Delta Dawn

As the Corona Virus Charges Back, Theaters Hedge Their Bets

By Steven Leigh Morris

Pat Towne and Laura Neimi rehearse a scene from POOL BOY

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The lease is for use of that outdoor terrace, which not only sets the stage but is the stage for Hopkins’s 60-minute two-hander about the comedically isolated relationship between a long-term house sitter (Niemi) and a swimming pool maintenance technician (Pat Towne)

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For the past six weeks, director Scott Cummins has been commuting weekly — a seven-hour one-way drive between his home in Half Moon Bay (35 miles south of San Francisco) and Los Angeles. He’s not racing up and down and Golden State Freeway for the fame or the money, but to continue working with a gypsy stage company he obviously admires, Lost Angels Theatre Company (founded in 2004) – this time to direct Wendy Hopkins’s dark comedy, Pool Boy. Cummins’s prior work with the troupe includes two plays by Tracy Letts: Bug (in 2007) and Killer Joe (in 2005)

Director Scott Cummins, inspecting the stage

Anticipating both the clutches of the corona virus and aching to celebrate live theater’s triumph over it, Lost Angels producer Laura Niemi wanted to keep the production outdoors. Indeed, Pool Boy is being staged in and around a backyard swimming pool. With no theater of her own, she worked out a short-term lease with the owner of a Mulholland Drive hilltop home with ample street parking, and a swimming pool in the home’s spacious rear terrace. The lease is for use of that outdoor terrace, which not only sets the stage but is the stage for Hopkins’s 60-minute two-hander about the comedically isolated relationship between a long-term house sitter (Niemi) and the swimming pool maintenance technician (Pat Towne) who shows up at bi-weekly intervals.

Playwright Wendy Hopkins and actor Pat Towne

The play opens on Saturday, July 17, two days after the Los Angeles County Health Department changed its policy for public indoor mask wearing, reverting from an advisory to a mandate because of soaring infection rates propelled by the Delta variant.

The indoor mandate has no bearing on Pool Boy, or on the cluster of other outdoor performances currently underway or being planned. These include The Fountain Theatre’s Octoroon in the theater’s renovated parking lot; Ophelia’s Jump’s Twelfth Night in the Greek amphitheater on the Pomona College Campus; The Wallis Annenberg Center’s Tevye in New York, in the facility’s courtyard; Playwrights’ Arena’s Waiting, opening July 24 in the Atwater Village Theatre courtyard; and so on. (If the upward infections spike continues, the impact could be felt by more stringent distance requirements even for outdoor performances.)

What the reversed County policy does, however, is throw shade on the hundreds of indoor productions being planned – including the entire Hollywood Fringe Festival, which uses tiny indoor spaces — and the accompanying confidence that the pandemic is behind us.

And though a return to infection rates of last fall and winter appears unlikely because of a comparatively effective vaccination campaign (61% of people are fully vaccinated in L.A. County, contrasted against 51.4% in California and 48.6% across the U.S.), and though the current infection rate in L.A. (3,000 per day) is a shadow of 44,000 per day that permeated the region last winter, L.A. County health officials are nonetheless concerned, if not alarmed, by the current regional (and national) spike in positivity, hospitalization and death rates from the virus. A public health agency for a region as large as L.A. County doesn’t reverse its policy without empirically supported cause for concern.

These infection spikes have been propelled by the 40% of Angelenos (49% of Californians, and 52% of Americans) who remain unvaccinated, despite the widespread availability of the vaccines. This has led to the concerning increase in positivity rates across the country, including Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties: from 0.5% in Los Angeles, when the County reopened in June 15, to 3.75% this week, reports the Washington Post. The unvaccinated are clearly a danger to themselves and to others.

All of this is compounded by the lack of clear information about the effectiveness of vaccines to offer protection from the Delta variant and its inevitable future mutations, which are nourished by higher infection rates in general, which is what we have now. Though there’s a clear consensus that the current vaccines offer protection rates against “current and future variants” of between 88% to 95% of people vaccinated, Pfizer and U.S. Center for Disease Control are tangling over the need for a booster shot, based on unpublished research by the Israel Health Ministry demonstrating the waning effectiveness over time of current vaccines for current and future covid variants.  Also unknown is the extent to which even the fully vaccinated pose a danger to others, by spreading the virus without showing symptoms themselves.

