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    Nataki Garrett to Step Down at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

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    Garrett began her tenure at the organization in August 2019, and plans to depart at the end of this month.Nataki Garrett, the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is stepping down after a tumultuous period that concluded with a financial crisis so severe that the nonprofit theater warned that it was unclear whether it would be able to finish this year’s season.One of the most prominent women of color to lead an American theater, Garrett began her tenure in August 2019. She plans to resign effective May 31; the decision was reported on Friday by American Theater magazine, and then announced by the theater.Garrett has encountered a series of crises during her time at the helm of the organization, which has been one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious nonprofit theaters. Based in the southern Oregon town of Ashland, it is a destination theater, meaning most of its audience travels to get there, and it stages much of its work during the summer; before the pandemic, it had been attracting 400,000 patrons annually.Garrett faced not only the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the theater, like most others, to shutter in 2020, but also the impact of climate change, which has particularly affected the Oregon Shakespeare Festival because it has repeatedly been forced to cancel performances when smoke from wildfires has worsened air quality.She has also received pushback to her programming, which some longtime theater patrons objected to as overly left-leaning, and she hired security personnel after receiving death threats.The organization has experienced considerable turnover during her tenure — some of the leaders she brought in to help run the festival have since left — and in January she took on the title of interim executive artistic director after David Schmitz, who Garrett had hired as executive director, departed amid a leadership shake-up. Last month the company began a $2.5 million fund-raising campaign with the dire tagline: “Save Our Season. Save OSF.”Garrett declined, through a spokeswoman, to be interviewed, but issued a statement saying, in part: “We are at an inflection point in our industry, where outdated business models must evolve in order for our theaters to survive. But these challenges also pose great opportunities — to rebuild in a way that reflects where we are today and where we want to be in the future — with actors, staff, audiences, and artistic leaders who reflect the richness of our country’s diversity. This is what excites me. This is the work I came to do.”The company said in a statement that a board member, the playwright Octavio Solis, “will be stepping in to help oversee and support the artistic leadership team during this transitional phase.”The theater currently has two shows running, a production of “Romeo & Juliet,” directed by Garrett, which is described on the company’s website as exploring “the financial and class divisions of our current time,” as well as a production of “Rent.”The theater’s board chairwoman, Diane Yu, said in an interview that the fund-raising campaign is going well and that she is optimistic that this season’s other shows, including productions of “Twelfth Night” and “The Three Musketeers,” will go forward; the theater has canceled its holiday show, and Yu said what happens next year remains unclear, but that “the board is focused on keeping this theater viable — it’s important for the region and it’s important for the American theater.” More

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      Climate Change Threatens Summer Stages and Outdoor Performances

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      ASHLAND, Ore. — Smoke from a raging wildfire in California prompted the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to cancel a recent performance of “The Tempest” at its open-air theater. Record flooding in St. Louis forced the cancellation of an outdoor performance of “Legally Blonde.” And after heat and smoke at an outdoor Pearl Jam concert in France damaged the throat of its lead singer, Eddie Vedder, the band canceled several shows.Around the world, rising temperatures, raging wildfires and extreme weather are imperiling whole communities. This summer, climate change is also endangering a treasured pastime: outdoor performance.Here in the Rogue Valley, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is seeing an existential threat from ever-more-common wildfires. In 2018 it canceled 25 performances because of wildfire smoke. In 2020, while the theater was shut down by the pandemic, a massive fire destroyed 2,600 local homes, including those of several staffers. When the festival reopened last year with a one-woman show about the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, wildfire smoke forced it to cancel almost every performance in August.“The problem is that in recent years there have been fires in British Columbia and in the mountains in Washington State and fires as far as Los Angeles,” said Nataki Garrett, the festival’s artistic director. “You have fire up and down the West Coast, and all of that is seeping into the valley.”Even before this year’s fire season began, the festival moved the nightly start time of its outdoor performances later because of extreme heat.Wildfires, which generate smoke that pollute air quality over long distances, have already begun burning this year in parts of Europe and the United States. In July, the Oak fire raged near Yosemite National Park.David McNew/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRecord rainfall in the St. Louis area caused flash flooding. Among the effects: The Muny, a major outdoor musical theater, had to cancel a performance of “Legally Blonde” because of flooding on its campus.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressAshland is not the only outdoor theater canceling performances because of wildfires. Smoke or fire conditions have also prompted cancellations in recent years at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado; the California Shakespeare Theater, known as Cal Shakes; the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Nevada and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., among others.“We are one giant ecosystem, and what happens in one place affects everywhere,” said Robert K. Meya, the general director of the Santa Fe Opera, which stages open-air productions against a striking desert backdrop each summer, and which, in an era of massive wildfires near and far, has installed sensors to gauge whether it is safe to perform.The reports of worsening conditions come from wide swaths of the country. “Last summer was the hardest summer I’ve experienced out here, because fires came early, and coupled with that were pretty severe heat indexes,” said Kevin Asselin, executive artistic director of Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, which stages free performances in rural communities in five Rocky Mountain West states, and has increasingly been forced indoors. “And the hailstorms this year have been out of control.”Road signs in Ashland, Ore., guide drivers along wildfire evacuation routes.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesIn southern Ohio, a growing number of performances of an annual history play called “Tecumseh!” have been canceled because of heavy rain. In northwest Arkansas, rising heat is afflicting “The Great Passion Play,” an annual re-enactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In Texas, record heat forced the Austin Symphony Orchestra to cancel several outdoor chamber concerts. And in western Massachusetts, at Tanglewood, the bucolic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, more shade trees have been planted on the sweeping lawn to provide relief on hot days.“Changing weather patterns with more frequent and severe storms have altered the Tanglewood landscape on a scale not previously experienced,” the orchestra said in a statement.On Sunday, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of the nation’s first major climate law, which, if enacted into law, would seek to bring about major reductions in greenhouse pollution. Arts presenters, meanwhile, are grappling with how to preserve outdoor productions, both short-term and long-term, as the planet warms.“We’re in a world that we have never been in as a species, and we’re going into a world that is completely foreign and new and will be challenging us in ways we can only dimly see right now,” said Kim Cobb, the director of the environment and society institute at Brown University.