Four years ago today – the ides of March, 2020 – the COVID-19 pandemic forced the then-mayor of New York City to shut down the smaller In-person theaters that had remained open after the then-Governor of the state had shut down all Broadway theaters three days earlier. Within that brief time, the first new experiments in digital theater had already begun.
I began monitoring these experiments, and on the first anniversary of the pandemic launched the American Connected Theater Awards (ACTA) to recognize those who had stepped up to the moment. I have posted ACTA acknowledgements each year since.
Yes, in-person theater began reopening some thirty months ago. Yes, it’s been ten months since the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency officially expired.
That doesn’t mean COVID has disappeared, nor that in-person theater has fully recovered: As the Times reported this week attendance on Broadway is still down 17 percent and box office down 14 percent from pre-pandemic levels.
But more to the point, digital theater continues, now untethered to the pandemic — certainly less publicized, in some ways more underground, but in other ways more accepted, more integrated.
And some of the people and companies that caught my attention in the first three years are still at it, some of them bringing it to a new level. A look at some of the continuing innovators and what they’re up to.
Starting the same month that in-person theaters shut down, Joshua William Gelb created videos for a YouTube channel in which he turned his tiny closet in the East Village into a stage. At first, Theater in Quarantine felt like a gimmick A fast-motion 55-second video of his building and painting the closet; a minute 47 seconds of his tapping his knees to jazz music. Soon, improbably, he began adapting Kafka and Beckett, the shows expanding in length and ambition.
New Yorkers are not quarantined anymore, but Theater in Quarantine is still in business. Last Halloween, Gelb presented Nosferatu, A 3D Symphony of Horror. A new Gelb piece will be livestreamed next month on URHERE (see ACTA Year 3 below for a description of URHERE)
Gelb is also one of the four artists invited to participate in Playwrights Horizon’s newly organized New Media Lab (the others are Aya Ogawa, Johnny Lloyd, and Jeanette Yew) led by Jared Mezzocchi (whose name you’ll see continually below) and artistic associate Molly Cohen. They will meet regularly to come up with “new ideas that challenge the way we make theater, gather for theater, and view theater” — and present a series of short works in May.
Since 2009, theater artist Bryan Doerries, well-versed in Ancient Greek, has been presenting readings of classic plays, primarily those by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, with increasingly starry casts, to stimulate discussion about current issues facing specific communities. His company, now called Theater of War Productions, had its most high-profile success with “Antigone in Ferguson,” an adaptation of Sophocles’ 2,500-year-old tragedy, inspired by the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014 by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The adaptation was first performed in Ferguson, then taken on the road – where I saw it in 2017 in a playground in the shadow of the Howard public housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
The point of their performances has always been to prompt the discussion afterward by invited guests and members of the general audience.
In May, 2020, Theater of War began presenting its projects live online, and Doerries had a revelation: Zoom turned out to be a surprisingly useful platform to encourage such community engagement.
The company has resumed in-person productions (such as one recently on the volatile Columbia University campus) But most of what Theater of War does now is presented live online, sometimes simultaneously in-person, sometimes not. Their next performance is of An Enemy of the People, April 6th and 7, performed by a starry and eclectic cast including David Strathairn, Elizabeth Marvel, Bill Camp, Mayor Matthew T. Starr of City of Mount Vernon, Ohio, and former theater critic Peter Marks.
HERE Arts Center: URHERE digital hub
A new project of HERE Arts Center, entitled URHERE, which HERE described as a “one-of-a-kind, rigorously curated virtual platform for outdoor and digital premieres” launched in November 2022 with a digital play it had commissioned from Jared Mezzocchi.
Until the pandemic, “we didn’t have digital programming as part of our identity.” recalled Amanda Szeglowski, who was then associate artistic director of HERE. They scrambled to put something, anything, up – and eventually developed enough of a plan to win a $200,000 grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies through their Digital Accelerator Program, to develop the URHERE hub. A year ago, they were raising funds to continue it past their grant. “I personally believe that theaters such as ours will include a digital component from here on,” Szeglowski told me then. It’s the future.” A year later, Szeglowski has been promoted to co-director of HERE, and recently received word that Bloomberg Philanthropies will give them another two year grant to continue development of URHERE.
On March 23, URHERE will livestream The American Truth and Reconciliation Play, James Scruggs’ interactive exploration of the American history of enslavement and racism. After the live performance, the performance will be available online on demand.
Bard At The Gate
Bard At The Gate is Paula Vogel’s online reading series whose aim is to give a second chance to plays that had never gotten their due. The first play she produced was “Kernel of Sanity,” about racism in American theater, making its debut forty-two years after Kermit Frazier wrote it. The series has had three solid seasons, and started partnering with Broadway on Demand, with plans to expand; Vogel is a passionate digital theater advocate: “All of us who have been doing this are believers,” she told me for an article on Bard at the Gate for HowlRound.
For its fourth season, it’s trying something new — live-streaming from a proscenium stage and including a live audience. This will take place at Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton, New Hampshire. “Bard at the Gate productions to date have been largely shot from each performer’s makeshift home studio,” explains Jared Mezzocchi, who is the Playhouse’s producing artistic director, but also a digital pioneer who has been involved with Vogel’s project from the get-go (and URHERE, and much else.) “BARD will continue to showcase new work as it has in the past, and at the same time will have experienced another way of presenting the future of hybrid theatre-making.”
The League of Live Stream Theater
Last month alone, I saw ”My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion live on stage of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, Kate Hamill’s new dramatization of The Scarlet Letter at Two Rivers Theater in Red Bank, NJ and Sara Porkalob’s Dragon Ladyat Pittsburgh’s Public Theater – all without leaving my home. This weekend I plan to see “The Club” at George StreetPlayhouse in New Brunswick; next weekend “I Am Delivered’T” at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky.
All these shows are “simulcast” live from the stages of these regional theaters thanks to the League of Live Stream Theater
The League was founded by Oren Michaels and Jim Augustine as a non-profit shortly after they worked together on behalf of Second Stage Theater to produce the first-ever simulcast of a Broadway play, Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s” in January, 2022 — just four months after Broadway theaters started re-opening. They followed that up with two more Broadway plays in 2023, “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.”
But it’s their expansion to regional theaters throughout the country in this past year that suggests that digital theater was no flash in the pandemic.
“I grew up in a small town where I was lucky to have access to theater,” Augustine told me. “Theater feels like home to me. I want that for the next generation; I want my two kids to have an even better experience with theater than I did. Our theaters are suffering now, for a lot of different reasons…. One way to increase revenues is to drive accessibility to the theaters. People are taking lots of different strategies for this. One way of doing this is to make theater accessible beyond the four walls.”
He doesn’t like to think of what they do as “broadcasting” into people’s homes, “but teleporting our audience members into the theater – welcoming people in.”
But he also doesn’t see the simulcasting of in-person stage plays as the final frontier, nor the only way to do digital theater.
“During the pandemic, people had stories they wanted to share and they suddenly couldn’t. So their experiments came from a very authentic and beautiful place: How do we keep pursuing our passion? How do we keep bringing communities together around stories? I’ve seen some of these experiments – Zoom-based plays, hybrid experiences — and I think they’ve been amazing. I think we should embrace them. We should not think of them in terms of the paradigm that currently exists of: ‘This is theater; this is not theater.'”,
