Pug Bujeaud’s new virtual play will go on even though she has coronavirus
So dedicated to theater is Olympia’s Pug Bujeaud that even having coronavirus didn’t stop her from directing and producing her first original play, “The Culling,” which will be livestreaming Friday and Saturday evenings.
The veteran director tested positive for the virus on June 30, but despite such symptoms as headache, sore throat, nausea, exhaustion and difficulty concentrating, she’s going on with the show.
“The Culling” involves a group of actors who, tired of staying at home, decide to get together on Zoom to read an obscure play said to have been written by a serial killer. As you might expect, things go very wrong — but other than the fantasy-horror elements, the show reflects life in 2020.
“It’s very much a show of the now,” Bujeaud told The Olympian. “It’s set on May 30, so we’ve been in quarantine for two months. It was five days after George Floyd had been murdered, and the protests were going on.
“It’s a political snapshot on top of being a horror movie.”
The show also comes directly out of Bujeaud’s years in the Olympia theater scene, with characters both based on and played by actor friends such as Heather and Michael Christopher, Ryan Holmberg and John Serembe.
The cast members aren’t necessarily playing themselves, Bujeaud said, “but the characters all started as us, one way or the other. It’s been really fun.”
The show had been written and cast before Bujeaud got sick, but she’s continued work on it — making graphics, writing marketing materials and even resuming rehearsals (all virtual, of course) while in quarantine.
“It’s one of the few things that’s keeping me going,” she said.
The details behind her diagnosis might be more frightening than the premise of her show.
She and her family have been staying home since March, except for infrequent trips to buy groceries, and she’s been wearing a mask since before the governor’s stay-at-home order.
“I was in a store where 50 percent of the people weren’t masked, and I was so uncomfortable that I left the store, and I got sick a few days later,” she said.
And since getting the diagnosis, she hasn’t heard from a contact tracer or anyone with the Department of Health. She tried calling several times but couldn’t get through.
Between getting lots of sleep, doing breathing exercises and working on the show, Bujeaud wrote daily public Facebook posts on her condition for the first two weeks after the diagnosis.
“There are many faces to this COVID thing,” she wrote on July 1. “I went to the doctor because I was feeling achy and stuffy headed, had a scratchy throat and some tummy cramps. I never had a fever. Not at all. … Do not expect fever to be the litmus test for this thing.”
After diagnosis, she had intermittent low fevers, but her temperature never stayed up for long, and her other symptoms also got better, worse and better again, changing day to day.
Possibly the worst part, she wrote on July 6, is not knowing what might happen. “I don’t have any clue how this is going to go … and that’s terrifying. Every chill, every pain, every time you cough, every setback is amplified,” she said.
She wrote the posts and made them public in the hopes that people would take the disease more seriously.
“I keep hearing all these people complaining about masks,” she said. “I’m a middle-sized fish in a small pond, but enough people know me that maybe having a face of somebody who’s got this thing might mean something to somebody and get them to put a mask on.”
She ended each post this way: “Take care. Hug the ones you can. Know that I love you. Wear your f-ing masks.”