“This was early quarantine. I was waiting on the porch for my girlfriend to come by and I sent her a photo to be like, ‘Hey, here’s what I look like, in case you’ve forgotten since we haven’t seen each other in a while.’ I love that hat and I never wear it, so it was nice to pull out the hat again. And I love that jumpsuit. Basically I had put on my favorite item from every category — favorite earring, favorite necklace, favorite hat. I didn’t care whether or not they went together, I just threw them together. And I really enjoyed it.” (All photos provided by Leanna.)

Leanna Keyes on quarantine as a theatrical opportunity

For Memphis-based playwright and producer Leanna Keyes, 2020 was set to be a year of abundance. With several of her plays scheduled to receive productions around the country, Leanna was eager for new and familiar creative collaborations. A Chicago production of Love Serving Love had just closed as Doctor Voynich and Her Children was opening in Minneapolis when the country went into quarantine and theaters everywhere set out their ghost lights. I caught up with Leanna from her apartment on the ancestral lands of the Chickasaw people, which she now shares with a sweet scaly friend.

So theaters closed, and your playwriting productions got shelved. What happened next?

There was definitely a period of mourning. But I was able to lean on my other creative skills to pivot fairly quickly. I was already set to produce the Bay Area Playwrights Festival for the fifth time since 2015, and fortunately they decided early on after Covid hit that they wanted to make the festival digital, and do something really, really good. So we went all-in making visually interesting and compelling, fully-live digital content.

“This is one of the early iterations of my streaming setup. My current setup includes double the monitors, and double the fun — double the dust space as well. But yeah, this was my streaming setup for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Because we were doing five new plays simultaneously and only had four hours of tech rehearsal for each play, I had very elaborate spreadsheets documenting each director’s notes for positioning actors on the screen. With a staged reading, normally you’re just like, you go to that music stand, you go to that music stand, turn in. But in a digital world, we had way more options, and it all ran on the power of spreadsheets. On the bottom right is the software I used to caption for accessibility.”

But the biggest news of the last year is I’m now a small business owner. I have a company called Transcend Streaming and I produce fully live digital events. One of my philosophies around theatrical productions right now is they should be genuinely live unless there is literally no possible way to do it without being pre-recorded. The potential for things to change from night to night, for something to go wrong — with the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, we found that our audiences actually loved when something went wrong because it reminded them they were not just watching a YouTube video. They felt connected. The chat would go wild during those moments because audiences were having that communal experience we all have been lacking so much. So Transcend Streaming is a result of the successes of the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival — seeing how artistically, economically, and environmentally it actually made way more sense to rethink how we do live events. I wanna keep doing that.

What are your hopes for Transcend Streaming?

“This is ASM, which stands for Assistant Snake Manager, and also Ascending Scaly Machine. ASM is a Children’s Python, which is named for a guy named Children — not for the type of person. ASM was born on Mother’s Day 2020, and he entered my life in the fall. I’ve wanted a snake for a decade and finally realized I wasn’t going anywhere, so I got him. He’s precious. I built him the jungle gym you see him sitting on here. He’s tiny, and he’s very, very friendly. He loves climbing. We’re very much alike because I’m someone who also will happily take the highest possible point in an apartment building — I just love being elevated. And he does as well. I appreciate that bit of synergy between us.”

I believe we should be designing a world where people who are disabled can live and participate fully in society. I’m so interested in making accessibility the default. And in fact, I often find that doing things that are baseline accessible to an additional group of people actually benefits everyone. For example, literally every show I produce — unless the client says no — has captions by default. With the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, some of our actors didn’t have the best internet connection. And sometimes as a result, a line or two would get dropped. But because every show had captions by default, viewers could just look down at the captions and get what was said.

Theater has historically been exclusionary to so many people on the audience, artistic, and staff sides. This is an opportunity to take what has up to now been a very, very walled garden, and open the garden gates to audiences who want to engage with these art forms that haven’t been as accessible to them. So by doing live theater digitally and doing it well, my hope is people can see this makes a ton of sense to continue doing even after we don’t “have” to. We should want to do this.

Tell me more about your experience as a theater artist adapting to a time when we cannot gather in-person.

This is a spicy take, but in many ways my theatrical life has improved since Covid hit. Theater is now accessible to audiences we have never been able to reach before, we can collaborate with people around the world, and the art is better for it. Obviously, there are challenges. There are connection issues, both emotional and technical. There are a lot of unanswered questions about how this art form is changing and adapting to doing things remotely or partially remotely or a hybrid of the two.

“This is a spicy take, but in many ways my theatrical life has improved since Covid hit.”

But to use the Bay Area Playwrights Festival again as an example of how moving to digital led to good things: The festival has been going for 40-plus years, and in 2020 we were able to do plays we would never have been able to do if we’d been in person. One of our plays was set in Hong Kong and had very specific casting requirements — the actors had to be adept with a number of languages. That talent would have been very difficult to find locally in the Bay Area, and the festival doesn’t have enough funding to fly people out and put them up for that long. But for that one show, I literally had actors across 12 different time zones. I had people in New York, Taiwan, Hong Kong — all collaborating in real time for an audience that was more than double our usual attendance size.

