The Great Debate pits teams of non-experts head-to-head, toe-to-toe, and often dumb-and-dumber in lively debates of the inconsequential. Mundane topics are brought to life by ordinary, but opinionated folks. You’re bound to be a flip-flopper after listening to compelling arguments on things that never mattered.
Tickets are Name Your Price!
(more…)
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, is presenting The Grasshoppers.
Tickets are very limited.
Photo: Members of Denver’s Buntport Theater, thinking drive-in theater would be pandemic-proof, tried to imagine what kind of creatures belong on a lawn. Their solution: “The Grasshoppers.” Credit…Rachel Woolf for The New York Times
Inside a former firehouse in Richmond, Va., a lone actor performs “The Picture of Dorian Gray” for audiences as small as two. In a Denver parking lot, theatergoers in cars watch, through their windshields, four performers costumed as grasshoppers. On a 600-acre property in Arkansas, a cast of about 130 re-enacts the story of Jesus for several hundred ticket-holders spread across a 4,000-seat outdoor amphitheater.
The coronavirus pandemic has shuttered Broadway through the end of the year (at least), and the nation’s big regional theaters and major outdoor festivals have mostly pivoted to streaming. But even as infections surge in the United States, many theaters are finding ways to present live performances before live audiences.
Of course, there is social distancing. Also, in some places, masks. Temperature checks. Touchless ticketing. Intermissionless shows. And lots of disinfectant. At the Footlights Theater, in Falmouth, Maine, actors will perform behind plexiglass.
But these precautions mean there is dinner theater in Florida. Street theater in Chicago. Drive-in theater in Iowa.
“Our commitment is to do live theater — there’s a huge difference between that and seeing something on a computer screen,” said Susan Claassen, managing artistic director of Invisible Theater in Tucson, Ariz., a state that has emerged as a Covid-19 hot spot. The theater, which has been running a four-character play called “Filming O’Keefe” indoors, installed an air ionizer, allowed patrons in only one-quarter of its seats, mandated that they wear masks, and put on a show.
“Our theater got its name from the invisible energy that flows between performers and the audience,” Claassen said. “Even with 22 people in the audience with masks on, that energy is so strong.”
There are also financial reasons for continuing: Some theaters say they cannot survive a year without revenue.
“We’d rather go down creating good theater than die the slow death behind our desks,” said Bryan Fonseca, the producing director of Fonseca Theater Company in Indianapolis. The company plans to stage “Hype Man,” a three-character play by Idris Goodwin, outdoors, for 65 mask-wearing patrons. “I am hopeful and also very cautious,” Fonseca said, “careful that I don’t create a problem.”
By putting on shows, some theater artists are, in effect, making the case that it is a mistake for the industry to wait for New York to lead the way, given the risks there. “Someone has to be the first to take that cautious step into the dark to see what works and what doesn’t,” said Phil Kenny, a sometime Broadway producer who has a role in “Willy Wonka” in Orem, Utah.
But even in New York City there are signs of theatrical life. Food for Thought Productions, a company that presents staged readings of one-act plays, is planning to restart in a private club on July 13, with Louise Lasser and Bob Dishy performing and attendees required to have taken coronavirus tests.
“If we can prove that we can do this safely, maybe other groups can do safe theater as well,” said Susan Charlotte, the founding artistic director.
The pandemic remains a concern for any of the planned productions.
In Fort Myers, Fla., the Broadway Palm Dinner Theater postponed “The Sound of Music” as the number of confirmed cases surged in that state. In Houston, Theater Suburbia canceled “Daddy’s Dyin’ Who’s Got the Will?” citing a local stay-at-home advisory. And in Salt Lake City, where the Grand Theater was planning a run of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in which all the performers were masked, the theater scuttled the production just four nights before it was to begin, citing rising local caseloads.
But many are persisting. In Jacksonville, Fla., even as the mayor imposed an indoor mask order, the Alhambra dinner theater is continuing to stage “Cinderella.” The theater is selling only 50 percent of its seats; it has installed plexiglass between its seating tiers; patrons must wear masks after they eat; performers wear gloves and face away from each other during any partnered dancing; and, at the end, Cinderella and the Prince share an elbow bump instead of a kiss. (The audience invariably laughs.)
“I feel very comfortable, and I’m definitely not worried about my health,” said Olivia Zeisloft, 18, who is playing the title role (and whose grandfather is the director). “It’s been an amazing experience.”
Actors’ Equity Association has barred its members from performing onstage, and the Alhambra is one of several theaters that have adjusted as a result, deciding for the first time in years to use nonunion actors.
The Salt Lake City production of “Mockingbird” recast the role of Atticus Finch after an Equity actor would not perform. And in western Virginia, the American Shakespeare Center, which normally has both Equity and non-Equity companies, is planning to use only its nonunion performers this summer.