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an important driver of the local economy, but smoke and heat associated with climate change have become a growing challenge.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesSome venues are taking elaborate precautions. The American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wis., now requires performers to wear wicking undergarments when the heat and humidity rise, encourages actors to consume second act sports drinks, and asks costume designers to eliminate wigs, jackets and other heavy outerwear on hot days.Many outdoor performing venues say that, even as they are bracing for the effects of climate change, they are also trying to limit the ways that they contribute to it. The Santa Fe Opera is investing in solar energy; the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is planting native meadows; and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is using electric vehicles.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which before the pandemic had been one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the country, is, in many ways, patient zero. The theater is central to the local economy — the downtown features establishments with names like the Bard’s Inn and Salon Juliet. But the theater’s location, in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, has repeatedly been subject to high levels of wildfire smoke in recent years.At the Santa Fe Opera, which offers majestic desert views at sunset, concern about wildfire smoke prompted officials to install air quality sensors. Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesThe theater, like many, has installed air quality monitors — there’s one in a niche in the wall that encircles the audience in the open-air Allen Elizabethan Theater, where this summer “The Tempest” is alternating with a new musical called “Revenge Song.” The device is visible only to the keenest of eyes: a small cylindrical white gadget with lasers that count particles in the passing breeze.The theater also has a smoke team that holds a daily meeting during fire season, assessing whether to cancel or proceed. The theater’s director of production, Alys E. Holden, said that, ever since the time she opposed canceling a performance mid-show and later learned a technician had thrown up because of the air pollution, she has replaced her “show must go on” ethos with “If it’s too unsafe to play, you don’t play.”This year the festival reduced the number of outdoor performances scheduled in August — generally, but not always, the smokiest month.Air quality monitors, now in use at many Western venues including the Santa Fe Opera, can help presenters protect not only audience members but also performers. The opera is particularly concerned about its singers.Ramsay de Give for The New York Times“Actors are breathing in huge amounts of air to project out for hours — it’s not a trivial event to breathe this stuff in, and their voices are blown the next day if we blow the call,” Holden said. “So we are canceling to preserve everyone’s health, and to preserve the next show.”Wildfire-related air quality has become an issue for venues throughout the West. “It’s constantly on our mind, especially as fire season seems to start earlier and earlier,” said Ralph Flores, the senior program manager for theater and performance at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has a 500-seat outdoor theater at the Getty Villa.Air quality concerns sometimes surprise patrons on days when pollution is present, but can’t be readily smelled or seen.“The idea that outdoor performance would be affected or disrupted by what’s happening with the Air Quality Index is still a fairly new and forward concept to a lot of people,” said Stephen Weitz, the producing artistic director at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado, which stages free shows in parks and parking lots. Last summer the theater had to cancel a performance because of poor air quality caused by a faraway fire.The coronavirus pandemic also remains a concern, prompting crew members in Santa Fe to wear masks as they met before a performance of Bizet’s “Carmen.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesAnother theater there, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is now working with scientists at the affiliated University of Colorado Boulder on monitoring and health protocols after a fire more than a thousand miles away in Oregon polluted the local air badly enough to force a show cancellation last summer. Tim Orr, the festival’s producing artistic director, recalled breaking the news to the audience.“The looks on their faces were surprise, and shock, but a lot of people came up and said ‘Thank you for making the right choice,’” he said. “And when I stepped offstage, I thought, ‘Is this going to be a regular part of our future?’”Planning for the future, for venues that present out of doors, now invariably means thinking about climate change.The Santa Fe Opera’s stunning outdoor location is one of its great attributes, but also makes it vulnerable to climate change.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesOskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produces Free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, said that the 2021 summer season, when the theater reopened after the pandemic shutdown, was the rainiest in his two decades there. “I could imagine performing more in the fall and spring, and less in the summer,” he said.In some places, theater leaders are already envisioning a future in which performances all move indoors.“We’re not going to have outdoor theater in Boise forever — I don’t think there’s a chance of that,” said Charles Fee, who is the producing artistic director of three collaborating nonprofits: the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. Fee has asked the Idaho board to plan for an indoor theater in Boise.“Once it’s 110 degrees at 6 o’clock at night, and we have these occasionally already, people are sick,” he said. “You can’t do the big Shakespeare fight, you can’t do the dances in ‘Mamma Mia.’ And you can’t do that to an audience.” More

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      In the Theater, Workers Are Demanding Better Conditions

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      Getting to play Cinderella in a Broadway revival of “Into the Woods” sounds like a young musical theater performer’s dream, until you break your neck doing the pratfalls built into the role.That’s what Laura Benanti says happened to her in 2002. “I was a 22-year-old girl who didn’t know how to say ‘this doesn’t feel safe to me,’” she wrote on her Instagram page nearly two decades later, after suffering “intense pain every single day for seven years,” two surgeries and much heartbreak.At the time, people bad-mouthed her for missing performances.Disastrous tumbles and physical danger are so much a part of theater history that they’ve become treasured backstage lore instead of causes for concern. I am ashamed to admit to laughing when I read about the dancer who fell into the “Anyone Can Whistle” orchestra pit in 1964, landing on a saxophone player, who promptly died. In 1991 we all gossiped merrily when the tempestuous Nicol Williamson ignored his fight choreography in “I Hate Hamlet” and struck his co-star Evan Handler with a sword. (Handler quit; Williamson got applause.) For much of the early 2010s, the mayhem of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was an endless source of schadenfreude.Laura Benanti as Cinderella in the 2002 Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut concussions, broken ribs, a fractured skull, a crushed leg and an amputated foot — those are just the “Spider-Man” injuries — aren’t actually funny. And they are only the most visible part of the story of harm endured by theater workers onstage and off. In return for the privilege of scraping by in a field they love, they are commonly expected to endanger themselves physically and emotionally.They dance till they drop. They work punishing hours. They strip themselves, often literally, and enact trauma over and over. If they are parents and nevertheless insist on sleeping more than five hours a night, they may see their children — as Amber Gray, a star in the original cast of “Hadestown,” told me — barely more than 50 minutes a day.The pandemic put a temporary end to all that, reuniting families and helping injuries heal. The pause also gave theater workers, perhaps for the first time ever, plenty of time to consider the lives their profession requires them to lead. It’s no surprise that, as theaters reopened, calls for change therefore emerged with greater urgency. This summer I’ve been grappling with those demands, and in earlier parts of this series I’ve looked at ridding the art form of the “great man” inheritance that built cruelty into its DNA and the movement for fair pay.But getting back to business has also reminded show people of the specific weirdness of their work. In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them more holistically as humans, even as they continue to gut themselves every night?Some people will not even agree that it should. The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the industry’s ethos — not to mention its business model — that demands for shorter working days, more understudies, intimacy coordinators, mental health stipends, child care reimbursements and other accommodations are often met with doubt or derision. Caring for actors, some say, is coddling. Suffering is a badge of honor, and the theater is properly a purple-heart club.Amber Gray received a Tony Award nomination in 2019 for playing Persephone in “Hadestown.” She said her schedule began to make her feel like “a deadbeat mom.