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Adjudicator Art Page, Volume 1

Welcome to the first volume of the Adjudicator Art Page!

As you know, our Barrymore Nominators and Judges adjudicate all Barrymore-eligible productions.

While we are all doing our best to practice social distancing, we wanted to create alternative opportunities to allow our audiences and constituencies to discover the creative sides of our adjudicators.

Our adjudicators are of course theatre people, but they also have many different skills and talents than their professions or their money making jobs dictate. We hope that by regularly sharing different submitted works from our adjudicators on our website, you all get to know how multi-faceted and delightful our volunteer adjudicators are.

We are pleased to share the work of Emily Jenik (Nominator), Robert X. Golphin (Nominator), Celeste Mann (Musical Panel Judge), Emma Gibson (Nominator), and Linnea Bond (Play Panel Judge).

 

Emily Jenik

Emily is an Australian Actor, Singer, Youtube Content Creator, and works in Front of House at Venues in Philadelphia

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Don't Touch Your Face (YouTube) - https://youtu.be/JTpBIrDQfcQ

A parody song about Coronavirus and best practice hygiene to help stop the spread.

Recommended Viewer Age - 13+

 

Robert X. Golphin

Robert X. Golphin is an award-nominated SAG/AFTRA actor with TV, film and theatre credits. He is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. He holds an MFA in Screenwriting, BA in Theatre & Film, and Diploma in Creative Writing. 

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Voice of Majesty (FilmFreeway) - https://filmfreeway.com/VoiceofMajesty

Inspired by the life and legacy of preeminent American vocalist Marian Anderson, a group of aspiring musicians find themselves in that very legend's abode.

Donation Linkhttp://www.paypal.me/RobertXGolphin

Recommended Viewer Age - 13+ (Two characters briefly kiss on the lips. )

*"Voice of Majesty" was filmed on location at the Marian Anderson Museum in Philadelphia. The project won the Gold Award for Best Short Film at the 2019 Philadelphia International Film Festival & Marketplace.

 

Celeste Mann

I am originally from New York City, and I am an emerging visual artist who creatively assembles "dust." I use mostly soft pastel and charcoal, and I am also a performing artist and photographer.

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Flowers for Joe -

Image

(soft pastel on sanded paper)

"I was inspired to create "Flowers for Joe" for his wife of 59 years, Donna. Joe died on November 28, 2017 after being sick for a long time. I set up this still life, driven and compelled to render this subject for Donna."

Donation Link - Paypal: [email protected]

*Prints and originals available for sale.

 

Emma Gibson

Emma is a British theatre-maker, now living in Philadelphia, PA. She was the founding producing artistic director of Tiny Dynamite and has worked as an actress, producer, director and writer. More at www.britishemma.com

POEM - about Covid-19

Recommended Viewer Age - 18+

the dishes - 

My kids won’t load the dishwasher

It’s driving me insane

And so I smash the plates instead

And walk out in the rain

The air is sweet and heady

If I could survive out here I would

A feral, lonely woman

Doing what she should

I’d build a camp from things I find

And make a little fire

And I’d sit there for a long, long time

Until the world expires

My bones will sink much deeper

Than the mulch and wood and peat

I’ll funnel down into the depth

And try and plant a seed

And after a long silence

When the awful time has passed

I’ll emerge victorious

Like a crocus, a blade of grass

The darkness will still shroud me

The fear of what has been

But when I walk back into the house

The dishes will be clean.

 

Linnea Bond

Linnea Bond is an actor and creator who also works as a director, playwright, dramaturg, and teacher. She has worked with PAC and Renegade Theatre, and can be seen in the films Carol and Dark Waters.

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ESSAY - 

Recommended Viewer Age - 13+ (Mention of sex, death and violence)

"This is an essay I wrote about what it feels like in the world right now."

Journal 3-21

Each day the revelation of new information. Or something matters in a new way. Things change moment to moment. “Six Feet Apart” is intensely important, with great terror rising in my heart when Eli walks past at a distance of three feet between leaning her bike on the railing to my left and moving to the open chair farther away on my right side. New Rules. We have to give up touching the people we love. Judging each other for being to close. For even suggesting proximity, how dare you ask me to come over to play a game watch a movie eat a meal. We lean our upper bodies forward in space, our feet a measured distance. We rebelliously let our socks touch on the chair, feeling oh god that human warmth while we breathe potentially infected droplets into the air at a proper distance. Thank God for long legs. Don’t touch your face. Never has my face itched so much in all my life. Never has my hair gotten so much in my eyes. Buggers so big they could throw a semi off the road, and my fingers are covered in something, avocado, peanut butter, but licking it off is a crime. How dare all 12 of you have a picnic in the park! Basketball? Are you insane? And then something else happens too, - say hi to me damn it, we’re passing on a street and the world is falling apart, if I’m six feet from you the least you can do is use vibrations from your throat to caress my eardrums I’m dying I’m dying damn it look what I’ve had to give up and your luxurious marriage and kids to hold you don’t know what it’s like but we’re the same furtive glances we’ve always done here in the city. Mores relax slightly in the woods, where we’re so proud of ourselves for surviving, for getting outside, for making lemonade, except of course the middle aged sage who was going to do their Friday stroll anyway and now all of you, you with your new-found love of hiking, decided to interrupt their meditation with this plan to use the time you never would have had between your two jobs and committees and social responsibilities. 

