Feature: DIVANALYSIS by The Quarantine Players

With the COVID shutdown of theaters and the new norm of social distancing, a new wheel has been invented as a platform for playwrights, directors, and actors via Zoom at Quarantine Players. The grass-roots, Washington DC "theater company" decided to keep theatre alive by providing playwrights and actors an opportunity to read a play weekly, knowing that Art must survive under all circumstances.

The small company has now branched off to include diverse talent across the United States thanks to playwrights Carey Scott Wilkerson (opera librettist, playwright and author of Seven Dreams of Falling) and Stephen Foster (award-winning actor/writer of Awakening the Actor Within), who teamed up with producer AJ Campbell to bring a camp original to the world: DIVANALYSIS. The mock Zoom lecture explores the world of Zoom using gay icons as mythic examples of camp humor, allowing audiences to laugh at the insanity of teaching via Zoom, being shut in, and social distancing, but doing it through the lens of entertainment.

The show itself had humble, Hollywood roots. DIVANALYSIS began as Divas themselves begin: in front of the mirror. Stephen Foster and Carey Scott Wilkerson wanted to combine their interests (Diva culture and Deconstruction Theory) into one theatrical experience. Thus, with a rented theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, four dresses, two cast members, and a borrowed lighting kit, DIVANALYSIS arrived as a kind of post-modern drag review with extensive footnotes.

Now produced by the visionary AJ Campbell's Quarantine Players, the show is re-imagined as an informal Zoom lecture on the Diva phenomenon with guest appearances by the very ladies under review. In fact, everyone in this show, even the professor herself, is in analysis! Of course, some would be surprised to find Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Karen Carpenter, and Judy Garland suddenly defending the dissertation of their lives. But for these legends, it's just another day in the curious world of Divadom.

Indeed, this sweetly surreal, comic adventure confirms what every Diva understands when she gazes into her own mirror: her life is a show and the show must go on, sometimes in ways she never dreamed possible, in ways she never dreamed at all; ultimately answering the question "what came first - the Diva or the Dress?"

The Quarantine Players is composed of a group of directors, playwrights, actors, and technicians from all over the U.S. who have gathered to keep the ghost light on for you, working to create weekly podcasts and video readings of new plays so you can get your theatre fix! The group is female-led and queer-positive with a desire to break barriers in the plays we choose and how they are cast. The group works with early-career playwrights who bring plays to produce as part of the development process. A new play reading occurs every week, followed by a talkback with the playwright and actors, with each playwright involved every step of the way.

DIVANALYSIS is directed by Scott Olson, produced by A.J. Campbell, and features:

Tori Clay as Professor

Cait Kiley-Klimowski as Bette Midler

Eugene Ebner as Darling (Liza's assistant/life coach)

Sara Jones as Liza Minnelli

Sarah Mackenzie Baron as Karen Carpenter

Judy Lewis as Judy Garland

Watch RED Talk, the first episode of DIVANALYSIS on You Tube at https://youtu.be/ggEi2gLXt-Q or on The Quarantine Players Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/QuarantinePlayers/videos/361977748171527

For more information on rights to produce DIVANALYLIS, please visit Black Box Theatre Publishing Company at https://www.blackboxtheatrepublishing.com/divanalysis

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