Equity is not happy, and warning that “moving forward, we will shine a spotlight on theaters that decide to make the reckless and irresponsible choice to put the safety of their audience and workers at risk,” according to Mary McColl, the union’s executive director.
Summer is beautiful. But this summer is strange.
Denver’s Buntport Theater, which usually presents work in a 100-seat warehouse, decided to create outdoors, and, like several other theater companies around the nation, looked to the drive-in for inspiration. The result: “The Grasshoppers,” in which four actors wearing adapted onesies perform an isolation-themed piece for patrons in cars. “It both feels like you’re doing theater and not like you’re doing theater,” said Erin Rollman, a company member.
Then there is street theater, getting a new look from artists idled by the pandemic. In Chicago, the ad hoc collective Random Acts of Theater dons costumes to perform for passers-by some weekends. They dressed as seniors, carrying babies, in a work called “The Future is Watching Us,” and marked Juneteenth in oversized masks. Up next: something involving large bird puppets.
“This is a time when everyone feels frightened and weird,” said one of the organizers, Jessica Thebus, who runs the graduate directing program at Northwestern University. “Bringing art to people walking down the street feels really important.”
But there are also pageant-scale productions — big casts, lots of seats — underway in outdoor venues, including the Medora Musical in North Dakota, the Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Dramain Branson, Mo., and the Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs, Ark.
“It’s been a bit of a challenge to do a play in the middle of a pandemic,” said Kent Butler, who stars as Jesus on Friday nights in Arkansas, and who also leads tours and serves as the production’s spokesman. Attendance, he said, is down, reflecting a decline in tourism and the disappearance of large travel groups.
The Great Passion Play, which has been running seasonally since 1968, takes place on a 500-foot-wide, three-tiered stage, making social distancing easier for actors; all but Jesus are also costumed with face coverings whenever their characters are not speaking.
“When I was playing Jesus last Friday night, a little girl, probably age 3, came up to me and wanted to be picked up,” Butler said. “It doesn’t look good if Jesus ignores a child, and I knew that, but also knew that for her health and safety and my own, it is very wise to use hand sanitizer. So I grabbed her hand in mine and walked her off the set all the way to where I knew there was hand sanitizer available, and was able to clean my hands and made her clean hers as well.”
The American Shakespeare Center will rotate “Othello” and “Twelfth Night” between indoor and outdoor stages, so audiences can choose where they are most comfortable. The acting company has agreed to an “isolation covenant.” And there are few virus cases in the theater’s Shenandoah Valley region.
“We got lucky in terms of geography,” said Ethan McSweeny, the theater’s artistic director. “That gives us an obligation to see if we can try and chart a course.”
There are clearly willing audience members. “Theater is something you crave,” said Jackie Schmillen, an Iowa television anchor who went to see a drive-in production of “Love Letters” in the Des Moines Playhouse parking lot. And Joel Bassin, the producing artistic director of the Firehouse Theater in Richmond, said his productions of “Dorian Gray” are selling out — albeit for audiences of only two, four or six people. “People do want to go out if we can assure them we’re controlling the risk,” he said.
A clutch of actors, draped in white, ran, leapt and danced around an outdoor basketball court in Claverack, N.Y., one recent night, recounting their dreams and re-enacting their visions.
Instead of footlights, there were the beams of headlights surrounding the makeshift stage. Inside the cars were audience members, listening to dialogue and music over their cellphones and radios.
That scene was near the end of a particularly ambitious example of pandemic-prompted experimentation: The director Michael Arden, a two-time Tony nominee, brought 33 theater artists together in New York’s Hudson Valley to develop a piece called “American Dream Study.”
For a few invitation-only run-throughs, masked audience members traveled by car and on foot from scene to scene — watching a woman in a floating canoe, a couple at a condemned mill, dancers at an abandoned oil tank, and the whole ensemble emerging from the woods to sing around a fire pit. They remained distant from the actors and one another.
The company, including the Tony winner Nikki M. James (“The Book of Mormon”), developed the piece while quarantining, with a nurse, at an inn; they remain hopeful but uncertain about whether the show will have a full production.
“We were finding a new mode of storytelling out of an obstacle,” Arden said, “and it really felt incredible.”
Michael Paulson July 4th, 2020 New York Times
The trickster theater troupe will offer “The Grasshoppers” to help get your mind off the coronavirus.
Theater artist Erin Rollman started with the literal.
Rollman was trying to come up with an idea for a show that her Buntport Theater troupe could do after rules imposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus made it impossible to gather audiences and performers inside.
So what’s outside? Grass. And what lives in the grass? Insects.
