Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Next weekend, local writers and actors will bring an often overlooked issue to center stage with the production of In Plain Sight, a play about homelessness and housing insecurity.
The show, which is scheduled to play at the Tarlton Theatre Sept. 13-15, got its start two years ago as a project between Noah Simon and Cujo Mojock.
“We met many times to kind of figure out what we wanted to address…” Cujo said. “We talked about various avenues we could go down and then settled on this idea of theater for the people, highlighting people in our community that are, for lack of a better word, kind of invisible… We settled on housing insecurity, as this kind of invisible group that we maybe sometimes see but don’t always acknowledge.”
With the focus of the show determined, Cujo and Simon applied for and were selected to receive a grant from the Green Bay Public Arts Commission.
That grant, along with additional donations, gave Cujo and Simon what they needed to go ahead with their show, enlisting additional writers to carry out interviews in an effort to gather as many perspectives on the issue as possible.
“We interviewed people at the police department, we interviewed people who have experienced homelessness in general and specifically one person who lived in a city park here in Green Bay that we have loosely based the story around,” Cujo said. “We interviewed people at the Micah Center, St. John’s Ministries and Newcap… We interviewed Mayor Eric Genrich, who talked a lot about the city’s commitment to not just building more housing, but stipulating with the contracts that are being made with these companies that a certain percentage of housing needs to be labeled as affordable.”
With so many perspectives taken into account, Cujo said he hopes that all who come to see the show find something to connect with and expand their understanding of the issue.
“With the approach that we took by kind of zooming out and examining a lot of different perspectives, we’re hoping to capture pieces of everybody’s existence, feelings and perceptions about this issue,” he said. “We’re hoping we can make people feel like they are not alone in their feelings about it, whether they’re upset about it or angry at our city for not taking care of this problem more swiftly, whether they’re sympathetic to people who are experiencing economic hardship and all this stuff. And we’re hoping to not just have one opinion represented on stage, but such a diversity of perceptions represented on the stage that [the audience] can’t help but get a better scope of what the problem is, who is impacted by it and what’s being done in the community.”
“I would say the show is for anybody who thinks that they know something about the issue,” Cujo said. “Because in our experience doing these interviews and research for the play, what we thought we knew was so limited and small compared to what we discovered.”
There is no set fee to attend the show — attendees are encouraged to pay what they can, with a suggested donation of $20 with all proceeds going back into the community.
“We’re not taking proceeds from this show,” he said. “We got the grant funding crowdfunding money to pay all the actors and writers, so all proceeds from all three shows — Friday, Saturday and Sunday — we’ll donate to local resources. We’re currently set up to donate to the Micah Center, however depending on the amount that comes in we may expand that so it includes other organizations as well.”
Learn more about In Plain Sight at thetarltontheater.com.
