A bottle of hand sanitizer, an empty store, a stadium or theater, a virtual dance, a moment of mass panic, and a light in the dark. These were the “ingredients” required to be incorporated into the plays submitted to the first-ever “Quarantine Playwriting Bake-Off,” created by students from the University of Minnesota and NYU Tisch. One of the 11 contest winners was Jivani Rodriguez, a third year theater arts major at the University of Iowa.

In response to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the shutting down of in-person classes, three theater students from the University of Minnesota and one student from New York University Tisch asked playwrights to submit their plays. The group then chose ten plays to be read on their Quarantine Bake-Off YouTube channel.

Gus Mahoney, a third year acting student from the University of Minnesota was one of the creators of the Quarantine Bake-off. In response to COVID-19 and the shutting down of his university, he and three of his friends decided to have a playwriting “bake-off” inspired by previous bake-offs created by playwright Paula Vogel. The Quarantine Bake-off was only supposed to be between his friends at first, but then they decided to open it up world-wide.

“It was lowkey at first, we were at most expecting 50 to 100 people,” Mahoney said. “We actually ended up with 2,300 submissions.”

According to Mahoney, the submissions were read by a panel of 120 college students, artistic directors, educators, and actors from across the country. Then the 2,300 submissions were narrowed down until only 11 remained. Rodriguez’s play shadows on the wall was one of the selected pieces.

Related: UI Theatre Department introduces new performance series, Diverse Voices

Rodriguez and other interested playwrights had 32 hours to write and include the five “ingredients” in her play. After several attempts at starting one — including a discarded idea about monkeys — Rodriguez found inspiration in a play that she’d recently read. According to Rodriguez, Naomi Wallace’s The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek and its themes of isolation and being trapped, as well as the use of shadow puppets, helped inspire her. With a timeline and ingredients to give direction, she said her play, shadows on the wall eventually wrote itself.

“I wanted to explore this feeling of being trapped, but add some hope,” Rodriguez said. “There’s freedom waiting for us.”

She further explored the idea of isolation through the use of animals created by shadow puppets, which served as the only connection her characters had to the outside world. In shadows on the wall the main character, Robin, is trapped in a small room where they create shadow puppets; over the course of the play, they slowly start to befriend the voice that speaks to them over the intercom.

Rodriguez found out that her piece was selected at midnight the day before March 22, when the live reading was to take place. She said the experience of the Quarantine Bake-Off and having her play read online has been different than what she’s used to. Unlike productions of Rodriguez’s plays that have taken place at the UI Theatre Department, having her play read online was something special, exciting even, she said.

“It adds like this whole new layer of excitement, because it’s like I’m part of history that’s happening right now. I’m somehow connected to the world,” she said.

The success of the Quarantine Bake-off has also had a big impact on Mahoney.

“I felt a great sense of love, a great sense of humanity, and a great sense that we are all one big community,” Mahoney said. “I want people to keep writing, to keep art alive. I’m asking people to join our big art community because our next bake-off is coming up soon.”