The line between art and activism has always been blurred, but it was never more so than at Sunday night’s Playwrights Against Hunger gala to benefit City Harvest. The Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, a not-for-profit arts festival that supports eco-friendly and socially conscious art, hosted an evening of four one-act plays featuring the theme of hunger and food security. All the proceeds from ticket sales, a cash bar, and raffles went directly to City Harvest. For nearly 30 years, City Harvest has been rescuing food from restaurants, grocery stores, and farms that would have been thrown away, and redistributing it to the more than two million people facing hunger in New York City.
The evening began with SNAP*, a multimedia satire by Winter Miller. This mockumentary follows a well-off family who try living for one week on $5.25 a day, the amount most people receiving SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps) must survive on. The live action of the four-member family sitting around their dining table is interspersed with fake video diaries of each family member, each slowly unraveling as they suffer malnutrition.
Community Service by Wendy MacLeod is another tongue-in-cheek one-act involving three characters: a college admissions officer bemoaning the obligatory community service trip to Guatemala that every privileged white teenager takes to make themselves look good on their college application; a WASPy dad talking about how hard it is to get his daughter into a good college with all the competition from the other privileged white teenagers who all take the community service trip to Guatemala; and an actual privileged white teenager who recounts her interaction with a homeless person at a public library, and her subsequent commitment to a local soup kitchen.
Erik Ehn & The Tenderloin Opera Company presented a more dramatic and allegorical piece, Frail/Ingilin. In it, a narrator paints a scene at a soup kitchen, where two disheveled women express their sorrow and frustration over their bad fortune. It is a dark commentary on the suffering of so many hungry and homeless people living in New York City.
The program concluded with the Israel Horovitz play, St. Anne’s Soup, in which a soup kitchen volunteer closing up for the night has a disarming and very educational encounter with an educated, white, homeless woman who used to live on the same street in Manhattan as the volunteer. This play flips our prejudices about what homelessness looks like, then twists it around again.
In a post-show talkback, Casey Cole from City Harvest was joined by each playwright and Jolly Abraham, who played Ingilin in Frail/Ingilin, to talk about what inspired them in the construction of their pieces. All expressed a desire to raise awareness to the issue of food insecurity that plagues New York City. The message was that every little bit helps, from volunteering at a soup kitchen to giving a few dollars to organizations like City Harvest. But it was the idea of simply treating people like humans, regardless of the way they live, that really resonated.
