2017-18 Season Artist Feature

A BRIEF ENCOUNTER WITH MILO CRAMER + MORGAN GREEN

The day after returning from working on a downtown-minded production of The Music Man at Connecticut's Sharon Playhouse, Morgan Green and Milo Cramer huddled in the corner of an East Village coffee shop for a phone chat. With a single pair of earbuds split between them, they told us a bit about Cute Activist, and their work as collaborative artists:

Morgan: We went to college together and I always thought Milo was so talented and amazing and weird. I would beg him to do a theater project with me.

Milo: We used to live together — we were roommates for a year.

Morgan: One time, <REDACTED>

Milo: That can’t go in the blurb! So the play, Cute Activist. I started writing maybe three years ago. At the time, I was on OkCupid. Sometimes I'd be on a date and I would talk about wanting to be an activist. And sometimes that would turn the other person on. But it was all bullshit. I would just sit at my computer and read articles.

Morgan: The main character, Jen, is a young architect — an aspiring professional. She's very attracted to the idea of activism but she doesn’t know quite how to do it. And that's sort of the ridiculous conundrum of the play.

Milo: There's a shadowy ring of activists in the town. Everyone's trying to figure out who they are, where they are, if they exist, what they do...

Morgan: I think by fancifully using the term "activist" as a dirty word in the play, it pushes us to think about what it means to be an activist, actually, and think about what kinds of activism are effective.

Milo: It takes place in a topsy-turvy suburban landscape that's very sprawling and kind of haunted.

Morgan: Milo's made a lot of changes to the script since we started working on it, and he'll continue to develop it in rehearsals. That's one of the best parts about working with Milo, that it's such a collaborative process. He will be with me in design meetings, and I've made direct contributions to the script.

Milo: There are puppets. There are songs. There's a lot of theater in the play.

Morgan: Milo and I really like theater that celebrates the fact that it's live. So we try to fill it with spectacle, and make really live-feeling events that are entertaining and playful. That's part of the goal of our work.

PLAYING AT THE STARR JANUARY 9 - FEBRUARY 3, 2018
VIEW DETAILS HERE