Re-imagines play fest
With live stagings off-table, troupe embraces options
With live stagings off-table, Confetti Theatre troupe embraces options./
Back in February, when the call went out for submissions to the 16th annual iteration of a short play festival hosted by Albany troupe Confetti Stage, it was impossible to know that the world was about to be turned on its head.
The festival, which showcases locally written plays and has won numerous regional awards, always brings a flurry of activity to the ornate Albany Masonic Temple at the corner of Corning Place and Lodge Street that serves as the group’s home base. There, auditions are held, rehearsals take place on multiple floors and areas get set aside for set painting and prop building. The proscenium stage at the top level, which is also used for Masonic rites, is transformed into a festival theater space for a few October weekends.
But not this year.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought new health and safety concerns for the Masons who use the temple, as Confetti
Fest 16 producer Sean Baldwin explained. “Even they’re not using their fourth floor, where we would normally perform,” he said. “They’re trying to be
very careful about who is in and out of the building.”
If the festival were to continue, then, the first challenge would be finding a new space. But an even bigger question was how to bring the show to audiences who are being
encouraged to just stay home. A small number of local theatre companies have successfully staged outdoor productions over the summer, allowing ample room for social distancing.
But options diminish as warm weather disappears.
Of course, there’s always Zoom: Many companies pro
ducing work since March have placed their actors into the nowfamiliar rows of squares, each containing a talking head charged
with the formidable task of getting an audience to suspend its disbelief. It may be easy to forget, in a darkened theater, that you’re not inside the world of the characters on stage; watching from a living room couch while attending a performance that looks like a work conference call can be a different matter.
In the interest of finding an alternate approach, Confetti decided to present this year’s collection of five short plays as a collection of five short films, while still retaining their signature familiar feel. The company settled on the expansive indoor accommodations of the Albany Barn in Arbor Hill to treat each piece as a stage play to be
recorded; it also offered festival directors the option to explore more cinematic approaches that might involve location shoots and post-production editing.
One reason for that sort of flexibility was the pandemic’s unpredictable nature. Speaking earlier this month as film production was getting underway, Confetti Stage President Stephen Henel referred to that challenge as a moving target. “When we started the pandemic, things were at a frenzied pitch in terms of anxiety and in terms of infection rate,”
he said. “For all we know, in a couple of days, in a week, it might go back to severe lockdown. We have to think of alternatives, we need to think of multiple different plans… the safety of our casts and crews is our foremost priority.”
Regular check-ins have been a key part of ensuring that safety. “Fortunately, it’s been a very communicative group of people,” Henel added. “People are all very open about their concerns and about what’s going on in their lives, and we’ve been able to adjust accordingly.”
Submissions
One of the first adjustments to the process was extending the deadline for playwrights to send in work for festival consideration. Lydia Nightingale, who submitted a largely autobiographical piece about addiction called “Not Even One,” said the extra time influenced her decision to create the work.
“The COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning to rear its ugly head, and I could feel the fear and desperation growing around me,” she noted. “I thought if I could do anything to give my ‘siblings in recovery’ a little more hope that they could persevere… I should do it.”
For Laura Darling, whose “Painting Moonlight” is a story of two lives intersecting in a café, the challenge was finding a way around physical contact. During the extension, Darling discarded some of her original ideas to avoid having her script rejected on the grounds of “impossible blocking due to COVID.”
On the other end of the spectrum is the festival’s one solo show, “Merry Chrismukkah to All.” Requiring only a coffee cup, laptop, table and chair, writer and performer Daniel Smirlock noted that “it could be performed almost anywhere.” Smirlock developed the piece for an acting class run by the show’s director, Patrick White, and submitted it before the original deadline; he tried briefly to integrate the pandemic into the work, but he found that it softened the focus. It’s timely in a different way, dealing with soulsearching questions of identity around the context of the holi
days.
Auditions
Confetti Fest auditions are normally an in-person, groupfocused process that offers a measure of flexibility for the directors: Actors can be seen on their own, as well as grouped together to gauge their chemistry as part of an ensemble.
This year, however, the need to maintain social distancing prompted the decision to move to an online format with individually assigned time slots.
“That ‘chemistry read’ is going to be very, very difficult if not impossible over Zoom,” said Baldwin, coaching the directors just before auditions got underway. “Make peace with that now.”
One of the plays, “The Choice” by Adele Costa, also called for dancing. “Are you going to want to see people move at all tonight?” Baldwin asked director Siobhan Shea. She replied that she might, adding that she would also take note of movement experience indicated on audition forms submitted via Google Drive. During the audition itself, she settled upon simply asking whether an actor felt they could dance or keep a beat.
Rehearsals
Allowing director discretion over when and where to hold rehearsals took the place of the usual coordinated schedule approach. Zoom could be used for initial script reads and what’s commonly known as “table work,” in which discussions around a table are used as starting points for defining the world the characters inhabit. Fortunately, this can be done without an actual table.
