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      Review: 'A Thousand Ways (Part Two): An Encounter' at the Public Theater

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      The experimental company 600 Highwaymen is back with theater of the most intimate kind, starring you and a stranger at close range.“So once you go inside,” the usher instructed me at the Public Theater on Saturday, “you’re going to walk onto the stage, and you’re going to take the seat farthest from the door.”“Farthest from the door,” I repeated calmly out loud, while my brain blared in silent alarm: “Wait, what? We’re doing this on the stage?”There are people drawn to center stage like blossoms to the sun, and then there is me, their opposite. Participatory theater scares me — even when, as in this case, it deliberately has no audience. Doing it onstage would make it extra intimidating.Still, I had swooned last fall for “A Phone Call,” the participatory, telephonic first part of the triptych “A Thousand Ways,” by the experimental company 600 Highwaymen. Ever since, I had been rooting for the in-person Part Two, “An Encounter,” to hurry up and get to New York so I could do it: just me and a stranger, following its script together. Now here it was. It’s just that, in my mind’s eye, it had all been much lower-key.None of this dramatic business of returning to the Public for the first time since the shutdown to find the lobby — normally a people-watching nirvana — whisper-quiet, then going upstairs to the Martinson Theater, where for a few minutes I was totally, eerily alone. My first encounter in “An Encounter,” then, wasn’t with my partner in this two-hander but with that familiar space, seen from an unfamiliar vantage, with nearly 200 empty seats staring back at me.As for “An Encounter” itself, my worry was unwarranted. It is a joy; even if it scares you, go. This is a work of inquisitive humanity and profound gentleness, which over the course of an hour buffs away the armor that lets us proceed through our days brusque, numb and antagonistic.Running concurrently in several spaces at the Public, it is seemingly as simple as simple can be. Like “A Phone Call,” which brings together two strangers by telephone and prompts them with an automated voice to share stories and memories, it is a private scripted meeting between strangers, both regular people, face to face across a table, masks on, with a glass panel between them.An arrow indicated which participant was to take each card. Maria Baranova(While you do not need to do Part One to do Part Two, the Public is also offering “A Phone Call” through July 18. The planned third part to “A Thousand Ways,” completing the journey through the pandemic, will be a large-group, in-person show.)In the theater, my stranger and I — I still do not know his name, or the bottom of his face — sat at the table under the stage lights and submitted to the script: a neat stack of printed notecards fitted in a small gap at the bottom of the glass. An arrow, pointing my way or his, indicated who was to take each card. On these we read our lines and stage directions.“Hello,” one stranger begins.“Hi,” says the other.“It’s good to see you,” the first responds, and what is striking is that this line of dialogue turns out to be perfectly true. It also hints at what this exercise asks and allows: that we look closely at each other, but kindly; that we take turns speaking and listening; that we try to imagine the contours of each other’s humanity. In this riven culture, when compassion for the stranger can be in much shorter supply than knee-jerk antipathy, these are not small gestures.Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, a.k.a. 600 Highwaymen, give the strangers in “An Encounter” a common goal — to get through the script together.“In silence, look across from you and imagine what keeps them up at night,” one stage direction reads. “In silence, imagine something they’re coping with,” says another.They have us draw pictures on the glass together with our fingertips (my stranger is a better artist than I am), tell each other scripted stories and ask and answer a laundry list of offbeat yes-or-no questions: “Have you ever broken a bone?” “Have you ever broken a heart?” When my stranger answered yes to that one, his dark eyes got so soulful that I felt his anguish and wanted to know more. But that of course is not permitted.“An Encounter” is less about the details of our lives than “A Phone Call” and more about spending time in the physical presence of another human being. I know that my stranger has a passport, can’t drive a stick shift and likes to dance. I know he has neat handwriting. My guess is that he is an actor and that he, like me, grabbed at the chance for this experience out of eagerness for theater’s return.But is this theater? Not really, though the script has a beautifully solid structure and the ending is both startling and powerful. Rather, this piece uses tools of theater — text, storytelling, the agreement to gather at an appointed time to have a collective experience — to achieve goals of theater, foremost the stoking of empathy and compassion. How extraordinarily “An Encounter” does this struck me only afterward.I am not usually the sort of person who walks around with Sondheim tunes as my internal soundtrack, but I was when I left “An Encounter.” Out on the sidewalk, as I headed toward Astor Place, then down 8th Street, I couldn’t stop scanning the weekend crowds. A snatch of “Another Hundred People” played on repeat in my head: the phrase “a city of strangers,” imbued with more warmth than I’d ever heard it.It sounds weird, and it was, but “An Encounter” left me in an altered state, keenly aware of these many people around me whom I did not know, and who seemed so alive with possibility, complexity, depth. Any one of them might have sat across from me at that table and been my stranger.I made my way through the throngs, trying to imagine the contours of their humanity.A Thousand Ways (Part Two): An EncounterThrough Aug. 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.orgA Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone CallThrough July 18; publictheater.org More

