HowlRound Theatre Commons: During the COVID-19 shutdowns, life as we knew it became unmoored. We felt the impacts culturally: Many of us baked bread for the first time. Yeast and toilet paper were out of stock everywhere. We made telehealth doctor appointments for the medical issues we’d been ignoring. Self-identifying non-artists developed their passion projects in their kitchens. Individual artists took breaks. Theatre companies streamed productions online. With the globe as their community, the performing and designing possibilities seemed limitless—for a time.
2 comments:
Katie Pickett was my theater teacher!!! She’s a lovely person and so passionate about making theater accessible. I had her class during online school in 9th grade and she was so committed to making everything work. I recognize a lot of these resources listed, and I think they’re relatively mainstream if you do theater in the metro Boston area. Theater during COVID was rough, and I know a lot of places that had to shut down or temporarily close because of it. Especially places that operate out of Boston because it’s an expensive place to set up shop. Maybe this was just because this was the theater scene that I was involved in, but I also feel like a lot of greater Boston theater is geared more towards young actors and kids. It’s good to know that there are resources that still exist for adults and professional actors.
As someone from the Boston area, I never really got a chance to use most of StageSource’s resources, as I was only really starting to need that kind of community when it shut down. However, I do think that as someone who is from the Boston area, my opinion is that it was a vital tool for the theater community in Boston. Just look at their Facebook page. They have such a long list of all the things and resources that they did, and who's doing them now. well I do agree that it is good and a sign of the resiliency of our theater community that so many of their responsibilities were taken over by other people or places, it sucks that they're not all in the same place, and there are some that it sucks that don't exist anymore, like the job fair they used to run. I don't disagree that there is definitely a valid reason for shutting down because so much is getting digitized, which does kind of a little bit defeat the purpose of the website, but there's also a lot that will now I'll be a lot harder to find or source because it's different people, or some different place, or on hiatus, now that there’s not just one central location for the Boston theater community, and I think that this was a point that the author of the article overlooked a little bit.
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