Seven Deadly Sins (Play)

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares149 Views

    When Theater Installations Aim to Make Room for Drama

    by

    These worthy and adventurous lockdown experiments too often give short shrift to the relationship between a script and how an audience takes it in.For the last year and a half, I’ve imagined shuttered theaters as shrines to live performance — the empty seats, the leftover sets, the lone ghost lights lit like memorial candles.While performances eventually moved online and outside, and in the last few months, thanks to mask mandates and vaccines, back inside, some companies and artists have chosen a different route: offering theater-adjacent installations that allow audiences to engage more directly with the spaces.In these shows, we are often asked to walk through the venues and explore, freely or with the help of a guide, not merely sit and watch. And with small clusters of bodies in motion, they may be (or at least feel) safer than the typical experience of being locked down in your seat.Unfortunately, most of the theatrical installations I’ve seen — which include “A Dozen Dreams,” “Seven Deadly Sins,” “The Watering Hole,” and, most recently, “Definition” and “Semblance” — have struggled to successfully integrate content and location. Most of these works, which, with the exception of “Seven Deadly Sins,” did not use any live actors, were an inventive approach to theater in a time when it was unsafe to sit and gather in these spaces. But they have yet to realize the full potential of these hybrid forms as more than a stopgap on the way back to pre-pandemic theater.“Semblance,” written and directed by Whitney White for New York Theater Workshop, is a set of lyrical monologues about how Black women are perceived and stereotyped. Socially distant groupings of white director’s chairs situated on an Astroturf floor in front of two colossal TV screens set side by side.On them we see Nikiya Mathis, playing Black women of different classes, from a bus driver to a politician. Her image often confronts itself, emphasizing the tension already present in the writing. And Mathis makes a feast out of these monologues, transforming her intonation and inflections. But the ultimate experience is far from immersive; in fact, it is little more than a dressed-up screening of a short film. The space is forgettable.Audience members watched videos at their own pace at Whitney White’s other recent installation, entitled “Definition.”Maya SharpeAnother White installation, “Definition,” presented by the Bushwick Starr at the performance space Mercury Store in July, had a clear understanding of its space but couldn’t make it cohere with the piece’s myriad elements. The first portion was designed like a museum; the stark white walls and starkly modern architecture of the space lent themselves to the curated selection of paintings and photographs that hung on the walls.Likewise, a selection of short videos by a handful of artists, which played on a projection screen on a mezzanine level that opened up to a bleacher-like flight of stairs, were comfortably showcased. This part of the production had a free-floating style; the audience members were left to wander at will, and were free to sit and watch the videos but could also stand or continue to browse.Guides then appeared, leading us to a room where we were given headphones. The rest of the experience, an audio-only musical with each act taking place in a separate designated space, lacked clarity. Gauzy curtains divided up the theater, but there was little to distinguish each subspace beyond the different seating arrangements.To lead an audience through a space should be to create a new narrative out of that movement: How do we change in moving from one room to another? How does our understanding of the text change? What do we see differently in one room that another couldn’t offer?One of the structures created for “A Dozen Dreams” at Brookfield Place.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beauty of En Garde Arts’s “A Dozen Dreams,” a sumptuously designed installation of 12 rooms that served as stages for audio monologues by female playwrights, was that each location had its own identity. The labyrinthine setup at Brookfield Place, with interlinked rooms divided by curtains, recalled the odd way we move through dreams — stories bleed into one another, scenes change suddenly. The experience of venturing from one piece to the next was essential.But even with such a luscious experience, I questioned the installation’s awkward relationship with Brookfield, a high-end mall. Mundanely expensive shops were juxtaposed with a uniquely surreal visual journey — art placed in a home for consumerism. Surely there’s a disconnect there?Similarly, “Seven Deadly Sins,” performed in empty storefronts in the meatpacking district, was an eye-catching spectacle but didn’t fully connect the text to the environs.The neighborhood’s history (slaughterhouses and sex clubs, and now pricey shops) was ostensibly reflected in seven short plays that focused on the vices of its title. But mostly we got guides mentioning tidbits about the neighborhood in passing, as they led the audience from one storefront to another.Audience members write notes as part of the Signature Theater’s “The Watering Hole.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA lost sense of communal gathering was one of the themes of the installation “The Watering Hole,” a mixed-media project created and conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon that ran at the Pershing Square Signature Center last month. Seventeen artists collaborated with Nottage and Haymon on the installation, which lacked coherency. Piles of sand and deflated beach balls in one corner, handwritten signs on the walls: this disjointed odyssey did no justice to the space as a watering hole for thought or a beloved home for several theaters. Even with talented creators, the magic of a theater can be flattened by a misuse of space.The irony is that I fondly remember the Signature Center as a safe haven. In my busy pre-pandemic days I knew I could take a break in the second floor cafe. I’ve waited there between a Saturday matinee and an evening show. I’ve ducked in to get out of the rain.These moments — along with what appeared on the Signature’s stages — were stolen away by the pandemic.Installations have offered reasonable ways to keep theater going during the pandemic. But they can’t just be backdrops. Real theater needs a space to breathe.SemblanceThrough Aug. 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ Review: Pride and Pole Dancing Behind Glass