Different theaters are sorting out their own public health protocols, in conformity with existing state, county and city health mandates – which are inconsistent with each other. For example, the current L.A. County mandate is different from State and Federal guidelines, in which public indoor mask-wearing is advised but not required.

Over in Orange County, the Chance Theater is open for business with its indoor production of the musical Edges. The theater is operating at full capacity with no social distancing and no proof of vaccination required, with the exception of a limited number of “Vaccinated+” performances “that will require proof of vaccination with photo ID, minimal social distancing, and face covering when indoors.”

But for non-Vaccinated+ shows, Managing Director Casey Long explains, “Through self-attestation, un-vaccinated patrons are required to wear appropriate face coverings. It is recommended for fully vaccinated patrons to do so as well . . . During the first weekend of previews, the energy was very positive. We had one Vaccinated+ performance, which people there were grateful for. At the other two previews, some audience members opted to wear masks while the majority did not. All theater staff wore masks, except [referring to himself] when I am giving my curtain speech.” 

Pool Boy

Producer-performer Laura Niemi, reflecting and being reflected

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Covid figures into Pool Boy’s origins, its staging and its themes of isolation.

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For her outdoor and socially distanced production of Pool Boy, producer Laura Niemi has established a wristband policy in order to address issues of audience anxiety. The actors and production staff are fully vaccinated, but audience members need not provide proof of vaccination. Instead, they are given color-coded wristbands: A red band means “stay away from me,” a yellow band means “I’m okay with a fist bump but don’t hug me,” and green means “I’ll accept hugs.”

Even so, director Scott Cummins pointed out, some members of the production team pushed back about “wrist band stigma” — that the policy labeled people.

Covid figures into Pool Boy’s origins, its staging and its themes of isolation. In her stage setting, playwright Wendy Hopkins sets the scene:

“Los Angeles, November 2020. During the second wave in the year of Covid. After we’d flattened the curve and hoped for “normal” only to be told the self-isolation would continue, indefinitely. Strangers are dangerous. But so are loved ones. The government spreads misinformation and continues to undermine CDC recommendations: masks and social distancing even outside, at least 6 feet from others. Nothing feels certain. And then in LA fires start. Now it really feels like end-times. You remember. You lived it. And some of you were alone.

“An actual pool, in an actual backyard.”

Hopkins wrote the play for actor Pat Towne, who was appearing in a union-paying, franchised production of Rock of Ages. Shortly after it opened, it got iced out by the pandemic. Towne referred Hopkins and her play to producer Niemi.

A native Canadian and Second City alumnus, Hopkins based her play on a job she took during the pandemic as a house sitter. She says she just needed a reason to get out of her own house, then co-occupied by her 20-year-old son and who, with the public health crisis, had nowhere else to go. One can infer that they were driving each other batty.

She soon started to imagine her role as house-sitter in fictional terms: “Who would this woman talk to? Who would she meet?”

In the play, she meets the pool guy, a no-nonsense fellow who, like so many of us, lives in his own world.

During a site visit in mid-June, Towne was going through the motions of pool-cleaning when Hopkins scuttled over and showed him how to maneuver the leaf net inside the water, and how clean the filter.

Meanwhile Cummins was contemplating how to situate the audience around the pool in order to underscore the play’s themes of isolation, whether or not audience members should be invited to dabble their feet in the pool during the show, how to protect both the audience and the performers from the sun’s glare.

They were collectively trying to formulate the best playing space in a venue with no stage.

“We’re after intimacy and distance,” Cummins explained. “That’s the paradox.”

The divide between intimacy and distance is also a paradox for all of the performing arts as they try to meet ever-shifting and contradictory protocols of public health edicts with the contrary, sometimes contrarian attitudes of their audiences.

Pool Boy opens Saturday, July 17, 5:15 pm; perfs Sat.-Sun., 5:15 p.m.; indef. https://www.lostangelstheatre.com