Professor directs radio plays about problems low-income families face
World Arts and Cultures/Dance Professor Dan Froot is a producer, performance artist, writer, composer, dancer, and saxophonist. His new work, Pang! is an evening of three short plays based on the oral histories of families facing food insecurity in Los Angeles, Miami, and Cedar Rapids. The plays are performed as a live broadcast, amidst a forest of microphones, sound effects props and musical instruments. Pang! aims to raise awareness, decrease stigma, and promote cross-class dialogue around circumstances faced by families living below the poverty line.
"Several audience members at “Pang!,” a series of three live radio plays, sit around a kitchen table onstage instead of in their seats.
Before, during and after the show, the play’s director sits down at the table and encourages the audience members to discuss food insecurity, housing issues and other core themes of the play. Sometimes, a member of one of the three families whose stories inspired the play joins them.
”Pang!”, which will run Saturday and Sunday at the 24th STreet Theatre, originally aimed to tell the stories of real families across the United States experiencing food insecurity. However, as the production team learned more about the families’ lives over several years of interviews, the script expanded to include other issues they dealt with, including discrimination toward immigrants, the foreclosure crisis and gun violence. “Pang!” debuted in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and will travel to Miami in January.
Dan Froot, the play’s director, lead writer and a world arts and cultures professor, consulted with three families from Los Angeles, Miami and Cedar Rapids. He and the show’s production team solicited input from the families as the script developed to help decide how to dramatize or modify their stories for the stage.
“The extensive nature of the research that we’ve done … has drawn us into close, trusting relationships with the families … and the surrounding communities,” Froot said. “Those relationships are the foundation of the plays themselves.”
Froot said he hopes the show will help people who qualify for social services, like food stamps, feel less stigmatized and challenge stereotypes more affluent audience members might have about low-income individuals and families, such as that they don’t want to work. The production team hopes to eventually release the show as a podcast, he added.
“If we can experience some of the human dimensions of what it feels like … to be in those circumstances, we can be moved to volunteer, contribute or treat people differently,” Froot said."— Madeline Pauker, Nov. 29, 2017
This post is an excerpt, read the full article at the Daily Bruin website.
Read more about Pang! here.