      by

      This array of short plays has viewers in headphones wandering the meatpacking district for stylish, but shallow, theatrical thrills.Sex and spectacle are on the menu in “Seven Deadly Sins,” a sumptuously staged, deliciously outfitted exploration of vice performed in the meatpacking district, once home to slaughterhouses and sex clubs, though now more about trendy dining and swanky shopping.Yet this feast for the eyes — bringing to life seven short plays performed in storefronts to audiences who mostly watch through glass but listen on headphones — turns out to be more about appearances than anything else.Originally conceived by Michel Hausmann for a theater in Miami Beach and directed by Moisés Kaufman, this iteration of “Seven Deadly Sins” features work by its director (covering greed) as well as by the notable playwrights Ngozi Anyanwu (gluttony), Thomas Bradshaw (sloth), MJ Kaufman (pride), Jeffrey LaHoste (envy), Ming Peiffer (wrath) and Bess Wohl (lust).But we begin in Purgatory (a blue neon sign makes that clear) greeted by Shuga Cain from Season 11 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who arrives like a beautiful, lip-syncing hurricane of gloss and glitter in the first of Dede Ayite’s many stunning costumes.“What better place to look at human nature than the stage,” she purrs, setting in motion how the show will work: Each of three groups will maneuver through the circuit of plays in a different order over a three-block radius, sitting to watch each roughly 10-minute performance before rising and walking to the next.My first sin of the night was gluttony, for which Anyanwu presents an alternative Garden of Eden story with “Tell Me Everything You Know”: Here it’s just Eve, here called “Naked” (a timid Morgan McGhee) and mostly covered in knee-length dreadlocks, and the snake, called “Clothed” (a sultry Shavanna Calder), in a sleek black bodysuit and a ponytail of hair styled into giant interconnected chain links. The snake’s temptation becomes queer in this context, and Anyanwu has linguistic fun with her Eve’s awakening, which comes in a verbal cascade.Sex, queerness and body positivity are central themes of most of the plays. In LaHoste’s envy play, “Naples,” set not in a storefront but in a shipping container on a cobblestone street, a manipulative 18th century French noblewoman (Caitlin O’Connell, stately yet cunning) has a less than friendly exchange with her husband’s not-so-secret boy toy (Andrew Keenan-Bolger).Bradshaw’s “Hard,” about a schlubby, unmotivated gamer (Brandon J. Ellis) whose wife (Shamika Cotton) tries to convince him to have sex, struggles to hit its comedic beats. The slovenly man-child paired with the attractive partner is old hat, and the sitcom dynamic between sad-sack husband and nagging wife feels unintentionally regressive.Cody Sloan in MJ Kaufman’s play “Wild Pride,” which looks at the commercialization of gay rights.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMJ Kaufman’s “Wild Pride” is the most politically conscious play of the batch, a pointed critique of the commercialization of queer advocacy. In a storefront set full of TVs, rainbow streamers and balloons that read “Queer AF,” a trans social media star called the “Guru” (Cody Sloan) believes he’s providing affirmation for his fan base (Bianca “B” Norwood, voicing comments from followers and other influencers) but finds the tide turn against him and is confronted with the shallowness of his brand.It’s a bold and welcome pick for Pride month, sharply underlining the limits of performative advocacy, especially online.Moisés Kaufman’s purely comic greed play, which premiered as part of the original Miami Beach production of the show, reappears here. “Watch,” in which siblings (a comic Tricia Alexandro and Eric Ulloa) fight about their freshly deceased father’s pricey Rolex, feels like the odd man out of this otherwise pretty horny bunch, which include the two most explicitly sex-themed — and powerful — plays in the mix, Wohl’s “Lust” and Peiffer’s “Longhorn.”Donna Carnow pole dances while Cynthia Nixon voices her thoughts in Bess Wohl’s play “Lust.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn “Lust,” a pole dancer (Donna Carnow) does her usual routine as we hear, via voice-over, her internal monologue, performed by Cynthia Nixon in her best matter-of-fact Miranda Hobbes. The mix of mundane thoughts (“Refill prescription for eczema cream”), casually withering judgment (“Oh, sweetheart, do you think I don’t know a toupee when I see one?”) and hefty declarations (“There is no God.”) showcase Wohl’s talent for capturing the quirky ways people think and move through their everyday lives.Carnow’s dancing, however, is the production’s true showstopper. She does splits and body rolls, windmills herself around the pole and performs aerial contortions that look utterly unreal — all with perfect nonchalance. And did I mention the platform stripper heels? When she’s upset, her heels violently stomp down to the floor, and when she’s caught in an anxious spiral her body likewise spins around the pole.Her facial expressions, however, can veer into exaggeration, revealing how Wohl’s otherwise clever script becomes didactic when it comes to the topic of sexual assault. Similarly, Peiffer’s “Longhorn” — tracing the troubling and fascinating power dynamics between a white man (Brad Fleischer) and an Asian dominatrix (Kahyun Kim) — ends on a gratuitously violent note. It’s a painfully explicit political parable that, while valid, banks too much on shock value.It’s a problem throughout “Seven Deadly Sins,” a presentation of Tectonic Theater Project and Madison Wells Live. That’s not to say their money isn’t well spent, both in Ayite’s costumes and David Rockwell’s remarkable scenic and site design.Shavanna Calder, left, and Morgan McGhee in Ngozi Anyanwu’s gluttony-themed “Tell Me Everything You Know.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe gives Eden dimension with bright flowers and layered panels painted in lush greens in Anyanwu’s “Tell Me Everything You Know.” And the cascade of gilded roses and baroque accents in “Naples,” as well as the sex dungeon props in “Longhorn,” show extraordinary attention to detail.Yet perhaps my favorite of the sets was Christopher and Justin Swader’s clever scenic design for “Watch” — the contemporary, lifeless room of what appears to be a funeral home, bisected by a grave with a coffin in the center, which we see as if from overhead.“Seven Deadly Sins” is eye candy, no doubt, and a fun interactive experience for those who crave a lively outdoor performance with a few raunchy surprises. But given the emphasis on sexuality, and nods to the meatpacking district’s transgressive history, I expected a more exacting sociopolitical statement. There should be more than meets the eye.Seven Deadly SinsThrough July 18 at 94 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; sevendeadlysinsnyc.com More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Storefronts Turned Stages for ‘Seven Deadly Sins’