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      It’s Outside, but Shakespeare in the Park Still Plans Social Distancing

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      The free, beloved summer tradition will enjoy an extended run, but currently plans very limited capacity, with masks required.One of New York City’s hottest tickets is about to get even harder to get: When Shakespeare in the Park returns to the Delacorte Theater this summer after losing a year to the pandemic, it plans to sharply limit capacity in order to follow state guidelines, officials announced on Thursday.The 1,800-seat theater currently plans to allow only 428 attendees for each performance of “Merry Wives,” the intermission-free adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” being put on by the Public Theater; it says it must do so under the state’s current, but rapidly-shifting, rules. But there will be more performances: The show will run three weeks longer than originally scheduled, through Sept. 18 rather than Aug. 28.In a news release, officials said the capacity limit was put in place because of the need for social distancing. They said all theatergoers over age 2 would be required to wear a mask and either provide proof of full vaccination or a recent negative Covid test to attend.The decision to significantly limit the size of the audience stands in contrast to some other New York venues that have gotten permission to reopen to bigger crowds. Radio City Music Hall, for instance, plans to reopen this month to a full, indoor house of maskless, vaccinated ticket holders. Broadway shows have started ticket sales for what will be full-capacity performances, some of which will begin in mid-September. And on the other side of the country, the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles has decided to start selling all 18,000 of its seats.It is possible that the limits could be eased before opening night. A spokeswoman for the Public said Thursday that New York health and safety protocols for small and medium-sized performing arts spaces still require six feet of social distance between patrons. She said the theater would await updated guidance from the state and would adapt its policies as needed. More

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      Sondheim Musical, in Development for Years, Looks Unlikely