“I had [actors] in New York, Taiwan, Hong Kong — all collaborating in real time for an audience that was more than double our usual attendance size.”

So many artistic directors and literary managers and dramaturgs were able to see these new plays, whereas ordinarily only the most wealthy theaters can afford to send someone to scout talent in San Francisco for a week. And don’t get me started on the economic and environmental benefits of the festival being reimagined digitally.

What do you envision for theater in a post-Covid world? Do you think there’s any point in returning to a world where people commute to the theater?

I do. There is an important element to live, in-person, large-scale or small-scale theater. I got into theater because I believe the immediacy and intimacy of a live person on stage changes emotional realities in a way movies do not. But I am very interested in a future hybrid model where you have, in addition to a stage manager who’s calling the theatrical show, a streaming manager who is broadcasting from multiple cameras and choosing camera angles and doing audio mixing.

“This is a photo I took of an electrical box in my neighborhood — it was just so funny to me. And it’s related to part of my personal way of interacting with the world, which is to make suggestions jokingly until someone says yes to me. And I feel like this sign and this graffiti is in conversation with that way of living. Because what if we did that? I feel like it’s asking ‘How would your life improve if in fact, we went on a rent strike?’ Because rental properties — they’re an investment. As a landlord, you’re not providing a service. This is an investment, and sometimes investments don’t pan out for a little while. Why is it essential that your rent money keeps flowing in from your dozens of properties? Whereas, if someone’s stock market portfolio is going a little bit badly, they go, ‘Well, that will come back.’ They’re fine, and the dip in their portfolio has no material impact on their life. I love when people pitch things that are jokes — but what if we really did it?”

To broadcast every performance everywhere, every night — that is my eventual goal. I’m really interested in a world where instead of listening to the cast album a thousand times and saving their money all of high school to go to New York for a weekend of shows, young people can instead catch the live stream several times and be obsessive about that, then eventually go to Broadway and see their shows. “Oh I’ve watched the stream 100 times, I can’t wait to see it in person. I can’t wait to see it live.” I think there’s huge potential in bridging gaps we previously thought were unbridgeable.

How are you feeling as a playwright?

I’m actually not generating a lot of content at the moment. Frankly, there are other voices I think are more important than mine right now. As a producer, I am trying to specifically spend my time producing work by BIPOC artists. That’s how I want to spend my energy, so I haven’t been writing as much. I had an idea early on in the pandemic that I was gonna write a play a week. But ultimately that wasn’t where I wanted to be putting my effort, and my stories weren’t what I thought people needed to hear.

What are some of the stories you are most eager to prioritize?

I’m a queer trans woman, and obviously I am horrified about the things that are possibly going to happen to my community over the next four, five, 10 years. It is also true that people are not building concentration camps for me. We literally have concentration camps right now for people who are migrating across the border.

“I have that first responder, triage mindset right now — let’s start with the people who need the most help to get their human rights respected.”

If you’re a doctor and you’re triaging patients, you go where you‘re needed most first. I have that first responder, triage mindset right now — let’s start with the people who need the most help to get their human rights respected. Let’s amplify their voices and give them the resources and support they need to transcend the white supremacist system in which we all live.

The (r)evolution of theater aside, what have you realized about yourself during this time?

I’m increasingly investing in taking care of my body. I’ve been looking at more ergonomic sitting situations. I’m a way better cook than I was at the beginning of Covid. I finally buckled down and got a psychiatrist to help me with sleep and sleep medication. I’ve decided I don’t have to accept certain challenging things about my health just because they’ve always been that way.

I’ve also started to see myself as someone who doesn’t exist just to fulfill the needs of other people. If I in fact need to cancel or reschedule a meeting because I need to go deliver supplies to a friend who has Covid, or to take a nap, I have the power to do that. I’m really starting to come into myself as a person who can affect positive change in organizations and in my relationships.

As a Thank You for sharing your story with me, I’ll be donating to any person or place of your choosing. You’ve chosen The TGI Justice Project — tell me more about them.

The TGI Justice Project is a California-based initiative that helps incarcerated trans women of color transition back into non-incarcerated life, as well as supporting them while they are still being held. The Project exists at the intersections of people who are considered disposable, who are the most heavily policed, and who are the most heavily persecuted. It’s a no-brainer for me to support them. For whatever reason someone is incarcerated, we should not punish them as they reintegrate back into the world — a world from which we forcibly removed them usually for unjust reasons. I’ve supported The TGI Justice Project for years. They do good work. They’re good people helping good people.

To donate to The TGI Justice Project:

Please visit http://www.tgijp.org/donate.html

“My girlfriend is really into the Sims, so we made our Sim selves and had them move in together and get two cats. I am pretty big into video games, but the Sims is where my girlfriend’s knowledge and abilities far surpass mine. It was fun to sit down and put a little future together during a time when the future was deeply uncertain — a little future where we could just be happy. It was nice.”