      by

      A live theatrical event in the Meatpacking district, featuring several playwrights and sets by David Rockwell, “turns New York itself into the playhouse.”On a balmy weekday afternoon in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district, a small crowd gathered around a storefront window where a neon-lit pole dancer in purple platform stilettos performed an alluring routine. Passers-by stopped to gawk at the silent spectacle. Some took out their camera phones.There was no way for them to know that this was a rehearsal of a short play called “Lust,” or that soon the dancer would be performing it nine times a night. On the sidewalk, the director Moisés Kaufman sat in a bistro chair, surrounded by members of his Tectonic Theater Project. Through their headsets they heard what the pedestrians could not: pulsing music and the character’s narrated thoughts.Across the street, sleek installations in other vacant storefronts — a grave site, a dominatrix’s dungeon — were also sets for plays, one about greed, the other wrath. And that open storage container parked at the curb? It would become the stage for a piece about envy. Riffs on gluttony, pride and sloth would have wide windows in a disused space two blocks away.Ngozi Anyanwu’s play, inspired by gluttony, follows two women in a garden and explores the pitfalls of being overly curious.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesMing Peiffer’s play, a riff on wrath, imagines an encounter between an Asian dominatrix and her white client.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesAs New York embarks on its hot vax summer, Kaufman and Tectonic Theater are bringing “Seven Deadly Sins” to the streets. A carnal, high-gloss evening of short plays performed largely in storefronts to peripatetic audiences supplied with headphones to hear the dialogue, it started previews on Tuesday, part of the restless, exuberant rebirth of live theater — experimental and open-air.“The urgency that I feel about making these plays is something that I have not felt in years,” Kaufman said in an interview. “Because we — the artist, the actor, the playwright — we are needing it. We have this hunger. But I also profoundly believe that the audiences share that hunger.”Probably best known for the Matthew Shepard play “The Laramie Project,” Kaufman imported the concept for this show wholesale from Miami Beach, where Michel Hausmann, the artistic director of Miami New Drama, staged the first version of “Seven Deadly Sins” last fall.In the Florida iteration, Kaufman wrote and directed just one piece, “All I Want Is Everything,” about greed. For New York, he is directing the whole 90-minute evening, surrounded by a fresh crop of playwrights: Ngozi Anyanwu (gluttony), Thomas Bradshaw (sloth), MJ Kaufman (pride), Jeffrey LaHoste (envy), Ming Peiffer (wrath) and Bess Wohl (lust).With the eye of the Tony Award-winning set designer David Rockwell, the show has suited its aesthetic to the neighborhood, past and present. Once notorious for gritty sex clubs and streets puddled with animal blood, the Meatpacking district has evolved into a chic backdrop for modeling shoots and the home of the High Line and the Whitney Museum of American Art.Jeffrey LaHoste inside the set for “Naples,” about bisexuality in the French aristocracy, inspired by envy.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe plays of “Seven Deadly Sins” tend toward the political, which is in keeping with Tectonic’s tradition. And as a note on the show’s website warns, some of the content may be upsetting, such as a venomous confrontation between the two characters in Peiffer’s play. Children under 13 are not allowed.When Kaufman contacted Peiffer about “Seven Deadly Sins” — at what she called “the height of the Asian hate,” right after the Atlanta shootings left six women of Asian descent dead — she knew that she would choose to write about wrath. In “Longhorn,” she imagines an encounter between an Asian dominatrix and her client, a white man.“The thing that I kind of wanted to get at with my play is the ways in which different people, depending on their identity — their cultural identity, their racial identity, their gender identity — are allowed to express their rage in different ways,” Peiffer said.Or in the case of women, she added, not allowed, “because, you know, you’re called crazy or you’re emotional or you’re on your period or whatever the hell.”Wohl, who wrote the pole-dancing play and is a Tony nominee for “Grand Horizons,” said she picked her sin because “you can’t turn down lust when it’s on the table.” She, too, has used the project to examine sexual politics and violence, as well as the voyeuristic element of storefront performance.