Krista Knight's CRUSH Wins Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival

Krista Knight's video puppet play CRUSH is one of the six winning works of the 45th Annual Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival. The winning play, which was selected from over 500 submissions and a group of 30 finalists, will be published and made available for licensing through Samuel French, a Concord Theatricals company.

When the usually in-person festival was cancelled this year due to COVID-19, Knight and her partner Barry Brinegar decided to use the virtual tools they'd been experimenting with prior to the pandemic to create something completely remotely, completely in-house. Literally, in their house. CRUSH was created in Knight and Brinegar's 500 sq-ft home studio in the East Village. They recorded actor Ben Beckley in two sessions over Zoom (on his iPhone) and set up a home nerve center with 5 monitors (assembled from a motley crew of tablets, computers, and spare screens) and used virtual technologies to capture motion in 3D space to match the vocal performance. With one person in virtual reality and the other watching the footage, they recorded the live animation.

Picking up roughly from where Kafka left off-a loner, squatter, and rebel dares to love. We follow the anti-morphosis through a series of beat poetry performances as our hero draws nearer to the object of his desire and his undoing.
The play is currently being presented in six parts and released in separate installments on YouTube.