in ways good and bad and hopefully revolutionary. I can say it’ll be very strange to step back into a dusty rehearsal room.”
At the end of the live-stream, the playwright hopes that audiences are laughing. She admitted that Beginning Days of True Jubilation is ultimately a playful play, with its creation coming well before the days of COVID-19.
“We decided that playfulness was OK to put into the world right now,” she stated. “But also, there is a tragedy in this startup / late capitalistic work model — we might see its excesses as ridiculous, but the truth is that there are very young minds and souls getting very burnt out in this all-encompassing world of intense ‘belief’ that allows zero time away from the mission.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Ice Factory Festival kicks off with Beginning Days of True Jubilation, presented as a live-stream July 24-26. Click here for more information.
