With No Stages Open, New York’s Theater Artists Pivot to Streaming
Actors, writers and directors have moved their craft onto Zoom. Is this a new frontier for performance or a placeholder until theaters reopen?
When Broadway theaters closed in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, few theater artists thought they would be unemployed for the rest of the year. Now, nine months into the shutdown and with no reopening in sight, they have turned to the safest black box theater available to practice their craft: a computer screen.
Throughout 2020, actors, writers and theater companies have utilized video and audio streaming services to create theater, from Zoom Theatre, a company that performs live plays over Zoom, to Walk-Up Arts, whose play “Baby Jessica’s Well Made Play” takes place entirely over the phone. But while these developments could potentially expand the medium’s boundaries, some believe they only serve to tide audiences over until live theater returns.
One of the first people to take advantage of streaming was producer Jeffrey Richards (who produced “Beetlejuice” and “American Son”). In April, Richards reached out to the Actors’ Fund, a human services organization for the theater community, proposing a series of play readings over YouTube that would generate donations to the Fund. With a star-studded lineup of actors that included Bryan Cranston, John Malkovich and Patti LuPone, the readings were a success. This fall, he partnered with TodayTix, an online ticket service, to produce another reading series for the Fund called “Broadway’s Best Shows.”
“Virtual theater fulfills a need,” Richards said. “It’s something that compliments the lack of having real theater right now, and people can immerse themselves in so many of these presentations that are being done.”
“Broadway’s Best Shows,” which concludes its first season Dec. 10, has streamed seven performances this fall, including plays by Kenneth Lonergan, David Mamet and Anton Chekhov. To put them together, Richards works with the director to cast the plays and conduct rehearsals over Zoom. The performances are prerecorded by the actors themselves, reading their scripts in front of a camera, and are edited together in post-production. Although he did not provide numbers, Richards said the readings have generated a fair amount of revenue for the Fund, and he plans to produce a second season in the spring that will consist entirely of plays by women.
Actor Lee Wilkof, who appeared in the series’ first reading, Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man,” said that he’d never done a recording over Zoom before. “They actually sent me a tripod so I could record myself on my phone,” he said. “And then they recorded our Zoom sessions. I was under the impression that we were doing it live, but they edited it together very nicely.”
Since then, Wilkof has also collaborated on a one-act play written for Zoom by actor Greg Germann, called “Any Song,” which is currently streaming online, separate from “Broadway’s Best Shows.” Germann plays a director who puts Wilkof, playing an actor, through a Zoom audition from hell. Peter Marks, who reviewed the play in The Washington Post, called it “a terrific entry in the comedy of humiliation.”
Germann does not intend for “Any Song” to be a one-off, however: he envisions it as part of a longer sequence of one-act plays that could be done both over Zoom and on stage. Like Arthur Schnitzler’s play “La Ronde,” each scene would feature two characters, one of whom appears in the next scene with another new character, who then appears in the next scene with another new character, and so on.
Germann has relished the challenges of making theater over Zoom. “Each format demands a bit of a different tone or performance, and this is actually a bit of a hybrid theater piece and short film,” he said. But he feels that once live theater returns, the need for streaming performances will dissipate. “I’m hopeful that when it’s all behind, people are so hungry to congregate and come together in the theater,” he said. Richards agreed with him. “When it comes back,” he said, “there will be less appetite for what we are doing now.”
As for Wilkof, his problems watching theater over streaming platforms is different. When he tried watching himself in “The Best Man,” he turned it off pretty quickly, but not because he was embarrassed by his performance.
“I noticed that I had been wearing my glasses on camera,” he said, “and I could see the script on my computer that I was reading from reflected in my lenses.”
Bio: Jeremy Fassler is a student at Columbia Journalism School. Bylines: The Daily Banter (staff writer), New York Magazine, Rogerebert.com, Bklyner. Was on Jeopardy! once and led the whole game only to lose because Final Jeopardy was insanely hard. He/him/his
