YouTube is streaming its first live play, a star-filled reading of a new work 8, Saturday evening. The subject: the 2010 trial of Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that took away the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.
The California Supreme Court forbid cameras from the courtroom during the trial for Perry v. Schwarzenegger (now Perry v. Brown). The play hopes to give people a look behind the trial’s closed doors.
8 will be streamed live on the American Foundation for Equal Rights’ (AFER) YouTube channel. The reading will take place at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles at 7:45 p.m. PT (there’s a pre-show starting at 7:30 p.m.). You can sign up to watch on AFER’s website.
In a rare expression of a political opinion, Google (Yahoo’s parent company) publicly voiced its opposition to Prop. 8 in a 2008 blog post written by Sergey Brin.
“While there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.”
Academy Award winner Dustin Lance Black (Milk), who wrote the play, centers the action around the historic closing argument in a U.S. District Court. The one-time reading features George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Martin Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Jane Lynch, Matthew Morrison, Jamie Lee Curtis, among others
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“You see, we had a problem,” director Rob Reiner jokes in the event’s announcement video (below). “We couldn’t find any famous people to be in the play.”
It’s particularly interesting that Clooney, a long-time social media and technology evader (he’s not on Twitter or Facebook), will be a part of this YouTube first. He plays the plaintiff’s attorney David Boies, who argued to overturn Prop. 8.
How important do you think it is for the public to know what went on in the California courtroom? Do you think this live streaming will advance AFER and Google’s case against Prop. 8? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Source: Mashable
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