On March 12th, 2020, The Broadway League announced a suspension of all performances in reaction to increased outbreaks of coronavirus throughout New York City. London theatres followed suit on March 16th. Regional theatres across the United States began to shutter on a rolling basis as infection rates rapidly spread, and what was supposed to be a month-long shutdown quickly turned into a year of fear, pain, and struggling to stay afloat.

To mark the one-year anniversary, I sat down with eight theatremakers, ranging from inventive regional and community theatre artists to a Broadway producer, in an attempt to examine just what it means to be an artist when your artform is on pause.

“I felt like I was waiting for someone to give me something to work on or collaborate with them on.”

Bryan Freedman graduated from college in December of 2019. He had quickly fallen into the pattern of waking up at 4:30AM to stand in audition lines, occasionally with guitar in hand. By the beginning of March, he had started to make progress - roles on National Tours and Cruise Ships were beginning to be within his grasp, and he had booked multiple short term gigs in the meantime.

On March 13th, he had three cruise ship callbacks scheduled, all while he was preparing callback material for a Broadway show set to open later that year. No one had told him not to come in after the shutdown announcement, so he had prepared diligently. He was in the middle of reviewing material when the casting agent stuck their head out of the door, and told him to go home.

By the time he made it through his front door, three jobs had disappeared, including an opening night scheduled that weekend. A week later, the fever hit.

In the midst of the confusing chaos, Bryan was laid low with a fever that slowly turned into vertigo. Covid-19 tests were not readily available to the public, and he spent his time bundled up alone in his apartment as he steadily lost the ability to focus his vision.

The loss of taste was by far the most concerning for him, as cooking had been his main mode of expression outside of his art, to the point of being jokingly referred to as his religion. When asked to contact trace himself, his best guess is that he picked up the virus from the dance call for a dual cruise ship production of Mamma Mia and Grease.

Eventually, the worst subsided, and through concentrated effort, he was able to rebuild his palette, even as his body adjusted to a newly exhausted state. As far as records are concerned, Bryan is one of the thousands of Covid-19 cases that can neither be confirmed or denied due to the early testing shortage.

Once the worst had passed, and a quarantine period had elapsed, Bryan went home to Philadelphia, terrified of being trapped alone again should things get worse. He became involved in the Philadelphia Arts scene, where he was able to raise $5000 in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Philadelphia Bail Fund.

He kept searching for digital acting jobs, hunting for ways to stay involved, when music began to call to him. He had made music throughout high school and early college, but the focus given to “the acting grind” had pushed off the practice during his time in college. Suddenly, he had the time and space to return to it.

“I was inspired by the recent rise of singer songwriter folk musicals, and that world, to embrace the indie folk style of music making. Being exposed to a show like Hadestown was a huge blessing for me. What they were able to create was incredible, and it was very cool to see that kind of sound on that stage. It emboldened me to embrace those kinds of sounds as something I should cultivate more.”

While doing these remotely recorded, livestream productions, he taught himself music production and hardware. Slowly, without even being conscious of the shift, he began to put more time into his music than into his acting.

“The past year removed my agency. I was firmly a performer, rather than a creator, and I felt that my ability to create art was intrinsically tied to the underlying theatrical structures and other people creating stuff. I had a come to god moment in late October/early November.”

In the Fall of 2020, a member of his family got sick, and the entire household was rushed into full lockdown, with every member isolating themselves. An EP began to take shape as a way of coping with the grief and trauma he had been carrying for six months.

“It was a way of understanding how life had been ripped away, through the lens of a long-distance relationship. It isn’t that it was destroyed or killed, but that it was separated from me. It does and it can exist, in terms of the life that I loved and currently miss, of creating art and being surrounded by people who love me and that I love. It is one of those things where it could exist, but there is distance between me and it. I can’t control how many miles there are between here and there, I can’t control the circumstances. It is a powerless thing.”

In the end, the project involved 30 of Bryan’s friends, who all came together to create the five-song EP. It was released in early 2021, a release of the claustrophobic stagnation that had been haunting his 2020.

“The thing that is so hard is that the form that I love the most is one of the deadliest things you could do right now.”

2020 was supposed to be Laura Stratford’s year. As the co-founder of Underscore Theatre Company in Chicago, she had been producing new musical theatre for more than ten years when the time had finally come to premiere her own musical, The Boneharp.

After a workshop in January, the production had gotten onto its feet, and the editing process had begun when everything crumbled in the middle attending a friend's wedding.

“I was at a giant Indian wedding in Houston when things started shutting down - I had already cancelled a business meeting in NYC, but hadn’t thought it would go out of the city like the flu. By the time we got to Houston, the world started ending. We made it through the multi-day wedding, and then flew home into the warzone.”

