Advent Zoom Theatre Retreat: “The Humans” by Stephen Karam

We’ll explore the spiritual dimensions of theatre by creating a Zoom community through the process of taking risks, exploring language and bringing a play to life.

Each night we’ll do a workshop reading of one-third of Karam’s play “The Humans.”

• We’ll begin with prayer and quick warmups.
• We’ll read through the act (no memorization needed).
• After reading through the play together, we’ll hold a short period of silent meditation and/or private journaling, reflecting on how those themes speak to us in our own lives or questions.
• There will be a period of discussion to share our impressions of and questions about the characters, language and themes of the play.
• Closing meditation

Renée Darline Roden is a graduate of Notre Dame twice over. She has an undergraduate Bachelor of the Arts in theatre and theology (with a minor in Catholic Social Thought) and a graduate degree in theology. She has taught theatre for nearly two decades, to preschool thespians, high school students, college students and seminarians. She has directed productions at the University of Notre Dame, and off-off-off-off Broadway in New York City. She is a playwright whose work has appeared at staged readings and festivals in Milwaukee (“Pedro & Galileo”), New York City (“The Last Hurricane”; “Genna the Goldfish Solves it All”), Chicago (“Cali-for-No-One”) at the Catholic Imagination Conference (“Is the Internet in Color?”) and has been produced in New York City (“SHE”).

Renée is a Catholic Worker (meaning she has a personal commitment to voluntary poverty and lives alongside and for her friends and neighbors who are among America’s 600,000 homeless) and a journalist (which makes the voluntary poverty part very easy) who writes frequently for catholicworker.org and its newsletter, Roundtable. She is an alumna of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Renée got ruined by the Jesuits while teaching at Cristo Rey New York High School in East Harlem after her 2014 graduation from Notre Dame and is forever grateful for that. She finds constant inspiration in the mantra of Fr. Joseph Parkes, SJ, the first Jesuit who gave her a job: “Courage.”