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      The 91-year-old composer told the Public Theater last year that he was no longer working on a show based on the films of Luis Buñuel.One big lingering question for theater fans following the news that the prolific producer Scott Rudin will “step back” from his stage projects: What will happen to his shows in development, notably the Stephen Sondheim musical “Buñuel,” which at last report was slated to be produced Off Broadway at the Public Theater?Rudin, who is facing a reckoning over decades-long accusations of bullying, had been a commercial producer attached to the musical.But the Public now says: It isn’t happening.In the wake of reports about Rudin, the Public on April 22 put out a statement saying it had not worked with him in years. Responding to a follow-up question, Laura Rigby, a spokeswoman for the Public, said last week that Sondheim had informed the theater last year that he was no longer developing the musical. (The Public clarified that its cancellation had nothing to do with Rudin.)Sondheim, who turned 91 at the end of March, did not respond to emailed questions about the project’s status.The work, which was based on the films of the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, promised to be one of the last chances for theatergoers to see a new stage musical by musical theater’s most venerated composer. Sondheim had been developing it for the last decade or so with the playwright David Ives (“Venus in Fur”), who also did not respond to email requests for comment.Sondheim had previously said that the show would comprise two acts, the first based on the filmmaker’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), and the second on “The Exterminating Angel” (1962).The musical, he said, was about “trying to find a place to have dinner.”He offered more detail during a 2014 appearance at The New Yorker Festival, explaining that the first act involved a group of people trying to find a place to dine, while the second focused on people who finally did just that — and were trapped afterward in hellish circumstances.The project would have been the composer’s first major musical in more than a decade. His last was “Road Show,” a 2008 collaboration with John Weidman about two brothers constantly looking to strike it rich, which was presented at the Public.“Buñuel” had a mini workshop at the Public in November 2016, with a cast that included Michael Cerveris, Heidi Blickenstaff and Sierra Boggess, with a hoped-for opening date of late 2017. The New York Post reported at the time that Joe Mantello, who directed “Wicked” and the 2004 Broadway revival of Sondheim’s “Assassins,” was set to direct.Cerveris said in an email last week that the first act was essentially complete at the time of the workshop, and the second was “sketched out, but still awaiting much of the music.” He said a later music workshop was planned, but it was canceled so Sondheim could use the time to continue writing.Then, he said, the trail essentially went cold. He said he was sorry to hear of what looks to be the show’s demise.“It was an appropriately surreal, unnerving and often hilarious piece,” he said. “And Steve was, as ever, experimenting with some fascinating, complex musical structures which David’s sensibilities seemed to suit really well, I thought.”Sondheim is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize (in 1985, for “Sunday in the Park With George”) and eight Tony Awards (including one for lifetime achievement), more than any other composer. A film remake of “West Side Story,” for which he wrote the lyrics, is due out at the end of the year. And whenever New York theaters fully reopen, the Classic Stage Company plans to revive “Assassins.”Cerveris said that, despite hearing nothing of “Buñuel” for several years, he had still been hoping for another Sondheim show.“The marriage with Buñuel felt pretty right for the times, and the world has only gotten darker and weirder since then,” he said. “I’d have loved to see it come to be. But then, I will always want more Sondheim in the world.” More

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      Review: A Perfect Storm of Weather and Racism in ‘shadow/land’

