The first week of the Pandemic Theatre Project is in the books and we’re off to a solid start. The one thing that I think we’re all struggling with right now is endurance and I can’t help but think that is because of the loss of connectivity. After two hours of work either in person and masked or online, exhaustion sets in. This is certainly related to the accumulation of our life on zoom, our constant self-policing of behavior, and the weight of the world’s affairs, but there’s more. Theatre has always been the space where I could check the world at the threshold and play for hours on end. A four hour rehearsal, five times a week was a release, not a burden. Our schedule is two days a week for three hours each day and in the first week we didn’t sniff that third hour. But that’s okay. I am realizing that the focus needs to be on the quality of the work and not the quantity. We definitely had that this week. 

Monday. We met in person outside the theatre on the mini-quad, which has become my new classroom. There’s something right about being next to the theatre but never going in. It’s a constant reminder of what was that compels the focus on what is. I gave my first day address, but this time around its purpose was to share my point of view on theatre and not a specific play. It was also the first time I didn’t write anything down and not out of laziness, but because I didn’t need to. I gave my definition of what theatre is to me: live, communal storytelling. Whatever this new form becomes, that is my only ask. We then laid the foundational blocks of creating “the room,” implementing the Chicago Theatre Standards as well as setting a strategy for COVID related matters, including a Zoom room available to all. Then I attempted to lay out the vague plan of our journey. As I did this, I realized just how vague it is at this point and my stage manager, Mikayla, clocked the ensemble’s reaction. Us theatre folk thrive on a schedule with familiar tent poles. We table the play for a week; we begin blocking working towards a stumble through date; we see that off-book date on the horizon and work ourselves toward it; there’s a designer run and then another couple headed into tech; we tech long and hard with an eye on first dress; then another few runs with photography and a preview opening; and we open. These twelve weeks will look nothing like that. If we can get to our happenings, which is as close to a live performance that we’ll get, it will be in the middle section of our journey. But we don’t even know what that will look like because we haven’t done the research necessary to envision it. All we can be specific about is this week and once this week is done, we can get specific about next week. The pandemic has forced our hand with respect to being present. It’s all we have as the world changes around us every week, day, and even hour. We have no choice but to double down on the now and figure the rest out later. It contradicts the entire way I have lived my life for at least the next decade. My wife and I had 2020 entirely planned by summer of 2019. It’s all been scrapped and here we are. The second half of that evening was focused on mapping the box. My goal was to curate a brainstorm on how the basic tools of theatre relate to the restrictions we now work under with the idea that we have to reimagine why and how we do everything. What is the stage managers role in Pandemic theatre? What can lights do to help curate the audience’s threshold or their mental health? What can the set do to allow for safe blocking? How is all of this interrelated. It was successful in that the ensemble is ready to dive into the research with the idea that we have to reevaluate every tool and, as it turns out, we have a ton of tools to work with. It was also successful because in the middle of the conversation, we rode a tangent on why we do theatre in the first place. It came out of a comment on show choice and the new weight we have on choosing what plays to produce. It was agreed that that choice could be a call for justice and equity, but it could also be to relieve the pressure of the pandemic and provide an escape. Instead of keeping us on course for mapping our box, I pivoted and encouraged the conversation to become why we all do this. Community. To spark conversation. It’s fun. It feels like home. The people are my people. To see ourselves in a story. To gain self-knowledge and grow. Empathy. This is what we are fighting for. This is why this project is worth it. Theatre must survive. 

Thursday. Due to the threat of weather, we convened online. I thought there was a good chance we’d stay dry, but this gave us a rep in the Zoom Room together. We began the evening by assigning our Documentarian teams, which I broke out into Social Media, Journaling, Photo/Image, and Videography. The Social Media team will be asked to take the content created by the other teams and put it out into the world. Mikayla is also creating a website which will serve as a hub for all of the content. This is all an effort to keep a presence on the campus and show the world that we’re still here and we’re working on solutions. It will also provide a bounty of content to use in our conclusions on the other side of this journey. I imagine the key to this will be keeping the momentum and holding the teams accountable. We then moved on to assign four research teams that will focus on Greek, Kabuki, Roman, and Noh theatre. Their directive is to create a 15-minute presentation to share with the ensemble in a week’s time that focuses on the three areas of theatre: Design, The Rehearsal Room (director, actor, SM, etc.), and the Production (curating the audience). Out of these presentations, we’ll begin to dream up our experiments. Finally, we moved to the play, All My Sons. I gave my second first day address—I suppose this was my second day address—and again, I didn’t write it down. My aim was to set up parallel contexts for tabling this play. The first is to look for challenges that we have to solve within the pandemic box. I purposefully chose a play that doesn’t bend to our limitations; if we can solve this one, we can solve the rest. The second is the play within the context of America now. I needed to open the conversation around America’s reckoning with the false myth of the American Dream. I also needed to provide context for myself within this conversation. I realized the other day as I was making my way to my first class on campus this semester, that I created my syllabi and this project in a way that requires me to curate conversations on race, equity, and justice with my students. The enormity of that responsibility crashed down upon me. The nervous cough I acquired in grad school came back with a vengeance. I felt every fiber in my body pull tight. But then I breathed. Deeply. This is the work. I may not be great at this conversation, but I have been having it for some time now. I’ve been in the rooms, I’ve listened hard, but all of that means nothing without action. Now it is time. It will be messy, we will make mistakes, but we cannot shy away from it. We began to read the play without regard to “casting” as we’ve known it in the past. We discussed design challenges and advantages; the play is set in the backyard after all. A great point was brought up that, even if we set this play now and during the pandemic, this is a family bubble, so the characters wouldn’t wear masks. But the actors still have to. That’s a great first step towards breaking out of the old ideas. We then talked about our own sensitivity to pre-pandemic stories; watching TV shows with restaurants and crowds or just the word thermometer in this play. We as a country are entering into mass trauma and that has to be considered when telling a story now. Finally, we arrived at the scene where Keller plays with a neighborhood kid, Bert, and deputizes him as a policeman. A deep conversation followed about the indoctrination of our white, American youth. The pledge of allegiance. Gun culture. Cowboys and Indians. How do we frame this scene in a way that tells that story? I’m earmarking it for one of our experiments down the road. That was all just two hours, but I called it. Quality over Quantity. It was a good week. The foundation is laid. Onwards.