“There was something really evocative to me about creating these little spaces and trapping performers in them and asking them to repeat the action over and over for different audiences,” she said.“You can’t turn down lust when it’s on the table,” Bess Wohl said about the sin she picked for her play.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThomas Bradshaw’s play, about a couple working through their sexual slump, deals with sloth.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesKaufman’s own play occupies the same city block as “Lust” and “Longhorn.” Given where it falls in the rhythm of the evening, he decided he needed to reshape his script from what it had been in Miami Beach.“The playwright Moisés Kaufman had to talk to the artistic director Moisés Kaufman,” he said, deadpan, “and the artistic director said to the playwright, ‘I love your play, but all the other plays that are here are very dark and very difficult. You have to make your play a comedy.’”But his play’s set has the same designers that it had in Florida: the brothers Christopher and Justin Swader. Rockwell did all the others — his first collaboration with Kaufman, though they had been talking about working together for more than 16 years, ever since Rockwell saw Kaufman’s Broadway production of “I Am My Own Wife.”Rockwell, an architect who spent a chunk of the pandemic immersed in outdoor dining design and navigating New York City rules about it, said he was drawn to the logistical design challenges of “Seven Deadly Sins.” He used his bureaucratic know-how to get clearance for audiences to be seated in the same curbside zone where restaurant sheds tend to be.The return of live theater to the city is a “collective healing process,” Rockwell said, one that, in getting people into public spaces this summer, “turns New York itself into the playhouse.”Each of the three nightly showings will accommodate 66 ticketed audience members, split into three smaller groups that watch the plays in a different order, with 22 spectators per storefront. Gigi Pritzker, whose entertainment company Madison Wells is producing the show with Tectonic, envisions its format as “something that could be done all over the world.”“The urgency that I feel about making these plays is something that I have not felt in years,” Moisés Kaufman. His short play was inspired by greed.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesTo Kaufman, who said that “Seven Deadly Sins” has gone “a bit over” its $500,000 budget, the project is also a way “to jump-start our community” post-shutdown.“To be able to hire 100 theater makers for these plays is one of the greatest joys of my life,” he said. “After the year that theater makers have had? It’s been horrific, horrific, horrific.”A publicist later updated the number of theater makers to 123.Wohl, for one, said she blinked back tears as she headed to a rehearsal of “Lust.” But she also spoke of the poignancy of seeing how the pandemic has changed the city: all the places that used to be and no longer are.“It’s just one heartbreak after another walking through the streets of Manhattan right now,” she said. “So something about animating those empty spaces feels really meaningful. It kind of breathes some life back into those spaces, or allows them to have potential rather than just loss.”The Meatpacking district is of course pocked with dormant real estate. On the other hand, when Kaufman and I popped into a restaurant in the neighborhood to talk over a drink on a recent Friday evening, the place was humming with activity.Kaufman, too, was practically vibrating — delighted to be throwing himself into a big production again, eager to unleash his show on audiences and unsuspecting pedestrians.“My husband keeps telling me, ‘Temper your excitement,’ but I am Latino, Jewish and gay,” he said. “It’s very hard to temper my excitement.”He finished his gin on the rocks. Then he headed out the door, back to his colleagues, back to work.Seven Deadly SinsThrough July 18; sevendeadlysinsnyc.com. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Miami Outdoor Theater Hit Announces a New York Arrival