“I was thinking about the phrase ‘six feet,’” Rollman said, referring to the distance that public health experts advise we keep apart in public to try to stop the pandemic.
Well, kind of thinking about it.
“What little creatures would be out on the lawn that have six feet?”
She settled on grasshoppers. Some might quibble over whether grasshoppers have feet. They definitely have six legs, and a backstory that resonated with Rollman. Grasshoppers are usually shy creatures, but they become ravenous locusts when they’re around their peers. Physical changes accompany the new behaviors, with the creatures growing stronger and changing color.
During the pandemic, Rollman said, humans “can’t get together in big groups without, metaphorically, turning into locusts.”
As is the tradition at Buntport, she turned to colleagues to brainstorm, via Zoom before Denver’s stay-at-home transitioned to safer-at-home orders. Thus was born “The Grasshoppers,” a short play to be performed on a strip of lawn outside Buntport’s theater at 717 Lipan Street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood to audience members watching from their cars. It’s not too much of a spoiler to divulge that Rollman, Erik Edborg, Brian Colonna and Hannah Duggan all will be wearing green grasshopper costumes sewn by Rollman, who is also a Buntport co-founder.
Drive-in style, audiences will hear a pre-recorded script via their cell phones as they watch the four grasshoppers interact. The script sounds like a nature documentary’s narration, but “the learning factor is probably lower,” Colonna acknowledged.
This is, after all, Buntport, whose performers have been described by Denver Post theater critic Joanne Ostrow as “tricksters.”
Colonna said he hopes “The Grasshoppers” will offer a bit of respite from “the monotony some of us have felt in quarantine.”
A performance during a pandemic can’t be all fun. Safety was a priority as “Grasshoppers” developed from an insect egg of an idea to a show. Rollman, Edborg, Colonna and Duggan will keep a social distance on their lawn stage and have minimized sharing of props. Masks will be needed if you plan to roll down your windows during the show because cars will not be six feet from each other. Anyone who would like to see the performance without a car should contact Buntport for details on how that can be done safely (stuff@buntport.com or 720-946-1388). The theater bathrooms will be open during the show, but the performers kept “The Grasshoppers” to 35 minutes in hopes no one will need to go.
Within days of the May announcement of the show’s June 11-27 run, the eight available parking spaces were reserved (on a pay-what-you-can basis) for each of the 12 performances initially scheduled. Buntport is working out a schedule for additional shows, which will be announced on its website. Still, even if each car holds five people, the response to “The Grasshoppers” doesn’t compare to the 150 seats inside the Buntport.
While shops and restaurants have started to reopen under restrictions, it’s unclear when theaters will be welcoming audiences inside and under what guidelines.
For now, “a closed room with 150 people … doesn’t seem cool,” said Sam Schmitz, another member of the Buntport troupe.
Schmitz said her theater has some loyal fans who are used to coming as often as once a month. While it’s not quite the same as the pre-coronavirus performances, “The Grasshoppers” offers something more than the online material Buntport has recently offered.
“I personally think there is something about live theater you can’t always translate to online,” Edborg said.
Windshields will be between the performers and the audience, and the actors won’t be speaking during “The Grasshoppers.” But without bright theater lights, Rollman expects to be able to see each audience member, something she’s rarely able to do from stage.
“We can connect in a different way,” she said.
“This is its own thing. It’s not a replacement for a show that you can see inside a theater. We’re trying to make it as intimate and fun as we can,” Rollman said. “I suspect that even though we have barriers, it will feel emotional.”
Donna Bryson- June 1st 2020 Denverite
Check this link for great photos with the original article post
The COVID-19 crisis has pummeled theater artists, who were already struggling to compete in a world of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. Unique real-time experiences shared among actors and audience members have always been the theater’s selling point, but now those in-person experiences are shut down indefinitely. And while many local companies are helping their artists stay active and communicating with audiences through videos and performances over Zoom, most people are longing for something more immediate.
Amid the despair, Buntport Theater, one of Denver’s most cherished arts organizations, has found a way to pull off a live performance.
The Grasshoppers, described as a “short, funny twist on a nature documentary,” will be presented in the theater’s parking lot. The actors will be at least six feet from each other, and patrons will remain in their cars. “This is an experiment,” explains company member Brian Colonna.
But with Buntport, what isn’t?
Like all of the troupe’s productions, The Grasshoppers was created through a group process and inspired by a quirky, compelling fact that inspired one of the troupe’s members: Erin Rollman had read about a species of grasshopper that, because of changes in the environment, morphed into voracious swarms of locusts that infested the Rocky Mountain region beginning in 1875.
