Singer-songwriter Krista Detor brings nine Nyu theatre-makers to Bloomington and turns her farm into an artist’s colony

By Kellen Sillanpaa

Krista Detor isn’t completely sure whose idea it was.

She knows that she was there, the matriarch of her 40-acre homestead in rural Bloomington, The Hundredth Hill, complete with three guesthouses, and a barn performance space, and a dirt-covered pig named Ghede. She knows that her old college roommate was there—you know, the one who used to have a purple rattail, but who was now an employer of 100 people in a suburb of San Francisco with an eye for the things Krista hates the most—namely, spreadsheets, budgets, and numbers. She knows that her goddaughter was there—fresh from her NYU graduation on YouTube, a product of the prestigious Tisch School of Drama, now quarantined, and unemployed, and broke, no chance to direct the hard-driving, brain-exploding plays the New York theatre scene will one day know her for.

Krista does know that the wine was flowing. She knows that the chocolate was out. She knows that the dogs were pacing the kitchen, and that her husband was off punching new windows through some unknown room in her house, and that the sun had gone down and the moon had come up, and that at some point—somewhere in between that first and second bottle of wine—the idea had appeared, had manifested itself, had wandered out of the forest and sat itself down at Krista’s kitchen table.

The idea was small, but powerful in its simplicity. What if Kyndall, the goddaughter, picked eight of her friends from NYU—all similarly quarantined, and unemployed, and broke—and brought them to Indiana? What if Krista took what she learned at artist residencies in Seattle and Belfast and of course Bloomington, and created a fully-fledged, real deal artist residency at The Hundredth Hill? What if all of them joined forces to create a series of plays, brand new and socially distant and just for the Bloomington community, that had a chance to shatter what we think we know about how to create theatre in the age of Covid? What if everything the three of them had done for the last five years had led them exactly to this moment?

And Jesus, what if it worked? Read more

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