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat indoctrination goes deep. Stanislavski saw his students as votaries in an ascetic cult. The men who created the dominant forms of American theater assembled their power by extorting it from others. Musicals have often romanticized the idea that a good artist is a starving one. And Broadway dancers, many trained in a system even more repressive than the theater’s, have traditionally been expected to perform like robots, retire early and shut up in between.Perhaps the most pervasive and pernicious maxim is the one that says the show must go on — no matter what. Work rules that would seem ludicrous in any other business are, in the theater, built into the contracts. Performers represented by Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union for actors and stage managers, are typically engaged for eight-show weeks, but productions can increase that number under certain circumstances. During holiday seasons, many offer 10-show schedules, and nonunion gigs can exceed even that.Another rule, governing the number of hours a company can work during technical rehearsals, is so reviled it has been the subject of a 2015 backstage comedy. In Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” — named for the clause in Equity contracts that permits 12-hour days if there are two hours off — the under-slept and daylight-deprived company of an absurd plantation melodrama undergoes a kind of mass psychosis while the tech teams adjust lights and scenery.The ReformationThe world is changing, and so is the theater. Our chief critic looks at how.Sacred Monsters: Is it time to cut loose the “great men” who helped America create its classics and its institutions?Paying Dues: Poverty is part of the identity, even the glamour, of the theater. It’s not sustainable.The Hard-Knock Life: The physical risks of the theater have many demanding their basic needs as humans.It’s not fiction. Kate Shindle, the president of Equity, has lived it herself. As a working actor she spent part of 2018 at a regional theater having “an awesome creative experience,” she told me in an email. (She declined to name the theater.) “But the schedule was no joke. On the longest days, I left my apartment at 9 a.m. and didn’t return home until after 1 a.m. And to be clear, the employer wasn’t bending or breaking work rules. This is the intensity that the American theater has been relying on for generations. The workers have helped sustain a model that simply needs to be rewritten.”At its annual convention last year, Equity delegates endorsed the elimination of 10 out of 12s — along with five-show weekend-performance schedules and six-day workweeks. But while these were just recommendations for future contract negotiations, some theaters have already begun to experiment with the ideas.For Donya K. Washington, the festival producer at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the experiment has its roots in 2016. It was then, while working at a different theater, that a production department head told her how the 12-hour tech calls for actors were nothing compared to what he experienced. To manage his crew, implement changes and debrief later, he arrived at the theater well before the cast and stayed well after. As a result, he was working 16-hour days for days at a time.“That’s not sustainable,” Washington said in a recent Zoom conversation. “I didn’t know what to do about it, but it stuck in my head.”After arriving in Oregon in 2019, where she was drafted onto the team creating the intensely complicated schedule that allows a repertory company to function, she started looking for ways to eliminate the 10 out of 12s. It was then that a worker “began proselytizing” for another quality-of-life improvement: the five-day workweek. “We had just finished building the calendar for the 2021 season, and my brain broke,” Washington said.But the pandemic — which closed the festival’s theaters for 14 months — gave her time to think. Over the course of 50 calendar drafts, she played with the parameters. What if the company produced five shows instead of the usual 11? What if they mounted one show at a time instead of several in rep? In one of those passes, since the exercise “wasn’t real anyway,” she decided to see if “you could do a five-day, 40-hour week and still get a production up. And lo and behold you could.”On a spreadsheet, anyway. In reality, when the festival fully reopened this April, the five-day week was not quite attainable. (They got as low as five-and-a-half.) But Washington feels it will be possible in the future, by adding about two additional weeks of rehearsals per show to make up for the lost time. The cost, she said, “would not be ginormous.” Already 10 out of 12s have been eliminated without trouble, reduced to 8 out of 10s — a step in the right direction. “And even if just from a business perspective it makes sense,” Washington added, because happier, healthier, better-rested companies produce a better product.“Sometimes we have a mind-set of doing something for the sake of doing it, because that’s how it’s always been done,” she said. “But step by step we have to retrain ourselves. And not just actors. Even I have to remind myself I’m not supposed to work seven days a week!”When I pointed out that we were having this conversation on a Sunday afternoon, Washington smiled and shrugged.The theater is unlikely to become a model workplace anytime soon. It’s always going to be a very tough life choice for most people. But who gets to make that choice is one of the things at stake in the calls for bettering a work-life balance that more often presents itself as a work-nonwork nightmare. Those who can’t afford to be penniless must generally opt out of theatrical careers, and if they do get a job they can’t afford to complain.Among that group, traditionally, have been parents of young children. Even if you have a stay-at-home partner or the means to hire full-time care, the mismatched hours of a baby’s schedule and an actor’s can be unbearable. Gray, the “Hadestown” star, was horrified to find that her older son, now 6, at some point started to cry whenever she sang, having learned to associate the sound with her going away. “It’s brutal,” she said, “when your child hates what you do. I felt like a deadbeat mom.”From left, Satomi Blair, Tina Chilip and Maechi Aharanwa in Playwrights Realm’s 2019 production of “Mothers.” The company created a pilot program during the 2019-20 season to accommodate parents.Richard Termine for The New York TimesNot that working while pregnant was less worrisome. “We sign contracts that say we must always be able to fit the costume,” she told me, adding that she hid her second pregnancy “because there are so many stigmas.”But general acclaim for her performance in “Hadestown” — and a 2019 Tony Award nomination to cap it — emboldened her when her contract was up for renewal. “I asked for an alternate for the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could be home at least one day when my kids are too.” Previously, like most actors, her only day off was a Monday.When the producers, to her surprise, said yes, Gray found that the block of three days off, Sunday through Tuesday, made a huge difference. Finally getting enough sleep, she could “bang out” her two-show Wednesday “like nothing.” Her partner felt supported, she could play with her children, she