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Theatre folks mourn closed shows and unseen work due to the coronavirus pandemic, and worry over the impact on emerging artists. This piece first ran in American Theatre on March 22.
It was day three of technical rehearsals for Wolf Play at Soho Rep. and the creative team prepared to make a first pass at the play’s climactic boxing match.
Onstage,
microphones rained down from the ceiling as Jin Ha juggled radio announcing,
puppeteering, and playing a wolf while Esco Jouléy executed carefully
choreographed boxing moves inside a ring. In the house, the design team worked
at tables littered with coffee cups, cables, and spike tape as a friend of the
team watched from nearby.
Then, the
word came: in five minutes, the theater’s leadership team was coming in to
suspend production.
So for five
more minutes, the team teched the scene for their audience of one.
“It felt like
Titanic: it’s like, ‘Keep playing!’” director Dustin Wills said. “But we
were really looking forward to this moment in tech and at least we were going
to see what it looks like, damn it.”
Playwright
Hansol Jung agreed. “It was gorgeous.”
Jung began
writing Wolf Play in 2014. Coming to Soho Rep. for a New York premiere
was ideal: “This is my favorite theater
in the world and they’re doing this play. I thought it would never happen.
That’s what I was always saying. And now it looks like it will maybe not
happen.”
Across an
industry with tight finances in the best of times, artists are being rocked by
the nationwide shuttering of theaters. As companies cancel productions that
were months to years in the making in the name of social distancing and
self-quarantining, people whose work depends on bringing people together remain
in a particularly precarious position.
The whiplash of the moment is striking. At the beginning of last week, Jessica Blank met family members of the victims of the Upper Big Branch mining disaster in West Virginia who traveled to the Public Theater to see their stories on stage in Coal Country. By the end of the week, the show she directed and co-wrote had closed.
“You don’t
know where the next step of the process is going to come from, especially in
times like these,” Blank said. “I think that’s always true. We think we can
predict it normally and then something like this forces us into admitting that
we don’t actually know what’s going to happen next.”
While most, including Blank and Jung, expressed hope for another life for their shows, deep uncertainty abounds about the future. Which theaters will survive if this crisis continues for three months? Six? More? In the meantime, what does theater look like when people can’t occupy the same spaces as one another? Who will be able to pay their bills? And might those bills include unforeseen medical expenses?
Many were
bleak. “Unless there are some major interventions, I don’t know how any of the
tiny theaters are coming back,” said Daniel Goldstein, the bookwriter for Unknown
Soldier, a musical that ran at Playwrights Horizons before closing last
week. “Right now I’m just trying to put one foot ahead of the other and figure
out finances, figure out family, figure out schooling my kids, figure out
feeding everybody, figure out how to have two kids at home and both parents
with jobs to do. All of these things are full-time jobs.”
Brittany K.
Allen, whose show Redwood at Ensemble Studio Theatre was postponed from
a planned April opening, shared Goldstein’s concerns. “Most of these
non-profits don’t have any cash reserve, so there’s a death knell hanging over
a lot of these institutions, I think. A really long shuttering could ripple
through Off-Broadway in a way people aren’t able to process or think about
right now.”
Still, Allen
described herself as humbled, but cautiously optimistic in this moment. “I’ve
seen a lot of good leadership from artists this week and watched people really
come out for each other,” she said. “It’s reminded me of the best things about
this community.”
To playwright
Celine Song, the need to close theaters right now was clear: “The sites of mass
infection have been churches or synagogues,” she said. “And it makes a lot of
sense to me. Theater is a kind of church.”
But it was still deeply painful to see her play Endlings, which ran at New York Theatre Workshop, close prematurely—particularly on behalf of her actors.
“Every single
one of them was doing incredible work and I think that’s what the saddest part
is. It’s really not ‘Celine Song doesn’t get to do her play.’ The thing that I
think is so sad is just how good their work has been. They should’ve been able
to be seen by 200 people every night.”
Her director
Sammi Cannold worried about the long-term ramifications for directors just
beginning to work in the city.
“If this had
happened five years ago for me, it would have been devastating for my career.”
Cannold
envisioned a world where assistant and associate directors—important sources of
support for established directors— see what little funding there was for their
work before the coronavirus outbreak dry up. As a result, directing as a career
could become even more inaccessible to those who cannot afford to work for
free.
“I have a
career as a director because I was given opportunities as an assistant and an
associate and had the opportunity to sit in rooms of directors I admired and
watch them direct. For privileged young people, they can offer to be in those
rooms for free, but that does not apply to everybody—by no means.”
For Charly
Evon Simpson, the Pipeline Festival at the WP Theater would have been an
opportunity to workshop her play Sandblasted on its feet for the first
time. After writing the play Behind the Sheet about the history of
gynecology, she grew interested in the dismal mortality rates for Black mothers
in America. Drawing on Samuel Beckett “and a lot of sand,” she hoped in Sandblasted
to make visible the physical toll of the stress Black women face in
America.
Before the
workshop’s cancellation, she was still searching for an ending to her play.
“I really was
trying to figure out how to end a play about a thing that still hasn’t ended
without the play forcing us to leave with a sense of hopelessness. I wanted to
end on a helpful note and a joyful note and a loving note. And I knew that that
was going to be something that I wanted to be in a room looking at with all of
these people together,” Simpson said.
For the immediate future, that search for an ending—like most of our lives and work for an indeterminate number of weeks— will happen instead at home. “It was going to be an exciting but scary share. Now it’s just exciting and scary for me on my computer.”
On the occasion of the publication of their new books, Extended Play advisory board members Aaron Landsman and Jan Cohen-Cruz talked together about one of the themes in their work, the “civic turn” in theater.
With the new year, Extended Play is excited to share its new article series, Curated, which will feature recommendations from The Civilians staff for performances, talks, books, articles, and more.
For this installment of our 20/20 Series, our Associate Artists share their experiences working with The Civilians and creating a community of artists and friends.
Reflecting on 2021, we highlight Extended Play's ten most popular articles of 2021 and the theater and theatermakers who captured our interest. Read through the list to catch up on any you missed and revisit some favorites.
R&D Group member Julia Izumi outlines the timeline of the Great Chicago Fire ahead of her new play, A RE-ENACTMENT OF THE IMAGINED TRIAL OF DAISY THE COW 🐄, WHO ALLEGEDLY CAUSED THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE, presented in the Findings Series on June 14th.