This season at the Globe showcases extraordinary writing for the stage. Two Pulitzer Prize winners opened our year (English, and the novel behind our adaptation of The Age of Innocence), and a third (Fat Ham) is in production on our big stage next door. On top of these, we’re proud to boast a range of great material by contemporary American playwrights, and of course there’s also our friend and standard bearer for playwrights everywhere, Mr. Shakespeare. Tonight’s production, the world premiere of Stir, is yet another exemplar of how talented writers bring audiences new and beautiful and emotional experiences. The play is a Globe commission developed in our Powers New Voices Festival (it was entitled The Black Beans Project then), which makes it yet one more example of wonderful new work that originates here, delights San Diego audiences, and then—we hope and expect—goes on to vibrant life around the American theatre.

The audiences who heard an earlier version of this play were charmed by it, and the Globe’s artistic staff and I found it hugely worthwhile. Its co-authors, Melinda Lopez and Joel Perez, who also—thrillingly and unusually—are starring in this first production, do a series of brave and exciting things in their play. They explore rich themes of family and heritage, focusing on the way a cherished recipe can become a kind of talisman of familial bonds. They look at this through the lens of two siblings, still a relationship less frequently explored onstage than other human ties. And they root this sister and brother and these themes deep in their own shared cultural heritage, bringing profound personal lived experiences to their artistic inquiry.

But to me, one of the most powerful features of Stir, and one of its bravest, is that it is set during the COVID-19 pandemic. I honestly don’t know other plays that have ventured into this period, still not entirely behind us, that was full of churn and anxiety. To be sure, Lopez and Perez don’t get into virology nor vaccine controversy nor the politics of our government’s response to the crisis. Their interest is in the way the pandemic isolated us, separated us from the people we love, and robbed from us important family moments that, in the before times, would have drawn us close together.

They also take a deep and searching look at the single thing that is to me the most profound legacy of the COVID period: Zoom. Setting their play during a Zoom call, Lopez and Perez turn the now-overly-familiar features of that software—its ding-dong sounds and its flattening rectangles and its infuriating glitches—into the strange and dislocating things they truly are. And they find, to my surprise, that Zoom is inherently theatrical. The playwrights transform Zoom into a metaphor that expresses a series of binaries: distance and closeness, loss and restoration. They show us two people sorely in need of love and warmth who reach into the cold digital void and somehow make contact. Miraculously, they set a laptop computer next to a slow-cooking pot of beans, and they dramatize the ways in which these two things are actually not all that different. It’s delightful to see that happen. Great theatre works magic like that.

I’m grateful to Melinda and Joel for entrusting their play to the Globe, and for the generosity of spirit that has characterized their interactions with our company at every step in this process. I’m also delighted to welcome Marcela Lorca to our theatre for the first time. Artistic Director of the great Ten Thousand Things theatre company in Minneapolis, whose practices are central to our annual Globe for All Shakespeare tour, Marcela brings a sophisticated and exacting talent to her art and a great joy to every room she’s in. I’m honored to welcome all three artists to our family.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.

Barry Edelstein is the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director of The Old Globe.

Any feedback on tonight's show or any of the Globe's work?

Email Barry at HiBarry@TheOldGlobe.org and he'll get back to you!