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Feeling Remote
LA Theater Zooms through the Pandemic
By Steven Leigh Morris
How Must the Show Go On?
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Notwithstanding the weekly Zoom meetings of local stage artistic directors, to say LA theater has rushed online to continue play-development and, in some cases, performances, would be an understatement.
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On Wednesday, July 15, Boston Court Performing Arts Center announced the Covid-19 related cancellation of Stephen Sondeheim’s Passion, originally slated to perform live (not live-streamed) in March. The show had made it through previews and was about to open when the cities of Pasadena and Los Angeles announced the mandatory shuttering of all live performance spaces (and bars and indoor dining, and hair salons and tattoo parlors) due to the surging virus. Soon after, stage behemoth Center Theatre Group announced it would not resume live performances until Spring, 2021 at the earliest. The Hollywood Fringe cancelled its 2020 edition (though virtual performances can still register for free). Local and national arts institutions, large and small, are in a holding pattern for as along as they can afford (rent and leases must still be paid), theater support organization and Ovation Awards producer LA STAGE Alliance has evacuated its Los Angeles Theatre Center digs, furloughed its employees, and suspended operations for the first time in 45 years. Even the Rose Parade has been cancelled for the first time since World War II.
Notwithstanding the weekly Zoom meetings of local stage artistic directors, to say LA theater has rushed online to continue play-development and, in some cases, performances, would be an understatement.
How do we love online LA theater? Let us count the ways. From my inbox today:
Skylight Theatre Company’s New Web Reading Series offers “Square One…The Forth Installment of Benton Way” on July 16 @ 4pm; “Dear Auntie D” on July 23 @ 3pm; https://skylighttheatre.org/event/skylight-live/
Whitefire Theatre presents a live-streamed performance of Heather Dowling’s Fertile, Thursday, July 30, 7 pm; https://bit.ly/38ZwWBT
The Blank Theatre Company’s National Playwrights’ Festival, August 8-September 9: Thirteen plays all presented as digital shorts. www.theblank.com
Force of Nature Productions: Tales from Tomorrow, Live-Stream World Premiere of Episode One: Batter Up, Thurday, July 16, 8 pm; https://bit.ly/2OpxUhi
Sacred Fools Theater Company: Reprise: A live-streamed “enhanced reading” of Waiting for Godot Returns; Thursday, July 16, 5 pm; https://bit.ly/2ZyW1Rb
IAMA Theatre Company/Ammunition Theatre Company: Pass the Mic Playwriting Festival of Black voices; Thursday, July 16, 6 pm; https://bit.ly/2CAuWE0
Pixel Playhouse/After Hours Theatre, Definitely Not Clue, a live-stream performance of an interactive musical spun from the 1940s board game and subsequent movies. Friday, July 17, 6 pm, and Sunday, July 19, 5 pm; https://bit.ly/2WlbthO
And City Garage has posted and been promoting videos of former productions on its YouTube channel.
Finally, Latino Theatre Company just announced a call for scripts from LA playwrights for its “Unmasking New Works 2020 Online Reading Festival this fall. (Submit to literary@thelatc.org)
Digital Dancing
From Pixel Playhouse’s interactive musical, DEFINITELY NOT CLUE (Photo courtesy: Pixel Playhouse)
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Zoom is responsible for “the death of the pause” says performer-playwright Morgan Smalley. “Whenever there’s a pause, everyone thinks their Internet has gone out.”
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No artist in LA has gone on record saying that live-streamed or any other form of digital performance is preferable to being in a theater. Not a soul has denied that the Zoom gap between an actor’s moving lips and the sound that comes out up to half a second later is a problem.
Zoom is responsible for “the death of the pause” says performer-playwright Morgan Smalley. “Whenever there’s a pause, everyone thinks their Internet has gone out.”
Playwrights Arena recently completed a live-stream presentation of plays penned by LA playwrights. The company’s literary associate Zharia O’Neal acknowledges that “There have been difficulties in terms of overlapping dialogue – a lot of work relies on that. We have lost some of that. What I’ve been thrilled with is how cool everybody has been with it. People have been so forgiving of it, and understanding That may be because, oh, this will be over in two months. I’m interested to see how the tides turn when re return to the normal.”
Graham Wetterhahn is the Executive Producer of After Hours Theatre Company and co-founder (with Vijay Nazareth) of Pixel Playhouse, companies dedicated to fusing pixel technologies with live theater. In April, 2019, almost a year before the Corona Virus appeared in the US, during a Stage Raw/PLAY LA colloquy, Wetterhahn was villified by some in the audience for his ideas that creating digital performances would “destroy live theater” – a critique he took in stride.
“We don’t think [what we’re doing] will take the place of live theater,” he told Stage Raw this week. “[Digital performance] is a great way to bring more audiences to theatrical style entertainment.”
Using historical precedents, Wetterhahn is likely correct that his attempt to fuse art forms poses no threat to any of them.
Language-based stage plays did just fine on early radio – a tradition that LA Theatre Works has kept alive – with no ill-effect upon live theater.
