“Theatre Needs New York”
A year into the pandemic, and while stages await a gradual reopening, theatre workers in New York City endure
For Theresa Buchheister, the buildup to a show night at The Brick, a small independent theater in Williamsburg, always followed a similar pattern. As the venue’s director, Theresa, who uses the pronoun they, would make sure there was enough beer and toilet paper to make it through the evening, they’d prepare the stage lights, make themself presentable, and then, about thirty minutes before opening, they’d start noticing the nervous tingle that announced the arrival of the audience. And they would inevitably wonder: Will anyone show up? Or will too many people show up? How long will we hold the house? Is the L train being weird?
“You’d become activated in a way that’s really exciting,” Theresa says on a cold February evening. The Brick is empty on this night, as it has been for months. Water from a leaky roof slowly drips on the dark corridor leading to the stage. It’s been a year since Wallies, a comedy about two FBI agents who accidentally fall in love with a couple of anarchists, packed the theater for three straight nights. It was the first weekend of March of 2020. The risers were full. People sat on the floor, on the stairs, on the catwalk, and even in the small tech booth where Theresa ran the lights.
Now, The Brick has become a storage room where other theaters and companies, many closed or disbanded, have temporarily assembled their appliances — all while The Brick itself struggles to survive.
On March 13, 2020 Mayor De Blasio called for the cancellation of “all existing and future events exceeding a capacity of over 500 people”. The restrictions, a response to the spreading coronavirus, also affected smaller venues. These restraints were supposed to be temporary; performances on Broadway promised to return in April. They didn’t, of course. Theatres in New York City have been closed for almost a year.
For stage workers, already accustomed to the seasonal whims of the trade, it has been twelve months of postponements, closures, disappointments and doubts; but also of creativity, solidarity, and an intrepid and unrelenting instinct for survival. While a gradual reopening of venues has already been announced for April, there is also talk of careers evaporating and collapsing. And yet, despite everything, three off-off-Broadway theatre workers have endured.
Beyond the edge
“I came to New York ready to rock,” says P., a Brazilian actress and director who arrived in 2016 on a tourist visa (because she’s currently applying for an O-1 visa, she prefers to be identified only by her first initial). She did rock, doing whatever it took to support her career as an artist: as a babysitter, as a bartender, as an English teacher and even as a salesperson, pitching, improbably, automatic cash machines to local businesses around Brooklyn and Queens. Then, early in 2020, her luck began to shift: one after the other, shows started calling her. She felt ready to become a full-time theatre worker: “And, finally, when I was right there, COVID hit me in the face,” she says.
She didn’t get the virus, thankfully, but the metaphor stands. The pandemic shattered the off-off-Broadway scene, which, with its precarious, non-profit, hand-to-mouth nature, was particularly vulnerable to an unexpected shutdown. Within this world of part time actors, directors, playwrights and backstage artists struggling to make art while making ends meet, there is a special kind of solidarity; which explains, in part, why there was an outpouring of support within the independent venues. The same day that theaters in New York closed last March, the Indie Theatre Fund, a grassroots non-profit that supports small venues and artists around the five boroughs, was already organizing to deliver rapid $500 micro grants to independent theater workers in the city. “We do know that our artists live on the edge on a good year,” says Randi Berry, the fund’s director. “We can’t afford to have one missed paycheck.”
As the shutdown dragged on, the aid, while welcome, was never going to be enough. Merideth Waddy, a technical director with more than fifty years of experience, had always managed to cobble together a living. Just weeks after the shutdown, he was forced to move to a less expensive shared apartment in Brooklyn. He still made his way back to Harlem, the neighborhood where he’d been raised and lived most of his life, only now he was there to visit the food pantries at the Salem United Methodist Church and at the Salvation Army. With thousands of Uptown shows on his résumé, and with all of his upcoming gigs cancelled indefinitely, the Vietnam veteran felt he had no choice. First he went to the pantries once a week, then twice, and eventually, when things got hardest, even three times. “We needed to be near where the food was, so we could eat,” he says.
Still, in some ways, Waddy was lucky: he had a monthly social security check of about $1,400. He also got an $11,000 one-time loan from the City in May to sustain his six-member company of technicians. By early April, the Small Business Administration had established, through the new CARES Act, a loan program to assist small businesses affected by the pandemic: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). This also helped Theresa, The Brick’s director, temporarily cover the salaries for staff and actors.
As an unemployed immigrant with an O-1 Visa, P. had fewer options. After working off-the-books at a liquor store, she found a job at a design company that had pivoted to produce face shields. Between June and July, P. produced between 850 and 1000 face shields a day on ten-hour shifts, and yet she never thought of going back to Brazil. “I knew that unfortunately Brazil would be in a worse situation,” she says, holding back tears. “I’ve been through so many things in New York… I believe in New York.”
“Nothing, nothing, nothing to do”
Spring gave way to an eerie summer. The weeks dragged on, postponements became cancellations, and Theresa struggled with the ethics of fundraising. Asking for money in the middle of a pandemic just felt wrong; if they couldn’t figure out how to make it through the next few months, they told the theater’s Board, then maybe The Brick should just close for good. By early summer, The Brick was running on insurance claims and emergency grants; Theresa started considering fundraising.
Then, on May 25, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, sparking nation-wide protests.