could see other people’s work and attend the galas where connections are made. And even though the pandemic soon shut down that arrangement, it remains a model. Elizabeth Stanley, the star of “Jagged Little Pill,” made a similar deal when she returned to that show from maternity leave, splitting the role of Mary Jane with her friend Heidi Blickenstaff.These are, so far, one-off solutions, available to women considered important to the commercial success of a show. To test whether the idea of supporting parents could work in the nonprofit sector, the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway company devoted to early-career playwrights, created a pilot program called the Radical Parent-Inclusion Project. Roberta Pereira, the Realm’s executive director, explained that during the 2019-20 season, which included a production of Anna Moench’s “Mothers,” the company basically tried every possible accommodation to make parents welcome not only onstage and backstage but also in the audience.Among those accommodations was a caretaker reimbursement of up to $750, available to anyone working on the theater’s programming that season. (The credit was good for any kind of caretaking, including eldercare.) Rehearsals were cut back to 30 hours over the course of five days from 36 hours in six, necessitating an extra week to make up the difference. Broadway Babysitters, an arts-focused child care company, was hired to mind children during open auditions and callbacks, and a 4 p.m. matinee was added to the schedule. “For children who are younger and take naps,” Pereira said, “that was a much better time than 2 p.m.”The free child care was not just for performers, by the way; audience members brought a total of 22 children, half of them less than a year old, to the matinee — which perhaps as a result sold out.“Not that every theater should try this at the level we did,” Pereira said, “but you could see which things work for you. Some cost nothing, some cost a lot.” In all, the season’s caretaking enhancements added about $38,000 to the company’s $1.3 million budget, most of it covered by increased grants from its usual funders. That’s in line with what PAAL, the Parent Artist Advocacy League for Performing Arts and Media, has found at other theaters experimenting with child care programs. For Elevator Repair Service, a New York-based company, the cost of those programs amounted to less than 2 percent of the budget, PAAL reported.As a result, Pereira said, actors who effectively used to pay to be in a show — or just to audition for it — may no longer have to make the choice between plays and parenting.For the 2019 Broadway production of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon worked with an intimacy director, who helped stage the nude scenes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAchieving a better work-life balance is something you might expect to read about in emails from the human relations departments of companies promoting Yoga Thursdays. And though by no means common in American business, child care stipends are at least a familiar concept. But some of the other changes happening in the theater are intensely specific to the needs of the stage.One is the growing presence of intimacy directors, who help shape moments of physical contact in ways that feel safe to the people performing them. Intimacy Directors & Coordinators, one of several organizations created to further the field, defines its aim as the creation of “a culture of consent” in storytelling. Though that culture was traditionally the responsibility of a show’s director, the history of abuse in rehearsal and production has led many actors to advocate for the hiring of dedicated professionals on every show where the subject may come up — which is to say, virtually all of them.“To not have someone in that position is asking for trouble,” Audra McDonald told me in a recent phone interview. She first worked with an intimacy director in 2019, when Claire Warden helped stage the nude scenes and other physical interactions between her and her co-star, Michael Shannon, in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” Having been in previous situations where she felt she “didn’t have the right to speak up about what was happening,” McDonald found Warden’s presence “revelatory.”“Knowing what the boundaries and parameters were for what Michael and I had to go through on that stage, we could push up against them as hard as we possibly could while knowing what lines not to cross,” she said. “It’s about knowing where the bottom of the pool is, so you feel safer about diving all the way down and then swimming as fearlessly and fiercely as you want.”“Pass Over,” Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s harrowing play about the precarious lives of two young Black men, also had an intimacy coordinator, Ann James. But its producers offered the cast another protection against the potential trauma of the story: a mental health allowance.From left, Jon Michael Hill, Gabriel Ebert and Namir Smallwood in “Pass Over.” They had access to a “health and wellness” allowance during the play’s Broadway run last year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe allowance permitted actors to seek reimbursements of up to $250 a week for expenses deemed beneficial to their “health and wellness as it relates to performing this show eight times a week,” the policy stated. Matt Ross, the lead producer, added that the definition of “health and wellness” was deliberately broad; it could mean, for instance, a therapist or a voice lesson or a massage.Cody Renard Richard, the production stage manager, said it was only fitting to offer that support. “From their first class, actors have been asked to bring their traumas into a certain space, been nagged to call up personal stuff so they can cry in a scene. To ask them to open their wounds like that and not give them the help to deal with the result is incredibly unfair.”The additional cost of the mental health stipend, along with the production’s intimacy coordinator and the equity, diversity and inclusion consultant, Nicole Johnson, was “minuscule,” Ross said. “Probably less than 1 percent of the overall weekly costs.”But low cost is not the main selling point for advocates of such changes; undoing the harm built into the system is. And one of the reasons there is so much resistance to what seem like obviously worthy goals is that the harm has never been evenly distributed. When I spoke to Wayne Cilento, who originated the song “I Can Do That” in the 1975 musical “A Chorus Line,” he seemed proud of his ability to work on that show despite what he described as constant back and knee injuries. Later, in Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” which earned Cilento a Tony Award nomination in 1978, he missed only two performances in one-and-a-half years “while other people who didn’t have my urgency were dropping all around,” he said. “Stepping out was not my way.”From left, Jovan Dansberrry, Khori Michelle Petinaud, Manuel Herrera, Dylis Croman, Ron Todorowski and Jacob Guzman in a revival of “Dancin’” at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesStill, in preparing to direct and choreograph a revival of “Dancin’” for Broadway, he said he was more conscious of looking out for his dancers than Fosse was. (Fosse “never had a conversation about how’s your back or how’s your hamstring.”) For the tryout at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring, he cut the material from three acts to two and divvied up “his” track — the sequence of dances he’d done in the original production — among several men because it now seemed too much to ask of just one. For the planned 2023 Broadway production, he is rethinking the number of swings and covers to step into any role at any time so that injured dancers will feel less pressure to perform. And he is much more collaborative with the ensemble than Fosse was with him.“But it’s a fine line,” he said. “Incorporating the ensemble in the conversation makes them feel trusted and cared for, and it’s good for the show. But — this sounds awful — even though I want to hear your problems, at some point I don’t want to. The bottom line is: What you have to do for the show is what you have to do for the show. And the director, the choreographer, is the one who decides what that is.”Cilento is touching on a problem that underlies the uneasiness some people feel about the changes advocates are seeking. So much of what we are used to in the theater, so much of it thrilling, is ultimately the result of individual virtuosity being inspired by individual vision, even if the individual with the vision is a tyrant. When everyone is equally empowered what happens to it? If the theater ever does become a worker’s paradise, will it still produce heavenly art?Another source of unease is that those of us — I include myself — who grew up in the harsh, sometimes inhumane ways of thinking about the theater may have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. About the harshness we are blasé or even sentimental. When, in “A Chorus Line,” Cilento sang, with the rest of the ensemble, “What I Did for Love,” we understood the response to be: Everything. Anything. The gift was ours to borrow.Now I’m pretty sure that’s not the right answer. More

