Greetings from The 52nd Street Project, and from 789 10th Avenue, our new home. Yes, we’ve been here for a year, but the novelty of our surroundings continues to amaze me. It’s as if we’ve not only seen Paree; now we actually live there.
The shock (and awe….some..ness) of the new is amplified by the growth of our afterschool and arts programming. The kids of The 52nd Street Project are now not only playwrights and actors; they are also photographers and gardeners and cooks and poets and dancers and choreographers and filmmakers and employees. All of this new work has, of course, led to lots of new work, an explosion of content, which is being performed in our very own Five Angels Theater and displayed in the lobby and eaten in the Clubhouse and published in Fivey, our literary magazine and grown on our outdoor terrace. All of this gives us more reasons and more ways to come together, more to make and more to enjoy. But are we satisfied?
No. The newest newness at the Project is on your screen right now, a revamped website that matches and enhances all the changes the Project has been through in the past year. It is designed to grow with us and to provide us with the opportunity to establish an online community with a liveliness and cohesiveness that complements and enriches the stuff that happens when we’re in the same room with each other.
Participation in this online community does not include eating a breakfast of eggs-in-the hole and bacon (please keep reading, don’t despair) or applauding a ten-year-old playwright taking a bow or playing a noisy game of ping-pong. But it will include kids’ photos and poems and short films, as a repository for content that we generate. It will include information on what’s going on and what’s coming up (and what has already happened, via a complete production history). It will include stuff we haven’t even thought of including yet.
And it will include a blog. This blog, which I am starting. Me, a technophobe. Me, who is still somewhat afraid of automobiles (you can imagine how clueless I am when it comes to computers). But our founder, the “father of our country”, Willie Reale, had no idea what he was getting himself into when he started the Project thirty years ago, so I’m not gonna sweat starting a blog when I’m not really sure what a blog is, or can be. I’m guessing maybe we’ll share recipes, and this being a Project project, goodwill.
I’ll close with an amusing anecdote. A kid I was directing once told one of his pals, “I hate working with Gus. You’re never done.” So begins the Project blog. May it never be done.
Gus Rogerson
Artistic Director
The 52nd Street Project