Many feared that television would replace radio, the way the printing press replaced the hand-crafted scroll. It didn’t. It’s similarly unlikely that Zoom or YouTube will replace live theater, for reasons discussed below.
When television first emerged in the United States, the most common format in the 1950s was to throw a theater play in front of a couple of cameras and a live in-studio audience. Minimal editing and re-takes. Suddenly, audiences for these plays expanded from around 500 per performance to the hundreds of thousands. The most popular Christmas operetta of the 1950s and 1960s, Amahl and the Night Visitors, was penned by composer-lyricist Gian Carlo Menotti for television production in 1957. It later became widely produced in theaters.
The Guinness Book of Records lists 410 feature-length movies and TV adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Andre Gregory’s movie Vanya on 42nd Street starring Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore and Larry Pine, and directed by Louis Malle, is about as riveting, nuanced and humor-laced an interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s mercurial play, Uncle Vanya, as can be imagined. None of this interplay among television, movies and live theater has impeded any of these art forms. In horticultural terms, the cross-pollination has resulted in hybrids, which in many ways are more efficient to produce than their “heirloom” antecedents. (“Heirloom” varieties are so genetically entrenched and stable that their seeds can be relied on to sprout offspring identical to the parents, serving the interests of tradition. With seeds from a hybrid plant, however, there’s no telling what will sprout, which is a source of mystery, excitement, and promise.)
Playwright Weston Gaylord has worked on technologies that attempt to mix virtual reality with theater; one such piece was based on A Christmas Carol.
“I think it’s extremely successful,” Gaylord explains. “You have an audience member who is at a physical location.” One of his favorite companies is The Under Presents, which provides a virtual space, “a weird Dali-esque underground night-club. When you enter it (in virtual reality), you have a little body you can walk around [at you own direction]. Basically, there are actors who can put themselves in [that virtual space, and interact with you].
Gaylord describes The Under Presents as a virtual reality subculture that emerged from the British immersive theater company Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. He’s worked on an interactive show that’s based on The Tempest. But he adds that it’s “awkward technologically to put multiple people in one virtual space.”
Pixel Playhouse
Digital Theater, closer to how Wetterhahn and Nazareth envisioned:
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“Covid-19 affected digital theater,” Wetterhahn explains. “We did not design our theater to be remote,” he says, drawing a crucial distinction between digital theater and remote theater.
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The challenge of this particular cultural moment has no precedent: Neither audiences nor actors are permitted/advised to be in the same physical space.
O’Neal says that Playwrights’ Arena is exploring “which tenets of theater do not rely on being in the same space.”
This conundrum has also flummoxed Pixel Playhouse’s Wetterhahn and Nazareth. For his fusions of digital and real-time theater, Wetterhahn converted a second room in his condo into a studio, with tech for lighting and sound effects. When conceiving of Pixel Playhouse, the pair imagined, at the very least, his company recording from that studio.
“Covid-19 affected digital theater,” Wetterhahn explains. “We did not design our theater to be remote,” he says, drawing a crucial distinction between digital theater and remote theater. Until he can get his actors into his studio, he says, he’ll have to endure the shortcomings of Zoom. (Pixel Playhouse uses a Twitch platform, but with Zoom technology for the actors to beam in their performances remotely.)
The company’s latest interactive show, Definitely Not Clue (performing Friday, July 17, 6 pm; and Sunday, July 19, 5 pm, free) utilizes 12 remote studios (each actor’s computer is defined as a studio), seven actors plus one pre-recorded actor, a board operator, a stage manager, a camera lighting person, a live underscoring studio and a chat manager.
Attendance has averaged 300 people per show, Wetterhahn says, with as many as 1,000 people logging in at some point. This means that there is an audience floating on the Twitch channel, they may see Pixel Playhouse, log in and then log out ten minutes later. Which raises the final question of what exactly constitutes an audience? And how are these digital TV platforms impacting and gratifying diminishing attention spans?
Eugene O’Neill’s plays, performed most often in the first half of the 20th century, lasted three to four hours, with two to three acts and with two to three intermissions. At some point in the mid-late 1980s, the length of new American plays shrunk on average from two acts to 90-minutes or less — sans intermission, so that the live theater started to imitate the form and structure of teleplays.
Says Morgan Smalley, speaking as a performer, “I tried to do Zoom improv – impossible! – people get super comfortable in their own homes.”
Adds O’Neal, addressing the comforts and diversions of being at home, “I’ve found that my willingness [to concentrate] and patience online is thin. In the theater, I have to sit there and finish it, now.”
If, among the primary purposes of live theater, is to invite reflection and introspection by living vicariousy through the plight of the characters on the stage, that purpose is dubiously served by a format wherein audiences flip channels when the whim strikes, leaving to get Pizza and returning half an hour later. This might have no consequences for surfing social media, but whoever said that Twitter or Instagram were meditative platforms? Which begs the larger question, if theater’s purpose no longer includes inviting meditation, then what does it offer that Instagram doesn’t?
