On the evening of the first Friday this month, in a tiny town in a rural Kansas county where you could have tallied the coronavirus cases on two hands and had fingers left over, Leslie Coats headed to the high school where she has taught drama for more than 40 years.
School has been out since before Memorial Day, but one of her students wanted help preparing for a college audition. Afterward, he asked if they could go into the theater, where he hadn’t been since classes went virtual back in March. Inside, he looked around at the familiar space, where the frame of a familiar set — for Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” — was already back onstage.
“He said, ‘I feel like a huge weight just lifted off my shoulders,’” Coats recalled by phone the next morning, her voice thickening in sympathy. “And then he started crying.”
Such is the sneak attack of emotion in inching back toward normal in Paola, Kan., which has recorded zero coronavirus deaths, and where, as of June 1, students were allowed to enter the school building. That made Paola High School an outlier in this year’s International Thespian Festival — an annual drama-nerd nirvana, drawing throngs of middle- and high schoolers, along with their teachers, to the Midwest for a weeklong celebration of their craft.
The 2020 festival, taking place June 22-26 and originally planned for the campus of Indiana University Bloomington, would have been an immersion of the faithful in an art form that thrives on communal experience. Because of the coronavirus, this year it will be wholly virtual: workshops, auditions, performances and (as there’s no travel involved) a heavier than usual sprinkling of celebrity cameos — by, among others, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Dolly Parton and Miss Peppermint.
In an ordinary year, the 11 invited main stage shows — ambitious, accomplished high school productions chosen from around the country — would be performed live on sets trucked in from home, in front of raucously appreciative audiences of adolescent fans.
Sidelined from the stage by the pandemic, those shows will be represented in the Virtual International Thespian Festival by full-length videos — if a school happened to record a performance pre-lockdown, and if it secured the streaming rights. Otherwise, a video tribute to the production’s evanescent glory is the best its company could hope for.
Except in Paola, where the confluence of state regulations, local virus rates and promised safety precautions resulted in a green light for a livestream festival performance of “All My Sons.” The plan? For the cast of 10 to perform in front of an invited audience of family and friends that would fill the school’s 297-seat theater to about one-third capacity.
That is as close to normal as this year’s festival could even dream of getting. Which is to say, not really very close at all.
‘You will stay in character’
To veterans of the festival — held for the past 25 years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, whose facilities it gradually outgrew — normal can bear some resemblance to “Waiting for Guffman.”
Abby Stuckrath, 18, who graduated this spring from Denver School of the Arts, remembers performing “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” for a 2018 main stage audience during a tornado warning — and being told by her teacher that, should a tornado come their way and the auditorium be evacuated, “You will stay in character.” (Stuckrath’s character: Olive Ostrovsky, the Celia Keenan-Bolger role.)
Alan Strait, who taught drama for years in Las Vegas, was once voted down by his own students when he suggested a spring-break theater trip to New York instead of a festival trip to Lincoln. These people are hard-core.
But when, at the end of March, Indiana University canceled its summer activities, normal was no longer an option. The Educational Theater Association, the nonprofit that has produced the festival since 1941 and had expected 5,000 attendees in Bloomington, declared that the event would simply go online, with details TBA.
Much of it, including workshops and the college fair, has been adapted to translate digitally. Online, the cost of admission is a more accessible $199, down from the in-person $865. And if Tina Fey was an unlikely get for an appearance in Indiana, she will be doing a live virtual Q. and A. with the students.
Not everything is replicable, though.
“We’re trying to let them still make friends,” said Julie Cohen Theobald, the association’s executive director, “and have opportunities to chat with each other, because that is a huge part of this. But that feel of being on a campus, having an adventure, being away from your hometown — that cannot be replaced.”
Neither can the visceral excitement of live theater.
Amy Miller, who acted at the festival numerous times in her own student years, is now a drama teacher at New Albany High School in Indiana, where her production of “My Fair Lady” was chosen for this year’s main stage.
On the plus side, nixing the gathering means she won’t have to worry about loading the show’s bi-level set into two semis, and the costumes into a box truck. And she does have a professionally shot videotape that the festival can stream to its anticipated 2,500 participants.