She and the rest of the board of Underscore swiftly pushed all spring productions to the fall, expecting that things would calm down after a few months - eventually, those delays became indefinite. The Boneharp entered the same logistic limbo, and what was supposed to be a year of sprinting through edits and rewrites was suddenly at a standstill.

One project had managed to make it just under the wire. She had written songs based on the soliloquies of Hamlet for a queer true-crime retelling called Arden. They had recorded the majority of the songs in January of 2020, with only one song and the end credits theme being pushed to a later recording date. They were able to cobble together the missing pieces post-shutdown by the skin of their teeth, and the podcast is now on season 2.

Still, the world felt hazy, out of focus, and out of time, with the days blending together. That is, until June, and the Black Lives Matter protests.

“The Black Lives Matter uprisings focused me. The disruption of the always burning the midnight oil is going to have a big effect - that lack of time to pause and reflect and consider if things are working led people to not get what they need, and it caused burnout. Now people can really think about changes in the unintentional and intentional white supremacist infrastructure. I had a lot of hope that this long pause can enable people to go back to the drawing board, to see what is necessary. Learning from mutual aid, instead of hoarding resources.”

Laura enrolled in digital masterclasses that were suddenly available now that they had moved online - opportunities that previously would have only been available to those based in New York, or near one of the elite universities were suddenly accessible to her in Chicago, and to anyone else with an internet connection.

Laura Stratford (Photo: Joe Mazza/HANDOUT)

“I did a three-hour master class with Young Jean Lee over Zoom from her office at Stanford, and more recently have joined her team of readers for projects she is working on. I’ve attended Playwrights Horizons’ Perspectives on Playwriting workshops with Will Arbery, Clare Barron, Michael R. Jackson, and more artists. Getting a look at their approaches to art and feeling plugged in with them has been a lifeline.”

She and one of the showrunners from Arden began work on an episodic musical via Zoom in an attempt to capture the new momentum - using the technology of Zoom as a feature and not a hindrance, each episode was structured around being exactly 40 minutes, the allotted time for a free Zoom call before it is shut off.

With the main character in a never-ending Groundhog Day scenario of repeated Zoom meetings, it formed into a comedic satire of the present. With the announcement of the vaccine rollout, however, the project was paused - “will everyone be burnt out on Zoom theatre once we can go outside again?”

All the while, Laura kept The Bone Harp in her back pocket.

“I had been working on the show constantly for 3 and a half years, and this was my first chance to take a step back. I had burnt myself out and needed to rest before I could rework it the way it needed to be. When the deadline was taken out of the equation, I was able to make a more pared-down and focused version. I made the mystery at the core of the musical feel more earned - I was able to approach like an Agatha Christie fiction writer rather than someone sprinting to meet a deadline. The police abolition and transformative justice themes really informed how I needed to rework The Bone Harp - how do we make justice for ourselves when we know there are no authorities we can turn to. It changed the entire angle of the piece, and gave me a new way into the story.”

The Bone Harp is now aiming for a Fall 2021 debut, exactly a year after its set premiere. Laura is still hesitant to commit to that date.

“I have been in love with musical theatre since I could talk, and the idea that singing together in a space with other people is one of the most dangerous things you can do right now is heartbreaking. I am incredibly grateful that I have been in a position to continue thinking about and working on and benefiting from art - one of the nice things about being a writer is that you can do it alone in your house. But ultimately, none of us got into theatre because we wanted to be alone in our house. We want to be together in a room hearing the voices pour over us. Being alone for so long has only emphasized how incredible and special it is to be able to have that. I will take a lot less for granted when I am able to be back in that room.”

“Theatre in the past has been so white male-driven, and we want to bring in people of color and women who aren’t getting those major platforms. We want to be a platform that is a major springboard for change.”

Samantha Rosenblatt was mere months from graduating with her Masters in Musical Theatre Writing when she received word that their thesis presentations would be online and that the showcase of the musical she had been working on for two years was cancelled.

Called Night Witches, it had followed the lives of the Soviet woman who worked as night bombers during World War II and had been an immense labor of love. She and her partner, Stephen Wagener Bennett, were able to finish the draft in order to do a digital table read, and then the piece was frozen, set aside in hopes that better days would soon come.

There are only so many times a person can “debut”. While there are endless opportunities to reinvent oneself throughout life, there is a very short window at the beginning of a career in which you are considered “brand new”. While being green can of course have its drawbacks, it is still a thrilling thing to experience as you begin to find your footing in your chosen profession. Samantha, and thousands like her, lost that year.