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      Review: ‘Confederates’ Talks Race in Double Time

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      In Dominique Morisseau’s promising new play, the action is in the ideas and the setting bounces between the Civil War era and the present.“This play is not like all of my others,” Dominique Morisseau writes in an author’s note in the script for “Confederates.” The new play, about two Black women living in different times but dealing with similar oppression, carries several signatures of Morisseau’s work and yet uses narrative techniques that are departures for her. It makes sense then that “Confederates,” which opened on Sunday at the Pershing Square Signature Theater, feels like an elegant experiment, thoughtful and put-together but not quite realizing its full potential.“Confederates,” which was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Penumbra Theater, begins with Sandra (Michelle Wilson), a political science professor who has just found an offensive photoshopped image of an enslaved woman on her office door. A few minutes later she’s gone and we’ve stepped back in time to the Civil War, where we meet Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), a fierce young enslaved woman who will become a spy for the Union.These women and their contemporaries are the alternating focal points of the play, directed by Stori Ayers. The attention shifts so rapidly from one story to the other that they become two halves of a dialogue.Michelle Wilson as Sandra, a college professor, in “Confederates.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKristolyn Lloyd as Sara, an enslaved woman and Union spy in the Civil War era.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel Hauck’s scenic design — two antique chairs, a bench and a side table with drawers, surrounded by the towering white columns and high balcony of a plantation house — is neutral and, at eye-level, uninspiring. But through the heights of the house’s architecture and the spaces between the columns, the set creates a dimension and depth that makes it seem as if the background extends into the ornate corridors and rooms of a Southern home.Known for her Detroit cycle, including “Skeleton Crew,” which just completed its debut Broadway run last month, Morisseau typically opts for realism and traditional, chronological storytelling. In fact, she excels at it; she examines the intersections of race, class and gender through characters that feel as real as a neighbor you hear kicking off his boots at the end of a workday.This play’s structure, however, is different. There’s a textbook quality to it; every scene baldly illustrates a theme, whether it’s the sexualization of Black women, the ways institutions turn Black women against one another, or how expectations of Black men and Black women differ. What action there is consists of arguments and discussions usually involving two or three people, with everything else taking place in the background. For Sara, that means the usual toils of the plantation and the not-so-distant gunshots of the war, which she imagines spells freedom. For Sandra, it’s her search for the perpetrator of the photo and her troubled relationships with her colleagues and students.Morisseau blurs this binary by having the three other characters in the play double-cast: Abner (Elijah Jones), Sara’s brother who escaped the plantation to fight for the Union, is also Malik, one of Sandra’s students. In the past there’s Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), the plantation owner’s daughter and Sara’s childhood friend; in the present, she is Candice, Sandra’s talkative student assistant. LuAnne (Andrea Patterson) is a house slave when she isn’t Jade, in the present day a colleague of Sandra’s. Morisseau cleverly mirrors the conversations between story lines, so, for example, Missy Sue naïvely adores her slave friend the way Candice idolizes her Black professor.Jones, left, as Malik, a student of Sandra, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAyers’s direction, along with Ari Fulton’s clever tear-away costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s chic array of wigs and hairstylings, is liveliest in the transitions from the past to present, and in the production’s tiny anachronisms, like a slave giving dap. It appears that the play is going into more experimental territory as the characters’ entrances and exits begin to overlap across the timelines, but Ayers seems wary of doing anything more than having them pass like anonymous commuters at Port Authority. Too often her approach seems procedural, but there are moments when the direction shows spunk, as in the flashier transitions, when someone marches or struts to the music, which switches between old racist ballads like “Dixie” and “Oh! Susanna” to rhythmic original songs arranged by Jimmy Keys (a.k.a. J. Keys).Though the show uses the ancillary characters as the points of contact between Sara’s world and Sandra’s, the two women themselves don’t actually meet. “Confederates” creates this tension between its two parts but doesn’t do anything with it. If Morisseau has built her stories with this inherent magic of alternating settings, allowing us to time-travel with her through a discussion of racial politics then and now, why not try to allow the worlds of the two protagonists to extend a bit more? Why not go bigger? Get more bizarre?Because there’s a certain isolation to the story; we’re in the Big House or Sara’s cabin or we’re in a university office. “Confederates” wants to keep our eyes on the two main institutions here (slavery, academia), each of which breeds or fosters its own forms of oppression. Each scene so clearly illustrates a point in the play’s thesis on race that the stakes don’t seem real; we’re just in the realm of discourse.At least Morisseau doesn’t let the pedagogic obscure the poetic. Her language is as gorgeous as always — and just as sharp. So a conversation about sexuality leads LuAnne to say, “Nature ain’t no slave. It move to its own rhythm,” using the terms of enslavement as a way to talk about the untamable lusts of the body. And Morisseau can dress up an atrocity in a metaphor without obscuring the horror beneath the surface, as when Sara describes seeing slaves “whipped so bad looked like their skin came alive and was crawling on they own flesh.”Beautiful language that’s wedded to tales of adversity — the play is full of such paradoxes, another one being that “Confederates” is a work about racism that is truly funny. There’s a lightness to the satire, but it’s not in the writing alone; the roughly 90-minute production has a nimble cast.From left, Kenzie Ross as the master’s daughter, Missy Sue, with Lloyd, as Sara. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJones brings an animated repartee to his characters’ interactions, and Ross successfully plays up the cluelessness of her white characters (“OMIGOD. I was completely racist just then,” she exclaims as Candice, owl-eyed in shame with mouth agape). Patterson oozes cool as the brusque, sharpshooting Jade but has less heft to her characters.Wilson embodies the poised and self-assured academic in a red power suit, but the character doesn’t allow her to show much range, while Sara is the play’s most rewarding role, incorporating both a brassy brand of satire and ferocious politico-historical oration. Lloyd easily hits the comic notes and channels a Harriet Tubman-esque bearing in Sara but isn’t as comfortable holding the deeper emotions of the character.Morisseau is a fabulous playwright, so much so that even in her plays’ flaws her brilliance still shines through. And seeing an artist try something new in her art is exciting. What’s even more exciting than that? Anticipating how much further — in her settings, in her stories — she can go.ConfederatesThrough April 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Dominique Morisseau Asks: ‘What Does Freedom Look Like Now?’

