Friday, November 27, 2020
Quarantine, Ventilate, Be Ready to Quit: In-Person Theatre in the Time of COVID
AMERICAN THEATRE: When planning a full season of shows for Premiere Stages at Kean University in Union, N.J., artistic director John Wooten (he/him) typically submits a four-page proposal to Actors’ Equity Association. But for a single recent production of Fannie Lou Hamer, Speak On It!—staged outdoors just five times with two performers for relatively small, socially distanced and masked audiences—Wooten “went back and forth 15 times” with the stage actors’ union, filling up a safety worksheet with a “multicolored rainbow” of highlights of concerns and solutions, for a document that ended up close to 30 pages.
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I think what is going to worry many smaller theatre companies who want to employ Equity actors for these small productions that can be done with proper safety procedures in place is the amount of red tape that they will have to go through with Equity. I fully understand that the health and well being of the cast is paramount, but I feel like Equity takes it too far sometimes and not always for good reason. Sometimes it feels like Equity is just being a bully because it can. Making someone fill out 30 pages of information for a two actor socially distanced performance is too much and its actions like this that will cause smaller groups to run away instead of producing ground-breaking work. In general, Yes, I understand that Equity is only trying to protect their members, but maybe it is time to really look at all of the Equity rules and regulations, including the ones about smoke, fog, and haze, and re-evaluate what really needs to be a regulation and what can be a recommendation and let some of these smaller groups proceed to try to make some money. After all, if the actors aren’t getting paid, Equity can’t be paid.
The first thing I noticed about this article, despite it not being the main point, was that people were introduced alongside their pronouns. It made me wonder why every article is not doing this, because it is not a huge deal and provides clarification to the reader for the rest of the article. Besides this, I was at first thinking of how CMU could possibly bring in-person theater back, but was then disappointed by the last few sentences of the article, describing how Kean University had actually shut down since these performances due to rising COVID cases in the area. The recent surge in cases makes me pessimistic for the future of in-person theater, because this article describes how it was almost possible and developments were starting to work, yet that is a far off ideal in our current reality now. Despite this, I am glad that this experience worked out for those who got to witness the project, and I am sure it gave audiences a taste of what they have been missing.
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