At The Playwrights Center Ubu Bake-Off, Paula Vogel and Jeremy B. Cohen (Photo by Whitney Rowland)

Four days ago, the US theatre community fostered the birth of more than 100 new short plays, on our federal holiday of Presidents’ Day. These were not, however, created in a spontaneous outpouring of national pride, but rather a coordinated – if entirely voluntary – effort that specifically sought to conflate the current presidency with Alfred Jarry’s absurdist and profane play Ubu Roi.

Held at nearly two dozen theatres and theatre-related organisations, the Ubu Bake Off was the brainchild of award-winning playwright Paula Vogel, who, please pardon the expression, cooked up the idea while musing on Facebook just five weeks ago. The interest from her Facebook friends and acolytes was immediate.

The Ubu Bake Off followed guidelines Vogel has previously used in her teaching career. It was an exercise designed to prompt people to quick, instinctive creativity, helped along by a 48-hour writing time limit, coupled with a five-page limit. Vogel also provides a set of ingredients, so that the resultant playlets are all variations on a theme.

For Monday, the ingredients included Pa Ubu 45 (supposedly 6ft 3ins, a trim 239 lbs, in “excellent health”, and, yes, the hair is his and real), angry ambassadors from every country that Pa Ubu has insulted, a strange use of the English language that sounds like it is supposed to be English (ie, words for ‘shit’ are prolonged like ‘pshitte’), covfefe, and a double-triple-quadruple-octahedral cheeseburger with special sauce.

Among the companies that participated were the Vineyard Theatre (a creative home for Vogel) and the New Ohio Theatre in New York; the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis (which Vogel attended), Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago and Crowded Fire Theatre Company and Antaeus Theatre in California. I even got into the act, hosting a small group under the auspices of my day job at the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

This decentralised, far-flung realisation of Vogel’s idea means that no one person saw, or even read, all of the one-act plays that emerged. Almost like carefully organised insurgent cells, each location, each playwright, was part of a larger whole, carrying out their own missions, not knowing what else might be happening for the benefit of the cause elsewhere. Yet, at the same time, we were secure in the knowledge that other partisans were fighting the good fight in the same manner at the same time.

In my little troupe, we read nine plays over two hours, with playwrights and actors joining to give voice to the texts brought into the room, none adjudicated in any way. The Playwrights’ Center deployed eight actors to read all of the plays – in this instance, an astounding 41 plays by 44 playwrights in an event that lasted more than five hours. No doubt the solutions were as varied as the locales.

Based on the circle at my office, and the plays read, the Bake Off inspired instant camaraderie (I had previously met only one of the participants). It was great fun, in the name of expressing frustrations with our present leadership, while concurrently paying homage to a literary classic. The low-pressure, everyone-is-welcome spirit also stripped away any sense of theatrical hierarchy or critical judgement. It even freed me to try my hand at playwriting for the first time in about 40 years.

But perhaps most importantly, Vogel’s inspiration and recipe yielded a great deal of work in a very short time, demonstrating that her educational tool offers a significant opportunity for involving many voices on the same subject.

Without the demands of rehearsal, staging, ticket sales and fundraising, Vogel’s Ubu Bake Off stripped theatre to its most rudimentary essentials, yielding experiences that were, if my own metaphorical kitchen was at all representative, unifying and cathartic. It certainly provides a model for rapid-response theatre applicable to almost any topic. I suspect we have more national Bake Offs in our future.

Priscilla Lopez in Pippin (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The recent laws passed by the states of North Carolina and Mississippi, which condone discrimination against LGBTQ citizens under the guise of religious freedom are, so far as I’m concerned, a national shame. That other states have attempted or will soon attempt to pass similar legislation is frightening. I can only hope that these decisions will be swiftly challenged, taken to the supreme court, and repealed as unconstitutional.

Composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, known internationally for his work on, to name but three, Godspell, Wicked and Pippin, shares this opinion. He has used his platform as one of musical theatre’s most successful living artists to express his dismay: in the wake of the North Carolina decision, which came first, Schwartz announced that he would not permit the licensing or production of any of his works in that state so long as this law remains in place. Decrying the passage of HB2, as it is known, he compared his action to the boycotts undertaken against South Africa over apartheid.

While I saw numerous artists praising Schwartz online through social media, I also saw the response from theatres in North Carolina, who were concerned that a cultural boycott of their state might have minimal effect on their elected leaders, while denying works to a community that is predisposed to oppose the law. Angie Hays, the head of the North Carolina Theatre Conference, issued a statement in which she said her organisation has been in contact with “artists and producers from across the country who are asking how they can most effectively play a part in lifting up the NC theatre community so that we may continue to produce work that will open hearts and change minds.” In a letter to The Hollywood Reporter, Schwartz, in his second statement, said that his decision wasn’t singular, citing “a collective action by a great many theatre artists.”

As I write, based on news reports and my own conversations with the heads of several theatrical licensing houses, only one author (Tom Frye) beyond Schwartz’s own collaborators has joined him in placing a moratorium on his work in North Carolina. Ralph Sevush, executive director for business affairs at the Dramatists Guild, which represents the majority of playwrights and composers in the US, said in a statement that the guild itself “cannot call for or support boycotts, as a matter of law. However, even though the guild represents writers with divergent views, the guild is unified in supporting Stephen’s right to exercise control over the licensing of his work in whatever manner he deems appropriate.”

There is, I have no doubt, a great deal of conversation about how to respond to these loathsome laws at theatres, at dance companies, at orchestras and so on, and a prevailing unanimity in despising these decisions. But as is so often the case in the early days of a crisis, there is no consensus about how to combat it, either within North Carolina and Mississippi, or nationwide. If more and more works are denied, will theatres in North Carolina, and presumably in Mississippi, reach a point at which their creative decisions are truly constrained? Does stage work in these states rise to a level that will become meaningful to legislators, or will it stand in the shadow of major commercial interests, who have the scale and the economic power to sway policy?

Like Sevush from the Dramatists Guild, I absolutely support Schwartz’s right to make decisions regarding his own works. At the same time, I worry about the health of theatres in these states under these new regulations, at a time when they can be centres of opposition to HB2, by doing what theatre does so well, which is to teach empathy. In addition, even if they won’t be doing so on stages in these battleground states, I like to think that Charlemagne’s son, who renounced war and sin, that the Jesus who once wore Superman’s logo on his chest, and that the misunderstood green girl from Oz are on the ground there nonetheless, fighting the essential fight against bias and hate. Because we need every voice, real and fictional, to speak out and sing out as well.