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      Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play about Black women struggling to survive Hurricane Katrina gets an ear-tingling podcast production.In its heyday, Shadowland, a New Orleans dance hall, bar and hotel, provided its Black clientele, many of them visiting jazz musicians, with the dignity and amenities (including air conditioning) they were barred from enjoying at whites-only establishments.But on the day that Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s floridly powerful new play “shadow/land” begins — Aug. 29, 2005 — that heyday is long gone, and the place is in bad disrepair. Mostly memories live there now.If the date doesn’t ring a bell, that’s part of the reason Dickerson-Despenza must have felt the need to write “shadow/land” in the first place. It is the opening salvo in a planned 10-play sequence about Hurricane Katrina and its long, too often invisible tendrils of disaster.That the disaster is literally invisible here, in a thrilling Public Theater production that renders the play as a podcast, is all to the good. As directed for the ear by Candis C. Jones and performed by actors with extraordinary voices, “shadow/land,” may be better in your headphones than it would have been onstage.Surely its densely poetic language and cataclysmic events would be too much to take in a realistic context. Even without that, the play demands a lot, bending the familiar genre in which families wrangle over property — a genre that includes Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate” — toward bigger aims and expressionistic ends. Depending on your taste for it, the imperfect joinery of those modes in “shadow/land” is either a problem or a mark of a handmade and intensely personal art. For me it was both.In any case, the story is compelling. Though 80 years old and in middle-stage dementia, Magalee, the primary owner of Shadowland, shows no interest in closing what has been for many decades a proud family business. Her daughter Ruth, tired of the responsibility and cost involved, and knowing that their corner of New Orleans is in the last throes of decline, is eager to sell to a developer who promises a “face lift for the neighborhood.”On the overdetermined day Katrina will hit, she has come to take her mother to higher ground — and to force her to sign the inevitable “papers” she hopes will free them from their straitened, careworn lives.But living carefree is not a freedom equally distributed in a world that, as Dickerson-Despenza reveals it, is steeped in racism, especially the environmental kind. Ten minutes into the play, the storm announces itself with a violent gust of wind, a shattered window and a clock that falls portentously from the wall. Most of the city’s richer and whiter population has already evacuated, but Ruth and Magalee have waited too long; the day before, the roads were already “more congested than a chile with pneumonia,” Ruth says, and soon enough a live oak has “fainted” on top of her car.As the floodwaters rise within Shadowland, the conflict between mother and daughter intensifies: Ruth calling for help to get out, Magalee clinging to what’s left of an identity that has merged with the building’s.These scenes are framed by interjections from a griot, or traditional Black storyteller. This character, whom Dickerson-Despenza added for the audio version, speaks even more lushly than the others, a choice that may seem like linguistic icing or overkill depending on your tolerance for lines like “stars bedazzle a sprained black sky as the City untangles its raw limbs.”Still, as delivered by the New Orleans poet Sunni Patterson, the largeness of the wording comes to seem like the precise correlative for the largeness of the disaster.The balance of naturalism and otherworldliness is more complicated for the other two actors, but just as successfully achieved. As Magalee, Lizan Mitchell is wonderfully salty in her maternal mode and heartbreakingly childlike in her delusions. And as Ruth, Michelle Wilson (a star of “Sweat” at the Public and on Broadway) manages to create a fully rounded human character — with a husband, a lover, and a daughter to think of — while also serving as the play’s eyewitness to the terrible things happening outside the window.If that’s too much for a 70-minute play to wrangle, the problem is a better one for a playwright to take on than too little. In “[hieroglyph],” the second installment in Dickerson-Despenza’s Katrina Cycle — which I saw last month, in a filmed production from the San Francisco Playhouse and the Lorraine Hansberry Theater — the mechanism by which mere events were turned into drama was also noticeably clunky. Its characters, including a 13-year-old girl and her father, survivors of Katrina who wind up in Chicago with secrets to unpack, often seem to be serving the author’s needs instead of their own.There are times when “shadow/land” suffers from the same condition, one sign of which is the tendency of Ruth and Magalee to provide back story by telling each other (and thus us) things they would both already know.But this play is saved — and, more than that, lifted — by its tragic vision. The production also makes an enormous difference. Delfeayo Marsalis’s haunting music, bent and blurred through memory and, thanks to Palmer Heffernan’s immersive sound design, often morphing into the sound of the storm itself, helps us understand that what’s at stake is not just a building but an entire cultural history.That’s a big project, even before you multiply it by 10. Nor are the aftereffects of Katrina the limit of Dickerson-Despenza’s current theatrical interests. Her play “cullud wattah,” set against the backdrop of the Flint water crisis, last week won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for playwriting; the Public, which originally planned to produce it last summer, hopes to try again as soon as it is safe to do so.An astonishing start for a 29-year-old writer. Though Dickerson-Despenza says she does not consider herself primarily a theater artist but a “cultural worker” making space for Black women, she may, like her “shadow/land” characters, find that the emergencies of our day have a different fate in mind for her.shadow/landAvailable at publictheater.org and on major podcast platforms. More

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      Erika Dickerson-Despenza Wins Blackburn Prize for ‘cullud wattah’

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      The play is about the effect of the Flint, Mich., water crisis on three generations of women.Erika Dickerson-Despenza quit her last non-theater job in 2019, ready to pursue a full-time career as a playwright in New York. And that career was looking good: she was wrapping up a fellowship at the Lark, starting a residency at the Public Theater, and working on a play inspired by the Flint water crisis.The Public scheduled a staging of that play — her first professional production — for the summer of 2020.You can imagine what happened next.The coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters across America, and with it, scuttled her debut. But now the play, “cullud wattah,” is being recognized with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a respected annual award honoring work by women and nonbinary playwrights. The prize is a distinctive one — $25,000 for the winner, plus a Willem de Kooning print — and many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Wendy Wasserstein and Paula Vogel).Dickerson-Despenza, a 29-year-old Chicago native, is thrilled. “It’s a really affirming moment,” she said, “not only for me as an emerging playwright, but also for the way that I am doing my work as a queer Black woman who has intentionally decided to write about Black women and girls.”Her career, like so many others, has been upended by the pandemic. “cullud wattah” is on hold, but a spokeswoman for the Public said the theater still hopes to produce it once it resumes presenting in-person productions.In the meantime, she has been working on a 10-play cycle about the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. The second play in the cycle, “[hieroglyph],” was staged (without a live audience), filmed and streamed earlier this year by San Francisco Playhouse and Lorraine Hansberry Theater. And next week the Public Theater will introduce an audio production of “shadow/land,” the first installment of her Katrina cycle.“I am interested in what we learn, and do not learn, and what history has to teach us,” she said.She said she had been following the news out of Flint for some time before deciding to write “cullud wattah”; for a while, she said, she just made notes about the crisis and posted them on her wall. The play imagines the effect of the water crisis on three generations of women.“I had a wall full of Flint, and I didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. “The play is not so much about Flint, as it is about how an apocalypse makes everything else bubble to the surface.” More