      by

      “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a theatrical anthology series, will start off on June 23 at a series of storefront windows in the Meatpacking District.After enjoying a successful run in Miami Beach from late November through January, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” an outdoor theatrical anthology series that explores humanity’s basest impulses, will come to New York. Performances are scheduled to begin on June 23 and will take place in storefront windows in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.“I think it was important for us to do it in this moment of transition,” said Moisés Kaufman, the founder and artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project, which is producing the show with Madison Wells Live in association with Miami New Drama. “We wanted to be able to create something while the pandemic is still with us because it feels more like an act of defiance.”The New York version of “The Seven Deadly Sins” will feature short new plays by Ngozi Anyanwu, Thomas Bradshaw, MJ Kaufman, Jeffrey LaHoste, Ming Peiffer and Bess Wohl. Moisés Kaufman will also contribute a piece to the anthology and direct the production. Each playwright’s work will address a particular “sin”: pride, greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth or lust.“We really wanted the event to not be a revival of an existing play,” Kaufman said in an interview on Wednesday. After having been through a pandemic, “the idea that new art can be born on the streets of Manhattan is something that excites us.”The 10-minute-long plays will be viewable from the street — by a masked, socially distanced audience, who will be provided with disposable earbuds to hear the actors in the storefronts. Escorted by a guide, they will watch the seven pieces in different orders. Before viewing the artistically rendered debauchery, ticket holders will have the opportunity to grab a drink at a pop-up bar called Purgatory.The Meatpacking District Business Improvement District is pitching in to identify performance venues and manage the production’s use of public space.Dael Orlandersmith and Nilo Cruz were among the writers who contributed plays to the twice-extended inaugural production, which was conceived of by Michel Hausmann, a co-founder of Miami New Drama with Moisés Kaufman.Storefront performances have cropped up in New York periodically since the pandemic began, but none so far have matched the scale or complexity of “The Seven Deadly Sins.” In March, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that live indoor and outdoor shows could resume in the state at limited capacity beginning April 2, paving the way for more ambitious projects to take root in the city this spring and summer.Tickets go on sale May 14. Casting information will be released soon. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Bringing Stages to Storefronts in a Theater-Hungry City