Thanks to the internet, however, not all was lost. Zoomfest; A Theatrical Podcast had been launched by a team of Columbia students in the early days of the shutdown, and Samantha and Elspeth Collard had come together to write a 10 minute musical called Twenty Six Percent, about a person’s phone slowly dying and disconnecting them from the outside world during a never-ending subway ride. With no real short-form musical platform, they had submitted it to the podcast, while endeavoring to create their own platform for mini-musicals as a way to keep busy.

Their platform, The Latest Draft, took off from the moment of release. With an emphasis on inclusion, they set up a season of six full short musicals and a handful of cabaret nights where writers could test out new songs that were unconnected to plots. The first season passed quickly over the span of two and a half months, and when they opened submissions for season two, more than 100 musicals were submitted.

“Being a podcast curator is almost like being the artistic director of a theatre company. You have the power to lift the voices you want to hear.”

Diversity of voices is something that has been important to Samantha for years, and once she had the opportunity to pass the mic, she leapt to action. Season 2 of The Latest Draft is available now, ranging from adaptations of classics like The Yellow Wallpaper, to original Monty Python inspired comedies.

In addition to her work as the founder for The Latest Draft, Samantha also reconnected with Tin Pan Alley 2, a program she had worked with in 2019 that was dedicated to giving a platform to emerging writers from underrepresented communities through bimonthly concerts. As if those two curation jobs were not enough, she began work on a song cycle written by queer folk about queerness and family.

“I just want to be with people, even if that’s through a screen.”

“We have been training ourselves to work on a shoestring budget for so long, and have been making it work, but as we hit one year on in this new environment, it will be important to figure out how to sustain the stress.”

While much of the narrative focus for artists during the pandemic had been coastally focused, regional and community theatres have been decimated by the shutdown. With little to no federal aid, companies that were already scraping by have fallen to the wayside as support has centered on the largest theatres in urban centers.

For Matty Owen, based in Grand Rapids Michigan, that is deeply unfortunate. As a member of multiple regional performance groups, including the Actors Theatre Grand Rapids, she has been doing high-quality work for years, including a star turn as Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the Fall of 2019.

“You can find amazing art in the wildest of places. You don’t have to get it in LA, or New York, or Chicago, there are good artists making art all over.”

Matty is one of many regional theatre workers for whom performing is a passion, but not a sole profession. Although the United States is a constant consumer of art in all forms, much of the respect and financial capital is localized to coastal cities. This lack of funding has a significant impact on who is able to participate in theatre - you have to be comfortable enough with making a pittance in order to participate, and that proves to be a barrier of entry for many marginalized voices who don’t have wealth that they can live off of.

Matty, a transgender woman, works two other jobs in addition to her performance work. That she is able to maintain a performance schedule on top of that is a triumph of organization and careful scheduling. She has been a songwriter for nearly a decade, and presented her own hour-long concert in August of 2020, on top of fundraising work, arranging all of the music for the Vagrancy Acting Ensemble (Michigan Chapter) production of As You Like It, and becoming a member of the Vagrancy’s core ensemble.

This workload, while welcomed, is a stark reminder of how much effort it takes to eek out any kind of living both in regional theatre and during the pandemic. While she can keep up the pace now, there is the worry that the system of small theatres surrounding her will eventually come crashing down.

“I just hope that I am able to continue doing this stuff while also living life as a person in the United States during a pandemic, who also has to make money. I just hope all of us are able to hold space for the theatre in our lives because it would be a huge deficit to lose parts of it to negligence or mishandling of our current affairs.”

Many of the smaller theatres are the ones that have been doing the most innovative work throughout the pandemic - the Vagrancy created Blossoming, a new play series written entirely by women of marginalized experiences, and they have been blending film and theatre in ways many larger theatres have been resisting. Many label the work as avant-garde, but to those involved, they are simply working out of necessity.

“We have to adapt to the situation, because we are all going through so much, and we need to give ourselves a lot of grace. Everyone is frantically comforting each other with the fact that things are supposedly going to change soon in the future. I am holding a skeptics position myself, but I really think that we will be able to create theatre in new ways. One thing we really have to be mindful of is the people who are already dealing with added pressures of intersections of marginalized experiences, they’re already below sea level, which makes theatre very inaccessible. We need to focus on providing support and understanding to make theatre something that is viable for people to have time to do. People are having to choose between performance opportunities and putting food on the table.”

“It became a meditation on how to deal with quarantine.”

Hayley St. James was one of the thousands of creatives who used their art to process the past year. Their piece A Godawful Small Affair, originally conceived as a star vehicle for Lucas Steele, swiftly turned into a way of coping with the pandemic as the shadows began to loom. Through the use of David Bowie as an allegory for the all-knowing, everything was on the table, creating a type of time capsule for the first half of the pandemic, up to the end of May.