An altogether different kind of table was needed, however, once casts began to move into the Albany Barn space. In adherence to protocols, it included hand sanitizer, surface wipes and a sign-in sheet for contact tracing. Baldwin was on hand to take everyone’s temperature with a thermometer gun and to provide extra masks as needed.
“Not Even One” director Linda Shirey honored the concerns of one of her cast members nervous about moving too quickly into the Barn by sticking to Zoom rehearsals longer than originally planned. As a selfdescribed “hands-on” director, she said her preference is to work “in an actual space where you organically create things together.” But, having directed her actors before, she added that “I would have done anything to accommodate each of them to ensure they remained a part of the show.”
“Keep in mind that these are all new original scripts,” added Stephen Sanborn, assistant director for “Great Humanity,” a fantasy set in the distant future. “There’s the normal discovery process of finding out how to make the script work, finding out things about the script that maybe needed an adjustment or an alteration,” he explained.
“The extra challenges of the shutdown and all the implications of it have made that natural process… still exciting, but harder.”
Nevertheless, the need to work around various limitations sometimes served as a boon to the production. “I would get really strong work out of Zoom rehearsals,” said “Painting Moonlight” director Joe Plock, noting that the format removed the distraction of questions like
“What am I supposed to be doing with my hands?” Plock also found that the script’s avoidance of physical contact made the connection between the characters seem stronger.
Filming
Film is largely an unexplored territory for Confetti, but the troupe was able to rely upon technical guidance from longtime collaborator Nick Nealon, aka Nicky Lightz. Other Confetti regulars also pitched in to perform a variety of functions as crew — everything from running equipment to keeping passers-by from walking through external locations.
Plock, who shot in Troy’s Franklin Alley, laughed as he recounted the latter challenge. He had gotten a permit and used barriers to close the street to pedestrian and vehicular traffic, but, he said, “We had, on a few occasions, people walking directly through the set.” Yet he took it in stride, saying that such challenges ultimately “add to the color” of the setting.
Shea’s group was the first to start filming; that decision, she said, was influenced by the fluctuations of COVID case numbers and the ever-present reminder that production could be derailed at any time. Early in the rehearsal process, she also had to replace an out-of-state actor due to pandemic travel restrictions.
The primary setting for “The Choice” is a witch’s lair in Morocco, but it was perhaps mere coincidence that most of the filming happened on Halloween. The crew set up in an underutilized urban nature preserve that Costa had found while geocaching, an app-based activity she likens to treasure hunting. “This is the stream that runs under Albany… this is the only place where it’s exposed,” she said, pointing to the surrounding rock formations. Costa, who relied upon photos and journal entries from her time as a Peace Corps volunteer to flesh out the script, added that being pushed to find the otherworldly location was “maybe the best thing that could’ve happened to the show.”
Shea would subsequently shoot an additional “dream sequence” at the Barn, where the other three festival productions would be filmed in their entirety.
Shirey said she never thought about creating “Not Even One” as anything other than a stage piece. “That’s my background. I’m a stage director, so I felt very comfortable just sticking with that,” she explained. “Especially (for) this piece because it’s a psychological drama. A realistic setting for me just wouldn’t support the storyline… It was always ‘Let’s do it as a live performance.’”
White also felt that the Barn’s stage was right for “Merry Chrismukkah to All,” as it provides the opportunity to underline the actor’s connection to the character he portrays.
As a veteran director, White added that the main departure for him would be turning the filmed performance over to someone else for editing. “Our work will be done,” he explained. “How it is presented, interacted with and received is beyond us —unlike live theater.”
Sanborn added that an outdoor location was unnecessary for “Great Humanity,” given its setting inside an underground
hibernation chamber. The ability to shoot with “one camera, gently following” as he described it, allowed the creation of an audience member’s point of view — anticipating where someone in the audience would be bound to look and using the camera to bring them there. Filming also afforded the possibility of adding an audio visualization as a focal point for a computer character, which in the original script was written simply as an offstage voice.
Timing
At press time, Confetti Fest was on track to wrap all shooting during the weekend before Thanksgiving. This will allow simultaneous release of all five films on Thursday, Dec. 3, where they will remain available for viewing through Sunday, Dec. 13. Live talkbacks with cast and crew will also be scheduled during the first weekend.
The timing Confetti established for the festival was perhaps fortuitous, given the recent resurgence of the pandemic. Early in the process, Baldwin noted that opting for the short film approach would allow re-broadcast at a later date. He also expressed hope that there might be a future chance to perform the plays live, for an in-person audience.
“We would like to be able to have a live Confetti Fest,” he said. “Exactly when and where that’s going to happen, or what that will look like… that’s all in the hands of the fates.”