Covid Impact Statement

Along with my colleagues around the globe, my professional trajectory as a theater artist was stopped in its tracks by the pandemic. Most significantly, my company PearlDamour’s major project, Ocean Filibuster, which was supposed to premiere at the American Repertory Theater in September 2020, was indefinitely postponed. Conversely, my academic work went on super-drive—in my classes, I had no choice but to continue and address how to keep live theater going in a remote world.

Ultimately, by leaning into the challenges of translating performance to Zoom in Spring 2020, I was able to create work with my students that has been seen and celebrated by thousands of people nationwide, furthering my career and my standing in the field.

As the pandemic continued into the racial justice uprisings of the summer of 2020 and then to repeated lockdowns and theater cancelations, COVID's impact professional life changed. This statement will describe the arc of my experience from spring of 2020 – spring of 2021. I conclude with lessons learned. 

Spring 2020

When the pandemic hit, I was teaching an Advanced Directing Class and directing/devising a Department Production, called The Method Gun. I knew I had to pivot both to Zoom. But how? Many in the professional theater world were convinced it couldn’t be done—there was an assumption that live theater could not translate potently, powerfully, and impactfully to a digital space. In the early days of the pandemic, most theaters sat back and waited. But that wasn’t an option for me.

I told my students we were on the frontlines of figuring this out. Theater artists the world over were about to learn how to make theater happen on Zoom, and we had the good fortune of having the mandate of being in school: we were mid-semester and had to finish it out. There was an opportunity here for us to lead the way.

In class, we approached our strange situation with curiosity. Calling on my expertise in creating site-specific theater, we started by asking some fundamental questions about the “site” of Zoom. What does staging mean when you’re in a Zoom box? What is composition? How can your actors feel connected to each other? Do actors have to stay seated in front of your screen?  Do audience? What gifts do we get from the sound latency? How can you create intimacy with an audience? What can you control, what can’t you? As they explored these questions with student teams of actors, they learned how to translate scene work onto a screen. With my students, I created a website that captured our discoveries, our frustrations, and our solutions. I called it “Directing on Zoom” and published it via a free Google site (you can see it here). 

When I posted the website to my personal Facebook page, it reverberated through the American Theater community. The gratitude coming from artists across the country–those I knew and those I didn’t–was palpable: thanks poured in, educators started sharing it with other educators, and professional theater makers began looking to it for tips and how-tos. It became the basis of theater-making syllabi in educational institutions from Harvard University to the University of Iowa, from Whitman College to SUNY Purchase. A teacher from a high school in Canada reached out to me after finding it on a theater-in-the-pandemic resource list. Over 40 individuals wrote directly about it (a list of schools and individuals using the site is available upon request).  

Months later, the Library of Congress requested that our “Directing on Zoom” website be included in the Library of Congress COVID archive, 2021.  

Meanwhile, I continued to direct and devise The Method Gun. The process was immensely challenging: I had students in three countries and five time zones, so our rehearsals happened at odd hours and, even so, rarely had everyone present. Our cast member in Macedonia was fighting with computer problems. Our cast member in Singapore had to whisper her lines not to wake up her sleeping family. Other students were contending with the dissonance of turning their childhood bedrooms into viable acting spaces. However, upon reflection, the cast and I agreed that the play became a life raft for us during quarantine—our need for each other grew, and the play provided the technology for being together. Our reliance on each other became a certainty in our uncertain world.

The actual performance was a total leap of faith. Our actors were still spread across the globe; our stage manager called the show via telephone from her mother’s desk in Arlington, VA, to “board ops” in three other cities; friends, relatives, and professional colleagues from across the world joined the Wesleyan community to witness and watch. It was one of the first live-stream Zoom theater productions attempted—and it exploded across the American theater community. It was an outstanding success, both aesthetically and spiritually, proving to many people that theater was still possible—giving them hope to carry on throughout lockdown. Professionals, scholars, and fans wrote about the performance in numerous blogs, articles, and theater websites. Interviews with me and profiles of the piece are published on the theatre commons website HowlRound and in the Civilians’ Theater Blog called Extended Play. Author and journalist Tanya Ward Goodman published a beautiful reflection on the piece, and I was subsequently included in American Theater Magazine’s March 2021 reflection of the pandemic, called Where the Year Went: A Look Back, and Forward.

The Method Gun performance also anchored a feature about me and my community-engaged work in Wesleyan Magazine’s fall 2020 issue (you can read it here). To further investigate the powerful resonance the piece had in the theater community, I co-authored an article in Theatre Topics called Total Dramaturgical Collapse: American Theatre in Pandemic Times (June 2021). Elena Araoz, theater director and professor at Princeton University, subsequently interviewed me for a major pandemic project on a resource website called Innovations in Socially Distant Performance.

Fall 2020-Spring 2022

Professionally, Ocean Filibuster, originally slated to premiere in Fall 2020, was indefinitely postponed. It eventually premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Spring 2022, re-opening that venue to a live audience. Because of the pandemic, we worked without the benefit of a previously planned technical/video development workshop, and an additional COVID surge during our rehearsal process meant the show’s interactive experiences were not permitted. Finally, being the theater’s first show back after COVID, the BLM uprisings, and the subsequent demands from We See You White American Theater meant both our producers and our creative team were feeling our way into new structures and systems. Even as I worked to address our industry’s systemic problems within our rehearsal and tech processes, such as cutting down 10 out of 12 rehearsals, the challenge of ongoing COVID constraints contributed to my team feeling overworked and under resourced.

Even so, my team left that first run feeling committed to present our show as intended. Fortunately, Ocean Filibuster has been able to continue its life through touring (2022-2024). I have used the opportunity to sharpen the script, continue developing the video and projection aspects of the show, and build out five interactive “mini-labs” for our now fully participatory intermission. The show has been received warmly in Houston, Miami, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, and Wesleyan and Duke Universities.

I also did two major online events around Ocean Filibuster, as a featured artist in the Guggenheim Presents Works and Process series (June 2020), and for a presentation for the American Repertory Theater’s Behind the Scenes series, called A Conversation with the Makers of Ocean Filibuster (April 2021). Throughout the pandemic I participated on a number of panels about theater and climate change, including Michael Feldman’s Theater and Policy Salon (2021) Visions in Progress: Climate Underneath the Surface and for the innovative online FoodxFilm Festival in Oct 2021, in which I was a moderator for the online “immersive” performance Soupy Salty Sonic. In recognition of my ongoing and active role in the American Theater community during the pandemic, I was featured in two American Theater articles: Where the Year Went: A look Back, and Forward, in which I reflect on my theater work during COVID, published in the March 2021 issue; and The Shows That Got Away and/or Found a Way, published in March 2022 and detailing the story of how my project Ocean Filibuster weathered the pandemic.

Conclusion

COVID led me towards greater national visibility and artistic success as I worked to meet the challenges of making theater in pandemic times. The performance of The Method Gun and my Directing on Zoom website transcended the pedagogical sphere to influence the American Theater Community at large. Ocean Filibuster garnered attention as an early in-person regional theater production, and was featured in the March 2022 American Theater article “The Shows That Got Away and/or Found a Way” (read it here). Directorially, COVID affirmed significant lessons about the importance of scaling a project to meet a moment. Whatever the circumstance, one must stay clear-eyed: pushing for a big vision without appropriate infrastructure and support negatively impacts the integrity of a production and the well-being of its creative team. Conversely, leaning into constraints can lead to impactful discoveries, fulfilling processes, and sucessful productions.