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyExit InterviewBringing Stages to Storefronts in a Theater-Hungry CityMiami New Drama gave audiences a window on the “Seven Deadly Sins” when it took over part of a pedestrian mall for a production. Michel Hausmann, the artistic director of Miami New Drama, waves to passers-by from inside one of the storefronts where his company presented “Seven Deadly Sins.”Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021MIAMI — As the final performance of Miami New Drama’s “Seven Deadly Sins” ended Sunday night, the actors streamed onto Lincoln Road, thanking the company’s artistic director, Michel Hausmann. They had spent months performing separately, inside adjacent vacant storefronts on this South Beach pedestrian mall, to an audience that watched and listened from a distance.Whooping and hugging each other, they gathered around the gregarious Hausmann at the outdoor bar lit by a neon “Purgatory” sign. They continued celebrating, even as the glowing red signs, reading “Lust” “Greed” “Wrath” and more, flickered off and the block turned dark.The pandemic closed the city on March 13, the eve of the opening of Miami New Drama’s first musical. To keep the 5-year-old company going, Hausmann, who is from Venezuela, commissioned seven notable playwrights — five Latino or Latina, two Black — to write short works that would fit under the “Seven Deadly Sins” rubric.They included Aurin Squire, who imagined sloth as a white woman claiming Black identity. Carmen Pelaez envisioned pride as the arrogant statue of John Calhoun, an outspoken defender of slavery, challenging the crowd that is pulling him down. Moisés Kaufman, who co-founded New Drama with Hausmann, portrayed greed by way of a brother and sister clashing over their father’s will.Six of the plays, all with either one or two actors, were staged in glassed-in storefronts, the seventh in the loading dock of the Colony Theater, the company’s regular home on Lincoln Road.Guides led audience groups of 12 from store to store, where they listened to the actors over iPods Velcroed to their bright red, socially distanced chairs.Audience members watch as the actress Jessica Farr performs in the “Lust” section of “Seven Deadly Sins,” written by the playwright Nilo Cruz.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesActors performed inside the storefronts while audience members listened on headphones.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“Seven Deadly Sins” was extended twice, selling out for most of its two-month run. According to Actors Equity, “Seven Deadly Sins,” produced at a cost of $580,000, was the biggest live professional theater production in the country at the time, employing 100 theater workers, from stage crew to designers and actors. And thanks to meticulous precautions — including individual dressing room/rehearsal spaces — no one got sick.On the phone the morning after the show wrapped up, Hausmann reflected on the inspiration for the production and why it mattered. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did you feel seeing this show end?I cried when we couldn’t extend again. Then I made my peace with it. I feel like we pulled off a miracle. Not only artistically, but that the health protocols worked.How did you come up with the idea?I was extremely pessimistic when the pandemic hit. I’m normally an optimist. But I understood what we were facing was an unprecedented disruption. I’d been thinking for years about the empty storefronts on Lincoln Road. I was packing my office knowing I wouldn’t return for a very long time, and it hit me walking to my car and looking at those storefronts and boom! I saw the actors inside, the audience outside.“Although this is literally 40 paces from our door,” Hausmann said of the storefront experiment, “it was like producing on the moon.”Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThen I had the good and bad fortune of breaking my knee and wrist riding my bike. I spent weeks in bed. It was a quarantine inside the quarantine. My escape was imagining what I could do with the storefronts. I borrowed Thornton Wilder’s idea of doing 10-minute plays around the seven deadly sins, and a production in Venezuela in 1974 that commissioned different authors.Then what?My first call was to Dan Gelber, the Mayor of Miami Beach. I told him we have this crazy idea that is impossible to pull off without the support of the city. He said, “We’re all in.”What were you worried about?Everything. We’ve become pretty good at producing shows inside the Colony Theater. Although this is literally 40 paces from our door it was like producing on the moon. We had to create seven different theaters — lighting, sound, sets. It was uncharted territory.Any surprises?We had an incident before we opened where a man who I assume was a white nationalist was so offended by the Calhoun set that he threatened to bomb not only that storefront, but the Colony. He made that threat in a credible way. Twenty minutes later the whole block was taken over by police. That’s frightening, but that’s what theater should do. Theater needs to be political.Digital programs for the show were scannable.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesOne of the staff members who guided attendees to their seats, and from show to show.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesHow did Covid-19 protocols shape the process?We had to have three negative tests before we were even allowed to be outdoors together. After that we had to have two negative tests every week. I got very good at it — now I can share important tips. Breathe in while the swab is going in.You’ve always produced theater with a political dimension. How did that enter here?I gave the playwrights a broad mandate: Pick your favorite sin and write a 10-minute play with one or two actors. What they brought back was a look at American society through the seven deadly sins. We helped process what it means to live in America in the year of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and political reckoning.Given everything else going on, why was it important to stage live theater this year?I felt a great sense of responsibility to the theatrical ancestors who figured out how to do theater in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, during apartheid in South Africa, in the living rooms of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. To keep the flame alive.I felt an even bigger responsibility to our local artists. We never furloughed anyone. We employed a hundred people for the setup of the play and 60 professional actors and techs for the almost three months we were rehearsing and performing. Even if the play had had no artistic merit, that for me is dayenu. [Hebrew for “It would have been enough.”]What else did you learn?It’s liberating to understand we are in the business of live storytelling. The possibilities are really endless.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More