Roberta Gore reflects on inspiration from Idris Goodwin and other writers who created masterpieces during a quarantine.

Idris Goodwin, Sarah Ruhl, William Shakespeare—three wordsmiths whispering across infected air.

I attended an EDTA conference recently—the educational theatre association—it’s a conference for drama teachers. This year’s was virtual. Still inspiring. Idris is a poet and a playwright, a teacher and a speaker. I was mesmerized, and as any marvelous inspiring thing does to one’s creative soul, mine percolated with his words, meditating on his plays and how I could perform them. They’re brilliant and important. At the conference Idris said, “We still need to tell and experience story.” As a high school drama teacher who is reeling with the difficulties of 2020 and how I can inspire and enthuse teens who just want their voices heard, Idris showed me how he wrestled 2020 to the ground and rose again, having sculpted new stories.

He’s written plays, open source scripts for “an antiracist tomorrow,” and they’re free to playmakers to use. And they’re wonderful. On his website he says, he’s written “five short plays to spark conversation and serve as a catalyst for action.” The Water Gun Song is about a parent explaining to her child why a water gun isn’t a toy and Act Free is about children wrestling with the definition of freedom. Nothing Rhymes with Juneteenth introduces us to a parent and kid finishing a rap for school and Black Flag presents two college freshmen just moving in when one decides to decorate their room with a bit of southern pride. And the play performed at the conference, #Matter, is about two adults, once teens, debating matters of life and race. The plays are conversation starters. Art starts conversations.

I want to perform his work. And write my own. And my students’ stories—I want them to write theirs too. We have to write ourselves through this to a better place. I am inspired and want to inspire.

On March 13, 2020, ironically the very day I walked out of my school for the last time, Sarah Ruhl, a playwright I love, wrote a piece for The New York Times. In it, she reminded readers that Shakespeare too was quarantined. And when the London theatres were closed, guess what he wrote? King Lear. Well, that sure was a good use of his time. He received this feedback from the sixteenth century press, “the plague is banished by the breath.”  Books, Ruhl says, “carry no germs.” She suggests, while we wait out this dark age, we try “amateur theatricals at home, living room readings, podcasts of theatre and staying home and writing plays in solitude.” Like Idris Goodwin, Ruhl compels me to rise.

Lear fought wind and rain in one scene, and Richard Burbage or whomever of the King’s Men played the part did so without wind machines or cool lighting or sound. He did it with imagination, in the company of an audience ripe to pretend too.

I say, let us banish this plague with our breath.