In a normal year, David Winitsky spends most of the spring on the road.
Winitsky is the founder of the Jewish Plays Project, a theater incubator whose annual playwriting contest begins in March with a series of live readings staged at Jewish community centers across America. Usually, Winitsky travels to each location, rehearses a cast of actors, and hosts an event during which audience members view excerpts from several plays and vote for their favorites.
Even as the American coronavirus caseload climbed in early March, Winitsky held out hope that he could proceed as planned: It was hard to imagine the competition without in-person gatherings. One night, Winitsky called a colleague to confirm that the contest’s first reading was still on. The next day, news broke that major cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall were closing their doors in an effort to slow the disease’s spread.