Theatre as Therapy is hardly a new concept - artists have used their art as a way of understanding the world and themselves since the beginning, and Hayley is far from the only person to use the technique to process the pandemic. The characters were aspects of themself, and of their life. There wasn’t much they could do beyond sitting in their apartment, getting high, and listening to David Bowie to stave off the loneliness, and slowly but surely writing about those things helped them to lift themselves out of the pandemic blues.

In November, after a successful Zoom reading of the piece shortly after it was released to New Play Exchange, Hayley was inspired to dive back into their characters - this time, as a way of processing the 2020 election, and the trauma attached to the week-long process, and the chaos that had surrounded the end of 2020. This companion, called It’s Confusing These Days, is also available via the New Play Exchange.

When asked if they plan on revisiting these characters for a third time, Hayley demurs.

“It depends, I guess. Am I going to have to work through another national catastrophe in the next year?”

Learn more about Hayley St. James’ works here.

“Theatre can be more than four walls“

The constraints of the pandemic have forced many artists to get creative with their forms of expression - when in-person communication is off the table, new forms have to be invented to fill the void. For Isak Keller, that meant developing an entirely new theatrical platform.

“This past summer I stumbled into Early Access for GPT-3, the world's most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. I used it to write a play, the first GPT-3 play in the world. I think this technology has the potential to change the world as is and that it is the first super-advanced example of how the creative process is going to shift as this tech in conjunction with VR continues to improve.”

GPT-3 is functionally a deep learning algorithm. A user can input large swathes of text, which the program processes and synthesizes into a style - essentially, learning how to replicate the style of the text by studying the text. It can identify patterns and analogies, generate articles and descriptions, and even recommend other texts similar to the base text, once its library has been built up. Unlike previous programs of this style, it does not require extensive coding and technical knowledge - it is designed to be user-friendly and speaks the same language as its users (that is, you do not have to communicate with it through binary code).

On a whim, Isak inputted several complete scripts written by playwright Jeremy O. Harris, to see what the platform would come up with in response. What it returned was a completely new play in Harris’ style, down to the style of production notes.

The more content uploaded, the better the fake became - if one were to upload every play, sonnet, and long-form poem by William Shakespeare (more than 188 pieces of text), it would only take a matter of moments to produce a “new Shakespeare piece” that suited his style and syntax, 400 years after his death.

Inspired by the platform, Isak gathered 17 artists to create the first theatre festival on the platform - indeed, it is the first time AI has been used to stage a theatre festival on any platform. The festival will be happening this summer, with pieces of Isak’s original piece being performed at a VR festival this weekend. This technology, while feared by some as a way of replacing writers, has the potential to be a great tool for artists seeking to create art in nontraditional ways - while it will never replace the magic of a person putting a pen to paper with an idea, it adds a fascinating color to what exactly it means to create ‘digital theatre’.

“Can theatre be more cinematic, and what does that mean?”

Ellie Handel was in the middle of assisting a physical acting production when the shutdown took place. Working alongside Orlando Pabotoy, one of the premiere craftsmen of grounded instinctual theatre, she helped to pivot the production, called The Clouds, in the Spring, where the pair figured out how to make digital theatre while her peers were struggling to process what had happened.

Before the pandemic, Ellie considered herself to be an actor/stage manager, but beginning with The Clouds, that identification began to change to director/stage manager/actor. She had to learn an entirely new skill set in the middle of executing something that had never been done before - virtual production, digital theatre, and zoom play reading can all mean very different things, but at the beginning of the shutdown, they were being thrown around interchangeably.

Ellie had to create the vocabulary for herself and her collaborators - with one foot in the world of theatre, she had to turn to the world of film to understand how to communicate across the digital divide. Instead of blocking and staging scenes, she was sketching out storyboards and shot lists.

“You start to realize the difference between Theatre and Film. Both professions and circles are very scrappy, but theatre people have a very set way of working, and film people can be a little more lenient, even though they often don’t have any idea of how theatre is traditionally made. When you’re in that managerial or directorial level, you have to be that person bridging the two worlds.”

After being told to fear the film world's influence on theatre, the door was suddenly open to communicate between the two artforms. Ellie is hopeful that the efforts she and her peers are making could lead to more communication between the two forms in the future.

“This could really up the game of live recorded broadway shows - theatre has always been the weird stepsister, but now there is more crossover and people are getting more comfortable with cameras being in the room. Creative teams can communicate with film teams now, and the worlds are less protective of being separate. It made me not as afraid of film as I was - for my entire life I was afraid of working in film, and now it feels kind of normal. Granted I am in my little virtual theatre film hybrid bubble, but now I am learning the language and am conquering that fear.”

