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The pizza guy always showing up at the wrong house may seem like a simple small-town problem, but like most things in Hawk’s Landing, it masks something deeper. A motley cast of seemingly average people assemble to scheme, trick, blackmail, and connive their way in and out of trouble. Who is lying and who is telling the truth? Is anyone who they seem to be?

The everyday life of a not-so-ordinary town reveals the answers--and raises even more questions.

a river town where passions run deep

About

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About Hawk's Landing

The Lab is known for making innovative community-devised theater, but in March of 2020, as New York state began quickly shutting down to brace for the growing coronavirus pandemic, we found ourselves asking a question we had never anticipated needing to ask: how can we devise and produce a show completely remotely?

As we moved our programming online, we were faced with the exciting challenge of creating the theater we are known for, but in a completely new way. We came up with Play to Play - a remote devising game in which anybody could participate - as a way to continue to work collaboratively despite being isolated from each other. The game consisted of creative prompts, encouraging players to write, photograph, craft, and occasionally take short videos to submit for points.

This process produced over 250 pieces of content, generated by 72 participants.

The game, of course, was only the first step in our devising process. At the close of the game, participants - regardless of theatre or writing experience - were then invited to join the team as we used the responses to inspire a production. With a cast of 14 humans and 1 cat, we quickly got to work on remotely building a show without any real idea of what the end product might look like.

The result; a soap opera shot entirely in quarantine, called "Hawk's Landing."

Hawk's Landing was shot entirely remotely by recording actors during Zoom meetings (with the occasional independently-shot cellphone camera footage). Writers teamed up to write scenes collaboratively via Google Drive, inspired by both the Play to Play game submissions and in-rehearsal contributions by actors.

Hawk's Landing is the result of a community of artists and writers coming together to provide one another with a creative escape during a time of great uncertainty.

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