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      ‘Romeo y Julieta’ Review: Young Love in Two Languages

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      Lupita Nyong’o and Juan Castano star in a podcast adaptation that delivers the poetry — in Spanish and English — but not the fire.The scheme is so harebrained that it belongs more to farce than tragedy, but Shakespeare decided otherwise. In “Romeo and Juliet,” a trusted friar gives the desperate Juliet a potion to drink so she can fake her own demise.For a good “two and forty hours,” she will seem dead, he tells her, “and then awake as from a pleasant sleep.”Awake in a tomb full of corpses, he means, but that’s a mere detail. In countless productions, the hatching of this plan is where the plot flies off the rails. What is he, nuts, suggesting this to a teenager who’s come to him for help?Yet in the Public Theater’s bilingual audio production “Romeo y Julieta,” the extraordinary Julio Monge portrays Friar Lawrence with such warm ease and steadiness that the ploy seems — well, still exceedingly unwise, but almost persuasive. And the clergyman has his usual fine motive for aiding Julieta and her Romeo: to ally their warring families, turning their “rancor to pure love.”The program note for this production suggests that the Public, the most populist of Off Broadway theaters, has a similar motive concerning our own fractured culture. If this free podcast is better at conveying the poetry than the pulse of Shakespeare, its intention is laudable anyway.Starring Lupita Nyong’o as Julieta and Juan Castano as Romeo, the play is spoken in English and Spanish. It’s not a Sharks and Jets arrangement, either; the Montagues and Capulets are fluent in both languages. Switching nimbly from one to the other, midspeech or midsentence, is a means of welcoming speakers of either into the audience, and uniting us there — albeit at a distance from one another.Directed by Saheem Ali, the play is gently adapted by Ali and Ricardo Pérez González, and based on a Spanish translation by Alfredo Michel Modenessi. Presented with WNYC Studios, the recording (with original music by Michael Thurber and sound design by Bray Poor and Jessica Paz) comes with a downloadable script showing every line in Spanish and English, making it easier to follow along.Each actor in the cast of 22 takes great care with verbal clarity. Interpretive depth is harder to come by; textures of humor and passion, joy and grief, are scarce. Any scene where Monge appears, though, finds the others upping their games.That includes the tantalizingly paired Nyong’o and Castano, whose lucid performances never ignite the rebellious adolescent fervor that drives these just-met, I-would-die-for-you lovers to their irrational extremes. Romeo and Julieta are kids, with all the tendencies toward personal drama of people their age, yet we don’t sense that in them or in Romeo’s friends.It’s not a lack of talent on anyone’s part. What it feels like, largely, is a pandemic side effect. This show’s many artists couldn’t gather in a room to dig into characters and relationships; they rehearsed and recorded over Zoom. And when we listen to the podcast, and need the script to figure out who’s who in a crowd or a fight, we yearn for costume and gesture, for bodies in space.This “Romeo y Julieta” is a production in need of a stage, when that’s possible again. For now, it’s waiting on its third dimension.Romeo y JulietaAvailable at publictheater.org, wnycstudios.org and on all major podcast platforms. 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