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      Her new play, “Confederates,” straddles two eras, exploring what liberation means to a present-day academic and an enslaved woman in the 1860s.In 2016, Penumbra Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned Dominique Morisseau to write a play as part of the American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. The remit: to create a work about the Black experience of the Civil War.Morisseau had one question: “What were the Black women doing?”“Confederates,” her new play at the Signature Theater, is one answer. Toggling between the present day and the 1860s, the play — now in previews, with a premiere on March 27 — follows Sandra, a superstar academic played by Michelle Wilson, and Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), an enslaved woman who spies for the Union Army. While the title evokes the Confederacy, it also teases a bond between the two women.“This is what it means to be at this institution,” Sandra says. “To know deep in your core that there will never be justice for you here.”From left: Andrea Patterson, Kristolyn Lloyd and Elijah Jones in “Confederates,” opening March 27 at the Signature Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara echoes her: “This what it means to be in a peculiar institution. Under its boot, everybody yo’ enemy.”Even as “Confederates” evokes dramatic works as varied as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s postmodern drama “An Octoroon,” Adrienne Kennedy’s devastating tragedy “The Ohio State Murders” and David Mamet’s academic two-hander “Oleanna,” Morisseau renders each scene in her distinctive empathetic, tragicomic style.Rather than focusing on oppression, the play explores Black women’s agency and the different forms that liberation can take from one era to the next.“Getting free in the past, it’s just getting free,” Morisseau said. “Like, you’re literally in bondage. Getting free in the present is a very different thing. What does freedom look like now?”Morisseau was speaking from an apartment in Midtown Manhattan, near both the Signature and Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where her play “Skeleton Crew,” part of a trilogy of works set in her native Detroit, recently wrapped. Her 15-month-old son napped in the next room.During a 90-minute video call, she discussed “Confederates,” which will also be presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in August, as well as microaggressions, macroaggressions and what empowerment looks like for her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In “Confederates,” Sandra and Sara are living about 160 years apart. What joins them?They’re united in the history of Black women fighting for freedom. They’re united in being the most socially expendable.Sandra, the professor, is subject to frequent microaggressions. For Sara, the enslaved woman, the danger is physical and more overt. Do you understand these threats as related?The kind of racism that Sara experiences — you could be hanged, you could be dragged, you could be murdered — that overt racism is not most people’s experience of racism. There is the kind of racism that breaks the body, that attacks the body. Then there’s the other kind that kills the spirit. The one I engage with the most often is the latter. But the micro always leads to the macro. Microaggressions lead into aggressive actions.Eventually, all of these are harmful and deadly.In your research, did you find many examples of Black women spying for the Union?I did not find lots of examples. I would find little pieces. Those kinds of stories are under-told. But they tell me that we were not passive. We were never passive.Brandon J. Dirden and Phylicia Rashad in Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” whose run just ended at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou have written plays set in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the ’00s. Did you know that you would eventually write about the 1860s?I never thought about it, to be honest. When I was approached to specifically write about this era, I said to myself, I don’t want to just write about slavery. That’s not what I’m interested in. I am, however, interested in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the phrase coined by Dr. Joy DeGruy, which is the impact of being descendants of the enslaved and the traumas that have happened since, without treatment or healing.When you accepted the commission, were there certain stories or stereotypes that you wanted to avoid?I didn’t want to show defeat or agreement with the enslaved culture. There is no agreement.As an undergraduate, did you experience institutional racism?My experience at school taught me that no one’s here to protect me. There’s no agency for me here. I’m going to have to do for me in school, if I want to not be squashed, if I want to see myself as an artist.Theater can also be a racist space. I remember an essay you wrote in 2015 about white privilege, with the headline: “Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theater Patron, and What That Says About Our Theaters.” Has theater changed since then?I have actively worked to shift that culture at least around my own work. I have a Playwright’s Rules of Engagement insert that I put inside the program of every show that I do. Because I was policed for my own laughter. [The insert includes instructions such as, “You are allowed to laugh audibly” and “This can be church for some of us, and testifying is allowed.”]I have seen attempts to diversify boards, to have a wider outreach to donors. Then there’s the bottom-up approach: I would like to see more artists taking more agency over themselves and their art. There’s a culture of silence that has been perpetuated. There’s this feeling of expendability that artists get. Like, you cannot speak up, because you will then not have jobs anymore. And that’s crazy.“There are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists,” Morisseau said, referring to efforts she’s made to counter harmful behavior in the industry.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLate last year, you spoke up. You pulled your play “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen Playhouse, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.” What empowered you to do that?I’ve always been an activist. I just inherently have not ever been OK with things that aren’t right. What made me feel even more empowered in this moment is that I am now visible. And there are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists. So there is not a chance in hell that I can watch harmful behavior happen and be unaccountable. I will not write about Black women being harmed and learning to take agency for themselves — that’s what “Paradise Blue” is about — I’m not going to have that onstage and the opposite happening for them offstage.I’m not trying to create a culture of people pulling their plays. This is one of the hardest decisions you should have to make as a playwright. It was brutal. It was exhausting for me. I never want to have to do that again.Before the pandemic you made your Broadway debut, writing the book for “Ain’t Too Proud.” Did that change anything for you?“Ain’t Too Proud” happened, a MacArthur happened, quite a few things happened, right at the same time. It’s brought more faith about me as an artist from institutions. I don’t know if I’m a safe bet. I don’t think I’m a safe bet. But I’m worthy of a bet in general. I’m enough of an interesting voice. I’m definitely asked to write more musicals.And what did it mean to have “Skeleton Crew” move to Broadway?With Broadway comes more resources behind your work. I remember when I first saw “Ain’t Too Proud” staged, I was like, everybody deserves all those resources behind their imaginations, just once in their life. To be able to get it twice in my life is amazing.“Skeleton Crew” will always be one of my favorites because I know where it came from. I know where I was when I wrote it and I know who I wrote it for. The biggest thing for me, as a Detroiter, is to make Detroit visible. We had Detroit night on Broadway. It was like a family reunion up in there. It was the most Detroit behavior I’ve ever seen on Broadway. It was epic. More

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      Theater to Stream: Lincoln Center Theater Joins the Fray