Homesteaders faced “a plague of biblical proportions,” says Colonna. “Obviously, it changed the lives and times, including growing practices. Religion was part of it, too; the way the government responded was part of it. You have these settlers experiencing a spiritual dilemma, wondering if they’re being punished by God. And the church had to walk a fine line between asserting ‘Yes, you are being punished’ and cursing the locusts.”
In this production, four actors play the grasshoppers. That’s not a hard thing to do, observes Colonna, since Buntporters have often taken on animal roles. He was a camel in The 30th of Baydak and a rat in Universe 92; in Jugged Rabbit Stew, Erik Edborg was a giant talking rabbit. And Rollman gave a melancholy performance as Io, the Goddess transformed into a cow, in two productions.
“Clearly, we have a problem,” observes Colonna, laughing.
Although the COVID-19 crisis isn’t mentioned directly, The Grasshoppers does address it: The play explores the juxtaposition as solitary insects become “a gregarious swarm burning through resources like fire,” says Colonna. The production also touches on the way the stay-at-home orders have helped heal our damaged environment, since nineteenth-century settlers noted that fields were often more fertile after a locust infestation.
The theme of separation and coming together is personal for the company, whose members had been working together almost daily since Buntport’s inception two decades ago.
“This week is the first time we’ve all been in the same place since the shutdown — six feet apart, with masks, but together,” says Colonna. “Before that, all the work was online and on Zoom. Just having a rehearsal felt like a revelation. You can’t interrupt anyone on Zoom; it reins in conversations. And we talked today about connecting with the audience, also, letting them know you’re interacting with them and seeing them.”
While the future of Denver theater is unclear, Buntport may be better equipped to weather the crisis than some groups. The company has a devoted audience, strong connections with other local institutions, and an understanding landlord — though he, too, faces financial uncertainty, Colonna notes. Buntport has saved some money over the years, and has a history with large funders. The nonprofit received a small business loan in the first stimulus round, and the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation allocated funds. Members have taken pay cuts, but they are still receiving checks.
“Right now we are able to continue to have our jobs, which is a privilege,” says Colonna. “It’s been amazing, people coming together to support us. We are also a small company that can change course relatively quickly. We are planning to be able to sustain even if we cannot be fully operational for another year or more.”
In August, The Grasshoppers will take on new life with the release of a video companion piece created in collaboration with Fannypack Films and artist Adam Stone. This is part of the 3×3 Projects initiative created by the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, which has funded seven projects exploring creative collaborations during the stay-at-home order.
“Still, it’s a big problem,” Colonna concedes. “There’s no revenue in terms of ticket sales, and no knowing when people will be able to come together again. But the bedrock for us has been the community and being here twenty years. We’re still here. We’re hanging in. And we’ll see what happens.”
-Juliet Wittman May, 26th 2020 Westword
a mini drive-in [live] theater experience (a.k.a a short play performed outdoors while the audience remains in the safety of their cars).
Like most performance-based companies, we have been working on safe, alternative versions of entertainment, and like many companies both locally and around the country, we landed on an iteration of the drive-in.
The Grasshoppers is a short, funny twist on a nature documentary, featuring four giant grasshoppers (spaced safely apart from each other) on Buntport’s front lawn.
a mini drive-in [live] theater experience (a.k.a a short play performed outdoors while the audience remains in the safety of their cars).
Like most performance-based companies, we have been working on safe, alternative versions of entertainment, and like many companies both locally and around the country, we landed on an iteration of the drive-in.
The Grasshoppers is a short, funny twist on a nature documentary, featuring four giant grasshoppers (spaced safely apart from each other) on Buntport’s front lawn.
a mini drive-in [live] theater experience (a.k.a a short play performed outdoors while the audience remains in the safety of their cars).
Like most performance-based companies, we have been working on safe, alternative versions of entertainment, and like many companies both locally and around the country, we landed on an iteration of the drive-in.
The Grasshoppers is a short, funny twist on a nature documentary, featuring four giant grasshoppers (spaced safely apart from each other) on Buntport’s front lawn.
a mini drive-in [live] theater experience (a.k.a a short play performed outdoors while the audience remains in the safety of their cars).
Like most performance-based companies, we have been working on safe, alternative versions of entertainment, and like many companies both locally and around the country, we landed on an iteration of the drive-in.
The Grasshoppers is a short, funny twist on a nature documentary, featuring four giant grasshoppers (spaced safely apart from each other) on Buntport’s front lawn.
a mini drive-in [live] theater experience (a.k.a a short play performed outdoors while the audience remains in the safety of their cars).
Like most performance-based companies, we have been working on safe, alternative versions of entertainment, and like many companies both locally and around the country, we landed on an iteration of the drive-in.
The Grasshoppers is a short, funny twist on a nature documentary, featuring four giant grasshoppers (spaced safely apart from each other) on Buntport’s front lawn.