Many have pressured her to label her new work as something separate from theatre, insisting that this is a momentary pause that will be set aside once the shutdown is permanently lifted. Ellie isn’t so sure.

“Theatre is never ever going away. However, theatre might have to change. It will have to change in terms of inclusion and accessibility and transparency. This period could be one of those great transitional periods that theatre has gone through over thousands and thousands of years - Thespis stepping out of the chorus and assuming the role of a principal character. You don’t really realize it because you’re living it right now but this could be a moment where we see the virtual theatre come out and turn into its own auxiliary artform. It is a new branch of the big tree of theatre. Theatre has gone through so many changes, and will never die.”

“A lot of audience members don’t understand that there are actual human beings onstage.”

Larry Rogowsky was on the verge of triumph at the start of 2020. As a member of In Fine Company, a Broadway production company, he had three productions running in the 2019/2020 season - Moulin Rouge, Jagged Little Pill, and Company. Both Moulin Rouge and Jagged were popular contenders for Best Musical of the Season, and Company was one of the most anticipated revivals, after a starry debut on the West End. As March came near, however, things began to change.

“By March it was starting to look pretty bleak, but I never imagined what it would turn into. Company was one week into previews, and we were really on a high with these three massive hit shows. Moulin Rouge had been riding such a huge wave when people started to get sick.”

Moulin Rouge was the first musical to confirm Covid-19 within their company; in fact, they became a hotbed of infection, as the virus quickly spread through the cast and crew - 75% of the cast was eventually infected. Many in the company felt pressured to show up to work in the weeks before the shutdown, even if they weren’t feeling well - with a fervent fanbase, and high ticket price, no one wanted to let anyone down.

“They aren’t just robots who keep going and going. Eventually, something is going to give out.”

Originally an actor, Larry had pivoted to massage therapy in the ’90s before returning to the theatre as a producer. When the shutdown was announced, he was suddenly left with empty days, and was coaxed into returning to his wellness business.

While Broadway will eventually be back (current estimates mark Fall 2021 as the beginning of the reopening process), certain behaviors need to be left in the past; including the fear of disappointment that led to such a catastrophic outbreak at Moulin Rouge.

“When everything shut down, I decided to give my wellness business some love, and finally write the book that I had been meaning to write for the last 20 years. It is called the Urban Body Fix; Everything in Moderation. Healthy looks different on different people. You don’t have to have the “Broadway Body”, you don’t have to be snatched to make it. I love the idea of the show must go on, but we are also human. If you say the show must go on at the cost of injury, or possibly losing a career, that is never a good idea. It is detrimental to the whole industry. Performers will put a lot of themselves to push through, but people can lose careers doing that. You have to honor and nurture your body, listen to it when it tells you to take the day off. Your body is your most prized possession, and you shouldn’t sell it short.”

Learn more about Urban Body Fix here.

~~~

For many artists, the shutdown has been a period of resistance - in the face of so much trauma and confusion, many have resisted making art; for some, art is a form of release, rather than process, and it is impossible to release something you are currently living through.

They are just as valid as the eight artists interviewed above. In a world that deeply pressures people to be ‘productive’ at all times, living for yourself and not your output can be liberating. There is no right or wrong way to be an artist right now (or ever). As we mark this unfortunate anniversary of the shutdown, hundreds of thousands of artists are deeply struggling to get by. We at OnStageBlog highly recommend you join Be An Arts Hero, a movement to allocate proportional aid to members of the Arts and Culture sector in the United States. Our community must come together in order to weather the storm.

“2020 was the worst kind of stagnation. It revealed all of the underlying problems that led to it, and of course, if attention had been paid it wouldn’t have happened. It was a clear path that catapulted into the crisis we now call 2020. 2020 was a grand reckoning with the deep structural issues of the past several centuries. It has been a linear progression that led us to a complete collapse. This has forced us to finally, long overdue, reckon with what the status quo has insisted upon. People have been very vocal with warnings about the injustices that have been going on within the status quo within our industry for years and years, and it is sad that it took a complete structural collapse for it to be reckoned with en masse.

My hope for moving forward is not to reverse to what we had before this, because what we had before this led to this. My hope is that we make deep structural changes in the way that, generally, the way the world works, and more specifically the way that our industry works. Commercial art was intentionally built a certain way to extract as much capital as possible at the expense of the workforce. It is time for a grand reckoning with artistic structures.” - Bryan Freedman

"One Year On" : Being an Artist When Your Artform is on Pause