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      Presentations include a star-studded reading of “The Thanksgiving Play,” musicals crossing the Atlantic and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.Theater has faced many battles in the past year, and one of them has been the hurdles in streaming archived productions online. Now, two major American institutions have joined the fray, and are sharing some of their stash.The first offering in Lincoln Center Theater’s Private Reels series is the Off Broadway production of Christopher Durang’s comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” which went on to win a Tony Award for its Broadway run. Led by David Hyde Pierce, Kristine Nielsen and Sigourney Weaver, the cast is firing on all cylinders and makes the most of Durang’s riff on Chekhov transplanted to Bucks County, Pa. March 18-April 11; lct.orgIn Chicago, the Goodman Theater’s archival streaming program, called Encore, kicks off with Christina Anderson’s “How to Catch Creation,” which toggles between decades as it looks at the elusive, fraught and, in this case, broadly defined creative process (through March 28). That will be followed by a stage adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s magical-realist novel “Pedro Páramo” by the playwright Raquel Carrió and the director Flora Lauten, of the Cuban company Teatro Buendía. March 29-April 11; goodmantheatre.org‘The Thanksgiving Play’Dream cast alert! As part of the Spotlight on Plays series, Keanu Reeves, Heidi Schreck, Bobby Cannavale and Alia Shawkat have signed up for a livestreamed reading of Larissa FastHorse’s satire, in which a well-meaning drama teacher decides to put on a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving pageant — except she can’t seem to find any Native Americans to participate. March 25-29; broadwaysbestshows.comDerbhle Crotty, left, and Garrett Lombard in the Druid Theater Company’s production of “The Cherry Orchard.”Photo credit: Robbie Jack, via Druid TheaterClassics RevisitedThe Irish director Garry Hynes is particularly at ease with quietly insightful productions of classics. Her take on “The Cherry Orchard,” for the Druid Theater Company in Galway, Ireland, and adapted by the playwright Tom Murphy, is boosted by a sterling company that includes Derbhle Crotty as Madame Ranevskaya. It’s part of Culture Ireland’s online festival. March 19-21; druid.ieAnother formidable European actor is Hans Kesting, a regular in productions by Ivo van Hove. Thanks to the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s putting some of its shows online, we can watch him as the title character in Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus” — here a 21st-century politician on election night. In Dutch with subtitles. March 21; ita.nl.enFrom left, Kevin Anderson, Eden Espinosa and Ramona Keller in “Brooklyn the Musical” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAmerican Musicals Across the AtlanticSome of us remember the olden days of 2004, when Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson’s “BKLYN the Musical” was known as “Brooklyn the Musical” during its Broadway run. Does everything need a cool abbreviation? NVM. Still, it’s hard not to root for a show that ends in a sing-off pitting someone named Brooklyn (Emma Kingston) against someone named Paradice (Marisha Wallace). This new production was recorded in London. March 22-April 4; stream.theatreIn a completely different vein, the staging of John Caird and Paul Gordon’s lovely musical “Daddy Long Legs” by Boulevard Productions is now streaming, and it’s a low-key charmer. The story is told in letters between an orphan (Roisin Sullivan) and her benefactor (Eoin Cannon), and it’s a testament to Gordon’s catchy score (just try getting “Like Other Girls” out of your head) that this potentially stilted format actually works. Through March 21; stream.theatre‘Protec/Attac’A few years ago, Julia Mounsey and Peter Mills Weiss created waves with their brilliant and deeply unsettling “[50/50] old school animation.” So expectations are high for the duo’s new piece, “Protec/Attac,” which is getting a developmental stream as part of a mini-festival of four new works presented on consecutive evenings by the experiment-happy Brick Theater in Brooklyn. From March 26; bricktheater.com‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’Before writing the book for the musical adaptation of “Beetlejuice,” Scott Brown and Anthony King created this very wacky and very funny musical about two writers who perform their show about the inventor of the printing press in a backers’ audition. Now, Bobby Conte Thornton and Alex Prakken take on this rollicking goofball comedy in a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. March 18-21; broadwaycares.orgFrom left, Elizabeth Chinn Molloy, A.J. Baldwin and Nathan Tubbs in “Theater: A Love Story.”via The Know Theater‘Theater: A Love Story’Know Theater in Cincinnati did not take the easy way with a new effort from the playwright Caridad Svich, which interrogates the nature of theater and what makes a play a play. Theater about theater can get precious and self-congratulatory, but this show, which mixes drama and movement, avoids that trap. While it is admittedly a little long, the production rewards attention. Through March 27; knowtheatre.comStephen Michael Spencer, center, in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Julius Caesar.”Jenny Graham, via Oregon Shakespeare FestivalOregon Shakespeare FestivalThis beloved company in Ashland, Ore., has kept busy during the past year with streams that currently include its 2017 production of “Julius Caesar” (through March 27). But it is also a longtime champion of new American plays, such as Mary Kathryn Nagle’s “Manahatta,” a drama that juxtaposes the cutthroat world of New York City finance in the 21st century with the Dutch acquisition (to put it politely) of Manhattan from the Lenape nation 400 years earlier. March 29-April 24; osfashland.orgWomen’s Solo TurnsFrank Kuhn’s play “Let It Shine: A Visit with Fannie Lou Hamer,” about the Mississippi voting rights activist, is straightforward and educational — and that is its strength. Sharon Miles stars in this production from the New Stage Theater in Jackson, Miss., and it’s easy to see how Hamer paved the way for the likes of Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Through March 21; newstagetheatre.comThe tone is lighter in two solo comedies from Latinas, courtesy of the IAMA Theater Company in Los Angeles. Sheila Carrasco portrays a gallery of characters in “Anyone But Me,” while Anna LaMadrid’s “The Oxy Complex” checks in on a certain Viviana during a pandemic that just keeps going and going. (The title refers to oxytocin, a hormone released during childbirth, so there might be hope.) March 21-April 18; iamatheatre.com More

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      You’re New Here, Aren’t You? Digital Theater’s Unexpected Upside

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeWatch: ‘WandaVision’Travel: More SustainablyFreeze: Homemade TreatsCheck Out: Podcasters’ Favorite PodcastsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYou’re New Here, Aren’t You? Digital Theater’s Unexpected UpsideCompanies and venues that put work online are finding big, new and younger audiences — but little revenue.Pittsburgh Public Theater has found an audience for streamed shows like “The Gift of the Mad Guys,” an adaptation of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”Credit…via Pittsburgh Public TheaterFeb. 24, 2021Five days after the coronavirus quieted performing arts venues, the Irish Repertory Theater found its voice.It was St. Patrick’s Day, after all — not an occasion to go unacknowledged, even during a pandemic. So the humble nonprofit started posting homespun videos of company members performing Irish-themed songs, poems and monologues on social media.The response was encouraging, and in the 11 months since, the theater has added nine full-length digital productions. A house manager with no video editing experience stitched together the first such effort, a three-person play about a blind woman called “Molly Sweeney,” using video actors shot of themselves on their phones.By the time the theater was ready to attempt a holiday musical, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” it was considerably more ambitious, shipping green screens, tripods, lighting and sound equipment to actors’ homes.Was there an audience for these virtual ventures? Decidedly, yes.Over the course of this pandemic year, 25,000 households have reserved tickets — they are free, but there is a suggested donation — for at least one of Irish Rep’s digital productions (and many of them watch more than one show). That’s double the 12,500 people who buy tickets to at least one of the company’s productions in an ordinary year, when it’s comparatively safe to see live performances while sitting next to strangers.Even more striking: 80 percent of those who have watched an Irish Rep production over the last year are newbies who have never been to the company’s 148-seat theater, nestled in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.