New Online Initiatives Deepen Audience’s Involvement With Silk Road Rising

Silk Road Rising, a theater company showcasing playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean backgrounds, has moved its creative process online to engage audiences in play development and to present its first ever online play.

The ten-step online development process, a new initiative from the Joyce grantee, will guide Silk Road’s Founding Artistic Director Jamil Khoury as he writes Mosque Alert., a play inspired by resistance to the building of mosques throughout the country. The online development process complements the more traditional play workshop and reading process.

“The traditional new-play development process of workshops and public staged readings, while absolutely essential and without question very useful, needs to open itself up to a parallel track,” Khoury wrote in a newsletter announcing the launch. This parallel track, he added, will be “a virtual process that creates greater access and opportunities for artists and connects greater numbers of people to both the artist and the artistic process.” Learn more and become a part of the process here.

As the interactive development process takes shape, Khoury’s new play both/and is premiering online. The theater company's first online play is another platform used to create a virtual stage and present viewers with a 12-minute play that explores seemingly conflicted relationships between different cultural groups. Watch it here.

Khoury discusses his motivation to write Mosque Alert.