“Alone Together,” a play put on by the Occidental theater department, will take place April 3–6 at 8 p.m. in the Keck Theater Lobby. Theater & Performance Studies Associate Professor and “Alone Together” Director Sarah Kozinn said the play seeks to reflect on the five years since the first COVID-19 lockdown, exploring how people remember the time and what has been forgotten.
“It’s a party, a five year commemoration where the audience are guests coming to this celebration,” Kozinn said. “The lobby of Keck Theater is the home where these people have been living and quarantining, and each student has created a character that is based on things they learn from different interviews.”
According to Kozinn, the cast began working on the production early this semester but the idea has been in the works for a few years. Kozinn said in 2022, former Occidental President Harry J. Elam Jr. came to her and a colleague with the idea for a theater production informed by student experiences during lockdown.
“He was doing all these listening sessions, and he was hearing all these people in our community talk about experiences they had during quarantine,” Kozinn said. “Some of them were terribly sad, but also some of them were really empowering and uplifting and just incredible.”
Kozinn said “Alone Together” is a devised theater production, meaning that the cast created the production collaboratively instead of beginning with a pre-existing script. Kozinn said the characters the cast devised have been partially informed by a series of over 100 interviews she conducted with a team of students in 2023, documenting the diverse experiences of quarantine.
“‘Alone Together’ disrupts expectations for what happens on stage by doing something not on stage, doing something without a script, doing something that’s made not from only fictional characters, but from actual interviews and real truth that we experienced,” Kozinn said.
Cast member Lily Fawcett-Dubow (junior) said each of the six characters mimics a certain archetype of a person during lockdown, including a conspiracy theorist, a rule breaker and a social media influencer. Fawcett-Dubow said even if they do not exactly match anyone’s life, she hopes audience members will be able to see parts of themselves represented through each unique character on stage.
Cast member Olivia Nordbø (first year) said she has enjoyed the process of devising a script collaboratively because it has allowed for a lot of creativity within the cast. Nordbø said the characters they have created are informed not only by the interviews Kozinn collected, but by the actors’ own experiences of quarantine.
“I think it’s kind of a forgotten time, like we just moved past it, but there’s a lot there that it was worth digging up again,” Nordbø said. “Listening to these interviews and reading them and seeing how people actually reflect about that time — [it is] really interesting because we get to see it from so many perspectives.”
Cast member Connor Leebardt (senior) said the process of devising the script has been unconventional but extremely fun. Leebardt said they hope seeing the play will give audience members a chance to reflect on their own experiences of quarantine — particularly the parts that they have otherwise begun to forget.
“Giving people the opportunity to observe who they were then and how far they’ve come in a conscious manner I think is going to be really powerful when it all comes together,” Leebardt said.
Leebardt said theater is a powerful tool for exploring themes as big as COVID-19 because it is unreproducible.
“When you’re at a theater show, that’s it. You have the hour or hour and a half that you’re there, and what you don’t observe is what you’re not going to see again,” Leebardt said. “So you’re put in this heightened state of observation and reflection and interpretation.”
According to Kozinn, while the piece explores some heavy subject matter, it is, for the most part, a joyful celebration of togetherness after a period which suspended society’s ability to connect.
“I think that doing live theater where we have to gather together in a shared space to talk about COVID is a radical act, considering that we weren’t allowed to be together in shared space to tell these stories,” Kozinn said.
Contact Estel Garrido-Spencer at garridospenc@oxy.edu