Still, Miller said, the cancellation hit her hard.
“I feel like a teenage drama queen using this language,” she said, “but it was a little devastating.”
A muffled scream
Early last December, when Corey Mitchell and his students at Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte, N.C., put on “A Chorus Line,” he made the de rigueur preshow speech to the audience, instructing everyone to turn off their cellphones and explaining that because of copyright infringement, filming the performance was prohibited.
Does the school have a video of it, though?
Over the phone one recent afternoon, Mitchell’s answer was a muffled scream of anguish.
That’s a no, then?
“That is a no,” he confirmed. “Oh, gosh. This is hard, hard, hard.”
Northwest, a magnet school, had two recent alums in prominent Broadway roles when New York theater shut down in March — Eva Noblezada as Eurydice in “Hadestown” and Reneé Rapp as Regina George in “Mean Girls.” Mitchell himself, in 2015, was the first winner of the Tony Awards’ Excellence in Theater Education Award.
But taking a production to the festival is an expensive endeavor; Mitchell’s fund-raising goal for “A Chorus Line” was $125,000. The last time his school had a main stage show there was in 2013, when he brought “The Color Purple” to Lincoln — a production chronicled in the documentary “Purple Dreams” and shimmeringly enshrined in Northwest memory.
Brooke Watts, 19, who played Cassie in Mitchell’s “A Chorus Line,” grew up wanting to do what she had seen the older kids do in “The Color Purple.”
“My one theater dream,” she said, “was just to be on that big stage in Nebraska.”
True, she noted, this year it would have been Indiana. But that is how large the festival looms as a marker of achievement in the school theater landscape. So it is also a place to make a statement, as Mitchell did with “The Color Purple” (“You don’t see many predominantly African-American shows on that stage,” he said) and wanted to do again with “A Chorus Line.”
His was a meticulous homage to the original 1975 production, he explained, “except that over half the kids on the line are students of color.”
Which might not sound like a big deal, but Mitchell and Watts both said there were people in Charlotte who thought that Cassie, the Donna McKechnie/Charlotte d’Amboise role, had to be played by a white actress. Even Watts, who is black, wondered about that when she heard other students say so.
“The tradition on every Broadway show, every show that I’ve seen,” she said, “it’s been a blond lady with a bob, like skinny. I have not seen an African-American Cassie ever.”
This summer, the main stage audience will get a glimpse of one, anyway.
Thoughts of the wider world
The festival is the flagship event of the International Thespian Society, which has a membership of 130,000 and chapters in schools across the United States, as well as a smattering elsewhere. Its members are known as Thespians, with a capital T.
An honor society that requires many hours logged in theater arts before admission is granted, it has an expansive list of famous alumni. Wayne Brady, Adam Driver and Aidy Bryant were Thespians; so were Zoë Kravitz, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tom Hanks. Dick Van Dyke was a member. Madonna, too.
All year, across the country, Thespians compete in events that were recently rebranded the Thespys. At the festival, those competitions have also gone digital, with students uploading videos of their performances for adjudication. But they have had to consider more than their skills with a camera, or how to perform in the absence of audience response.
Maura Toole, 17, from Grimsley High School in Greensboro, N.C. — a state where the coronavirus rate has risen lately — was weighing whether to film her Thespys song, “Falling Slowly” from “Once,” in person with her duet partner or from their separate homes.
“By law, we can be together,” she said. “Our consciences are telling us that that’s a bad idea right now, given what’s going on in our community.” (Their verdict: separate spaces.)
Erielle Harris, 14, who just graduated from eighth grade at St. Martin’s Episcopal School in Atlanta, also had the wider world on her mind. Planning to attend the virtual festival with her twin sister while FaceTiming with drama program friends, she said early this month that she hoped that Covid and Black Lives Matter would be part of the online conversation, to “make sure everyone’s educated.”
Since then, the festival has announced a slate of diversity-themed programming, including a keynote address about racial equity by the Tony-winning director Kenny Leon.
A bootleg deluge
The thing about humans with smartphones is that they tend to be too entranced by their screens to pay much heed when someone tells them to put them away.