Mandy picks at her skin. Stuck inside working from home until she was laid off as the newest hire at the small firm of Boules, Ankor and Raleigh, she now cannot afford her empty two bedroom apartment and she doesn’t even know the neighbors to have someone to wave to in the morning – if any one still went out first thing to get their papers. (Did the paperboy sanitize his hands? Did he cough? Was it because of the dry air or the new plague? And anyway they’re called paperpeople now.) Staring into the mirror, she makes eye contact with herself, then practices looking away before it gets intimate. The coffee’s done so she presses it through – muscles are atrophying and the gym’s closed, how many push ups are the equivalent of the 5 lb medicine ball? She gets a mug, scratches her eye, and then takes a hammer to her hand. 

And somewhere a 39-year-old woman loses her virginity to a college student she met on the internet – a platform that’s new to both of them, one of the grittier apps on the crowded market, and one of them has it and the other one didn’t and now they both do, breathing the heavy air of her curtained bedroom, panting in and out the virus and one of them will be fine, a tickle in their throat one day that makes them wonder, and the other one will be in the hospital on a respirator in two weeks, which is unfortunate because by that point things will have gotten bad but the vaccine and the respirators from GM and Ford and Tesla (late to the party but they’re bringing beer) aren’t finished yet, and the doctors are already tired so they get a machine but a miscalculation of need and a father of five in more desperate condition will die in the meantime. They arrived at the same time and made eye contact once in the hall, as each were being wheeled past each other and true to ingrained emotional social distancing, they didn’t say hi but perhaps that was because each was focused on their own personal struggle to breathe. The father of five thinks about his second-favorite child before he passes into oblivion – briefly wondering if this virus well get her out of the closet and then its over and the nurses hurry to the next one. 

Catfishing continues in the plague apocalypse, and burning the vegetables, and losing your best friend to his new girlfriend because things are moving fast in quarantine and they’ve chosen to cleave to one another, forsaking their father and mother, who, anyway, live in a small town in western PA, and going to them would put the whole area at risk, although there’s great hiking nearby so someone has probably already done it, and the other one’s parents are stuck in Nepal anyway so its not like that was a decision anyone really had to make. Except the government, which is a bunch of highly emotional cats meowing at each other. No, it’s a bunch of angry cars in traffic. No, it’s a bunch of humans, but in an office where there’s an active shooter and Bob from accounting keeps yelling, first about how we’re overreacting and then about how we should all do what he says and everyone is shushing him and all the blondes are imagining shooting him themselves and all the brunettes want to strangle him and the one ginger is imagining drowning him but everyone’s picturing killing him and not til now did Glen realize how white the office was. And he vows if he makes it thorough this active shooter situation to adopt a kid from China or Ethiopia or Vietnam or give his next three paychecks to the African American theatre he saw on the alternative route to work he took this morning because the highway was under construction or go to the Hispanic festival and attempt to compliment every single vendor in his high school Spanish even though he is ashamed of how rusty it’s gotten and it was never that good in the first place and then when the active shooter is shot by the police – or he jumped from a tall window? Hard to remember which it was, there’s so many – Glen actually does all three despite the human inclination to dismiss odd ideas that flit through one’s head in a crisis, seeming suddenly important, and Nyla grows up speaking not only English and her native Cantonese, but Spanish too, and in college she takes Portuguese and Italian, because they’re so close, and Arabic because it’s beautiful and Yoroba, because she thinks it might be a challenge but it isn’t really, and she becomes a translator but still attends local theatre every two weeks because she grew up stunned by the African American theatre’s beautiful productions that she saw every season and she did their summer camp and though she’s remained painfully shy she still loves seeing the courage of the actors lit by bright lights, hiding nothing, belting or monologuing or this left shoe is my mother, it hath the worser sole. And she becomes an ardent supporter of the arts, and has two children of her own who become ardent supporters of the arts and their four children become ardent supporters of the arts, with one of them even becoming a famous baritone, and another a semi-famous painter and another a kindergarten teacher who employs theatre techniques in every class, turning out fabulous, advanced, confident readers year after year and all thanks to the active shooter in Glen’s building all those years ago. 

And a decade from now when the virus doesn’t often come up but everyone’s talking about the shortages, people will frequently catch themselves chucking at the way humanity keeps springing forward but ending up in the same place, the way some groups of people have rights now but global inequity still means it’s an assumption some people will just starve and despite the science there are smokers. But because of what we learned during the virus, instead of just melancholy or anger or powerless or suicidal or nothing or guilty we feel bemused and we say, like the next-door neighbor with the broken window yelling cheerfully to her grandkids, “Let’s watch movies today! None of that damned English shit!” because what’s school when we’re all going to ascend anyway and laughing too at how we all feel differently but then we all also feel the same. And there’s no real proof that just because you’re over there and I’m over here, nobody isn’t everybody else. 

Donation Link - Venmo @Linnea-Bond

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