“We’re batting down barriers we’ve been wrestling with for decades,” said Frances Howorth, the theater’s director of marketing and digital strategy. “We’ve reached audiences we couldn’t have imagined reaching.”From left, Paul O’Brien, Geraldine Hughes and Ciaran O’Reilly in the Irish Repertory Theater’s virtual production of “Molly Sweeney.”Credit…via Irish RepThe pandemic has, of course, been devastating for theaters, costing lives, jobs and dollars. And many longtime theatergoers find streaming unsatisfying — no substitute for the you-are-there sensory experience.But across the country, and beyond its borders, many theaters say new audiences for their streaming offerings has been an unexpected silver lining — one that could have ramifications for the industry even after it is safe to perform live again and presenters try to return patrons to their seats.“We’ve been excited and somewhat surprised at the eagerness and size of the audience that we’ve uncovered,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, a large New York nonprofit best known for its free Shakespeare in the Park program. The theater, which has streamed both video and audio shows during the pandemic at no charge, has drawn an audience of 700,000 for its digital productions. And while measuring the size of online audiences can be imprecise, the theater has attracted people from every state and 68 countries.“I got a fan letter from Kazakhstan, which is a first for me,” Eustis said.The pattern, although not universal, is widespread. In California, La Jolla Playhouse has seen its audience grow sixfold, from about 100,000 during a typical in-person season, to 640,000 thus far for its digital programming, which included a three-part radio horror show.Christopher Ashley, the theater’s artistic director, said he imagined digital programming would be a less dominant part of his programming post-pandemic, but that because so many people had been interested in watching it, “we’re not going to just shut off that stream.”There are reasons to be cautious about the metrics. The basic tools used by theaters to measure audience can’t determine how many people are watching within a household, and generally don’t reflect how many people watch or listen for just a moment and move on.But many theater executives assert that online theater has brought them a significantly larger audience than they saw in-person, a growth they attribute to price (much of the digital content is free or low-cost); geography (you can check in from anywhere with internet access); and, in many cases, ease (watch at your convenience, with no advance planning).Some of the content is full-length, but much is also bite-size, reflecting online viewing habits. And it comes in many flavors: archival and new, recorded and live, in some cases seeking to capture the feeling of being in Row J, and in others embracing digital theater as a new art form. Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, a nonprofit in New York, has streamed not only plays, concerts and conversations, but also a court transcript reading, a “communal ritual” and, now underway, a 17-part audio series set on the No. 2 train.David Kwong (framed in yellow) with members of the digital audience gathered for his Geffen Playhouse production “Inside the Box.”Credit…via Geffen PlayhouseThere is even money to be made. The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles has earned $2.5 million selling tickets to a series of live and interactive shows featuring magic, puzzles, cooking and a murder mystery. That theater has been quite aggressive — it has held more than 600 live performances since last May, including several scheduled for the convenience of international audiences — and reports that 88 percent of its audience during the pandemic had never been to a show at the playhouse.But digital content, in most instances, generates far less revenue: At the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, which decided to make most digital programs free to donors and subscribers, streaming has brought in $154,000 during the pandemic, whereas by this time in a normal season, that theater would expect about $23.5 million in box office revenue. Most nonprofit theaters are staying afloat thanks to a combination of philanthropy and layoffs; they say the digital work is not for revenue, but to maintain audience and provide work for artists. Often, theaters must navigate thorny health and labor issues as part of the process.“We started this for our members as a way to keep them close when we had to shut down our stages, and, quite frankly, so they wouldn’t ask us for ticket refunds,” said Kara Henry, the marketing director for the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago.Many of the theater’s longtime patrons greeted the initiative with a shrug, but newcomers were more enthusiastic. Now Steppenwolf has 2,500 digital-only members, who pay $75 for a subscription. “Our virtual-only members are a full decade younger than our traditional members, so obviously that thrilled us,” Henry said.Marya Sea Kaminski, the artistic director of Pittsburgh Public Theater, has been pleased to reach senior citizens by streaming shows to their residential communities.Credit…Ross Mantle for The New York TimesPittsburgh Public Theater not only has seen audience growth, but also has found ways to reach the hard-to-reach: It arranged to stream its productions on the television sets at residential senior communities in western Pennsylvania. “This has been a truly fascinating time to really think about who we are, what is our mission, and to have a lot of important conversations about access and accessibility,” said Marya Sea Kaminski, the theater’s artistic director.Streaming helped TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Ark., avoid layoffs and persuade three-quarters of its subscribers to renew during the pandemic. The theater has created 10 streaming productions, five of them filmed onstage using safety protocols, including Jocelyn Bioh’s acclaimed “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which has been extended through March 14. (Another play, about Marie Curie, is watchable through that date as well.)“Obviously, it’s better to sit down in the theater,” said Martin Miller, the organization’s executive director. “But tell that to a kid in a rural school 100 miles away who might not otherwise have a theater to go to, or to the patron who came for years but can’t leave home anymore home due to mobility issues.”The virtual pivot is not for everyone. In interviews, several theater-lovers around the country expressed screen fatigue, quality concerns and technology woes. “I tried,” said Jonathan Adler, a 42-year-old psychology professor in Massachusetts. “Much of it is quite entertaining, some of it is quite moving, and a bit of it is dreck, but, quite frankly, none of it is theater.”But to others, streaming is a gift — even preferable to live performance. Before the pandemic, Rena Tobey, a 62-year-old freelance educator in New York, subscribed to multiple local theaters; now, citing comfort, sightlines and sound quality, “I will be thrilled to give them all up to watch from home.”Even when theaters resume live productions for live audiences, many are planning to put money behind streaming as part of their offerings. Ma-Yi Theater Company and Dixon Place, both in New York, have invested in studio-quality equipment, hoping for rental income as well as to innovate in their own work.From left, Carly Sakolove, Amy Hillner Larson and Michael West in “NEWSical the Musical,” the first show produced and streamed by the Lied Center for Performing Arts.Credit…via Lied Center for Performing ArtsThat future has already arrived at the Lied Center for Performing Arts in Lincoln, Neb., where socially distanced performances returned in July. The center bought a five-camera system to broadcast work from its theater and has been using it since September. Its spring 2021 season — yes, it has a spring season — will feature Kelli O’Hara, the Silkroad Ensemble and mandolinist Chris Thile, all viewable either in person or online.And the Oregon Shakespeare Festival recently announced a 2021 season that promises both live and virtual productions, including a “Cymbeline” released in episodes over two years. Nataki Garrett, the festival’s artistic director, said the pandemic had expedited her efforts to reach new audiences.“We are providing a door,” she said, “for anybody to enter.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More