Thank goodness for that, at least in the case of Northwest’s “A Chorus Line.” Needing to piece together a festival tribute to the production, Mitchell put out a call for any videos clandestinely shot by audience members.
The response, he said, was a deluge of “bootleg footage” that he will use to punctuate certain moments in the tribute, which will also include backstage video, discussion of the musical and its impact, and interviews with Broadway veterans of the show. Watts got to speak with d’Amboise; other students video-chatted with McKechnie.
In dress-rehearsal footage, Watts will be seen performing Cassie’s big number, “The Music and the Mirror.” There will be video, too, shot late last month at a theater in Charlotte, where the Northwest company gathered in socially distanced fashion to sing, a cappella, “What I Did for Love.”
For Carson Palmer, 18, who played Mike, that was a bittersweet reunion, and a reminder of the capstone to their high school careers that he and the cast’s other seniors thought they would have. Just after graduation, there would have been an encore weekend of “A Chorus Line” in their school’s 600-seat auditorium, then the trip to Bloomington.
“We were all so excited to have the June production be our last show together before going off to college,” he said. “It’s wild to think that the show in December was actually the last time I’ll be performing with my best friends.”
‘If they bring it in, we’re done’
The rare luck of the students in Paola, Kan., is that they got to slip back into “All My Sons” — a drama that Coats, their teacher, believes has only gained resonance with the advent of the coronavirus and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests.
“It’s all about our shared humanity,” she said, “and our sense of the human family, and that we are responsible to and for each other, always. That’s exactly what the heart of this play is.”
Of course she feels responsible to her students, and she has drilled into them that they are responsible to one another, too — which in 2020 means being vigilant about coronavirus safety.
“They’re very conscious of the fact that if they bring it in, we’re done,” she said, two days after rehearsals started. “If anybody gets exposed, we’re finished.”
For the festival performance, Coats said she would move actors out of the single cramped dressing room and into three other nearby rooms where they could spread out. Their makeup kits would be individual, not shared, and the makeup crew — like the ushers — gloved and masked.
“Obviously,” she said, “you can’t social distance onstage, because the roles don’t allow it.”
They were taking a risk, Coats acknowledged, but one she considered acceptably small — even if a what-if kind of worry kept her up at night.
“If I could put them all in plastic wrap and keep them isolated totally until we’re done,” she said, “I would do it in a heartbeat.”
‘The world turned upside down’
The coronavirus quickly proved wilier than they were. A week into rehearsals, a crew member tested positive.
The county’s contact tracing program swung into action; a few students got calls. Yet the impulse was not to close the production. Consulting with the health department, Coats scrambled to reassess, asking her other students and their parents if they felt comfortable continuing.
They said they did. And Coats, who also got a contact tracer’s call, announced that she would direct via video from quarantine, while requiring her cast and crew, in the theater, to wear masks offstage and on.
“The masks will actually help you work on projection and articulation,” she advised her actors via email, ever the educator. The show would go on, with their faces uncovered for the livestream.
And then Coats reconsidered. A couple of days later, she canceled the performance. She declined to say, for this article, what had changed, but the crew member was among nine new local coronavirus cases reported that week, according to The Miami County Republic.
Until that abrupt end, though, Coats’s students had had the luxury of the nearly normal: being in a room together, making theater — something so many people, their fellow Thespians included, are aching to do.
Through these long pandemic months, a line from “Hamilton” has played on repeat in Coats’s head: “the world turned upside down.”
With her company gathered, it felt for a little while like the world was righting itself again. But it isn’t. Not yet.
And so for these Kansans, as for legions of festival goers, virtual is as real as it gets this summer.
It’s not much like being there. But at least they’ll not be there together.
"stage" - Google News
June 18, 2020 at 12:10AM
https://ift.tt/2Y8QnnR
Theater Kids Trade a Big Stage for Highlight Tapes and Heartache - The New York Times
"stage" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2xC8vfG
https://ift.tt/2KXEObV
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Theater Kids Trade a Big Stage for Highlight Tapes and Heartache - The New York Times"
Post a Comment