“I couldn’t, in good conscience, fundraise when people were going to jail and needed the money to get out,” they says. “I found it to be completely morally impossible to do.” Throughout June, The Brick became a shelter and pantry for the protesters that marched on Union and Metropolitan Avenue, on Lorimer Street and around McCarren Park. After months of not seeing anyone, Theresa joined the marches, and on warm nights, sat outside, talking for hours with friends and volunteers.
But through it all, they kept circling back to the same question: does anyone even need our art at a time like this? Since March 22, The Brick had been doing a weekly live stream show on Twitch, a platform mostly used by gamers. The initial aim had been to provide artistic escape. “But it just felt wrong and impossible to continue in that same way,” says Theresa. Still, with less than six weeks of funds available, The Brick continued streaming. “If we failed to survive as a space,” they says, “at least we were going to go down paying artists and supporting civil rights.”
For Waddy, it was a summer of anguish. He’d expected that things would have gone back to normal by then, that he’d be working round the clock during the busiest weeks of the year, when concerts and plays sprouted all around the city. In the summer of 2019, during the Harlem Week Festival, he’d worked on well over a hundred shows. In 2020, it was just 10. “We had nothing, nothing, nothing to do,” he says. He spent his days outside, sitting on the stoop in Brooklyn, under the sun.
He only left home to go to the pantries of Harlem, the neighborhood he’d grown up in during the Fifties. The first time he went to the Salvation Army pantry on Malcolm X Blvd., the condition on the streets struck him. He’d not seen such a level of desperation before; homeless people and recently unemployed people took shelter and relieved themselves under the scaffolding across the street from the Schomburg Center. “It was a whole other world,” he says. Looking for comfort, he took walks in Central Park, a place he had not visited in a long time.
“What on earth is the Senate waiting for?”
This urgent question, published in a statement on August 7, came from the Actors Equity Association, a national union for live stage actors and managers, urging Congress to fortify federal unemployment assistance. But it could have come from anyone in the industry. At the start of autumn, clamor for urgent legislation to save independent stages grew to new levels. The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), born in April at the height of the first lockdown, was taking on Washington, unleashing an unprecedented lobbying campaign to push for the Save Our Stages Act (SOS). According to NIVA, more than two million emails were sent to Congress supporting the SOS, which aimed to distribute at least $10 billion to independent venues across the country through the Small Business Administration (SBA). But Washington, beset by crises on all sides and in the grips of a hyper-partisan presidential campaign, dithered. All these efforts would take months to bear fruit.
For the most part, independent theatre workers were on their own.
After a $10,000 injection by the Indie Theater Fund in the summer, The Brick had managed to stay afloat. But as nights grew longer and colder, emergency funds started to dry up. Theresa, who takes pride in never being bored, had to force the theatre through a series of metamorphoses: it briefly became a storage room for an HBO production in the neighborhood (“They probably should have paid us more, I wish they could have.”). Then, an art gallery (”Artistically it did something, but financially, it did not.”) And, finally, the beneficiary of a virtual fundraiser hosted by Theresa’s friend Sarah Natochenny, who voices several characters in the Pokémon series.
This was in December, around the time that P. started receiving money from her mother in Brazil, a lifeline she’d never had to call upon since arriving in New York. After her contract at the face shield factory, P. had returned to her side gigs, but the income was inconsistent. “That’s when I really started to need help,” she says. It was the regulars she knew from her previous job in a small Brooklyn bistrot — the kind of place where you know everyone, she said — who offered her work, sometimes as a babysitter, sometimes as a cleaner. She earned enough to cover her basic expenses. “Covid taught me that you have to live one day after another,” she says. All while making the extra effort to save up for a lawyer to help her apply for the O-1 visa, which can cost up to $5000.
Two months ago, on December 27, 2020 the Save Our Stages Act was finally signed into law. Congress allocated $15 billion for shuttered venues across the country. However, applications for the grant program have not yet been opened. On a webinar organized on February 16 by NYC Department of Small Business Services, an audience member asked for estimates on the program’s start date: “Are we talking a week? Two weeks? Months?”
Even with help from Washington, a year after shutdown, independent theatre workers are still mostly on their own.
Waddy is hoping that summer 2021 will be better than the last. In truth, it could hardly be worse. In the meantime, he’s been earning some money by helping organize the New Heritage Theatre Group’s archive. Founded in 1964, it is the oldest Black nonprofit theater company in the city. For Waddy, this side job has been an unexpected plunge into his own past, which is also the history of black theatre in New York. He was there at the birth of the National Black Theatre in 1968 and at the incorporation of the AUDELCO Awards for Black Theatre and Dance in 1973. He worked with Gertrude Jeannette, a mentor to a generation of black actors in the city, and with George Faison, the first African American to win a Tony Award.
As for The Brick, the looming threat of bankruptcy and the delay in the allocation of both a city and a state grant have not stopped it from producing. In February, Theresa was cleaning the theater, as if it were finally waking up after a long, cold winter. They was refocusing lights, cleaning the dressing rooms and setting up the risers in preparation for a new project, a live-stream multi camera performance. “If we had any money, then it would help,” they says.
In early March, Governor Cuomo announced that venues will be able to reopen at a 33 percent capacity and with a 100-people limit in April. “We are not jumping on it,” says Theresa. “We feel that is too early. There has not been enough time between other things reopening to really track if cases will spike because of it.”
In the end, one thing seems to be certain: stage artists will stay in New York. “Wall Street does not need to be here,” says P. “They can work from wherever they want. But theater needs New York. We need the venues. The artists, we’re going to be here. We’re gonna make this city happen.”
