Theaters of the future
Will Chicago locales redesign seating for the COVID-19 era? Not likely.
For those of you Chicago theatergoers who are wondering, no, the theaters of the future will not look like spaceships. Theaters in Chicago and beyond, shut down and emptied by the pandemic since March, are now, in the early days of what usually would be the busy fall theater season, looking ahead to when — and how — they next might open for live performances in 2021.
All say they’re concerned with making audiences feel comfortable and keeping actors and staff safe. But no, for the most part they are not reaching for redesigns that will tear out their existing auditoriums and replace them with seating pods, partitions or some new innovation.
No magic solutions are coming for theaters, or for that matter concert halls or other indoor performance spaces. Just the familiar precautions such as disinfecting, some time to think and, here and there, some creativity.
“As much as we’d love to get back in front of audiences, we are loving that we have time,” said Tom Pearl, production manager at Steppenwolf Theatre.
Steppenwolf has been undergoing a campus expansion on Halsted Street that was begun a year before the pandemic, including the construction of a new 400-seat, in-the-round theater just south of its mainstage. It was designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill and the theater design company Charcoalblue.
Charcoalblue, based in London with a studio in Chicago, has been recognized as a leader in responding to the pandemic, contributing to a study on how to reopen theaters — the “Roadmap for Recovery and Resilience for Theater” — that was created by American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
So what is Steppenwolf doing with that extra time? Surely it, of any theater, must have ripped up its blueprints and started over? No, said Pearl.
Actually, it did think about it for a moment in March. Construction was paused while the theater sought input from its own departments and Charcoalblue. There was that precarious point when the reality and dangers of the virus sunk in for the first time in Illinois.
“It came at an interesting time,” Pearl said. “Quite literally, we had brought a cake to a meeting with the contractors to celebrate one year of breaking ground. And then we realized we could not blow out the candles.”
But other than a few measured steps — such as to add touchless bathrooms, touchless doors backstage and to rethink audience pathways — Steppenwolf returned to the original plan. It already had, in the design, an advanced ventilation system that draws in air from above and vents it below, versus pulling the air across audiences.
“But we couldn’t change the shape of the theater,” Pearl said. “We couldn’t change the size.”
Charcoalblue, for its part, said it would not have had a plan for Steppenwolf had the theater wanted to switch to some sort of “COVID-specific” design.
Such radical reinterpretations do exist — the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia announced in July it was building a theater-in-the-round with a two-level
ring of walled compartments surrounding its stage, each with two seats, which the Wilma said was inspired by Shakespeare’s Globe in 17th-century London.
“We look instead at ways that buildings can react more quickly to events,” said Clemeth Abercrombie, studio principal at Charcoalblue in Chicago. In other words, the key is flexibility and “not designing specifically for the biology of COVID.”
What happens to such a theater five or 10 years down the road? If and when its building needs to change the next time, he said, the circumstances are sure to be different.
Regardless, the problem that theaters are coping with right now is COVID-19.
That “Roadmap for Recovery” was published on A.R.T.’s website in July, its second edition made public for other theaters to use, with nine major points on making theater-going safer during the pandemic. The first two have to do with ventilation and air cleaning in indoor spaces, with recommendations for adding more outside air when possible and technical advice about MERV-13 filters and HVAC systems.
The next points stress disinfecting and sanitation, using masks, managing bathroom crowding and using physical barriers to protect audiences and staff where necessary — much of it similar to the kinds of precautions spelled out in Illinois’ Phase 4 reopening. Phase 4 also currently restricts indoor gatherings to fewer than 50 people, making big shows at Chicago theaters a moot point for the moment.
Theaters also are listening Chicago’s own theater community, as well as Actors’ Equity, the national union for stage actors and managers. (From an Equity statement in April, any theater production “needs to have a comprehensive plan in place that protects not just the actors and stage managers but ensures that everyone who works in the theater has a safe workplace. It is unclear under the current circumstances how that can happen.”)
In July, a modest plan to begin performances of the small-cast “Judy & Liza” at the Greenhouse Theater Center was met by widespread protests and criticism by others in Chicago theater. The musical revue opened and closed in a weekend.
Backstage areas are a challenge for a lot of theaters — they can be warrens of rooms and hallways where actors, scenery and makeup and wig artists all must share space. That even goes for the innovative Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier; the theater was built in the footprint of the old Skyline Stage, which constrained the proportions of the backstage, said Chicago Shakes director of production Chris Plevin.
But he ticks off the theater’s slate of live shows announced for early 2021: “I, Cinna (the poet)” and “I, Banquo” are both solo shows, and others have small casts up through “As You Like It.” All will be staged in The Yard, which otherwise is a textbook example of what Charcoalblue means by adaptability.
No surprise there. Charcoalblue designed it.
The Yard, which opened in 2017, is as close to that spaceship analogy as you’ll find in Chicago theater at present. Using a system of nine vertical, movable seating towers, its insides can change show to show, creating configurations like Shakespeare’s
Globe, an in-the-round theater, or a cabaret, as was done for “A Q Brothers’ Christmas Carol” over the last holidays.
Shows will be shorter, Plevin said, with no intermission, and the theater will utilize The Yard’s multiple entrances and exits.
“Standard practice was always to have the lobby open an hour before curtain, then half an hour before you open the house,” Plevin said. “That buzz and crush in the lobby was always part of the experience. It built energy, it built excitement and community.”
But no more. The auditorium will open the same time as the lobby to dilute the flow of people getting to their seats. Also, all parts of Chicago Shakes’ plans are subject to change.
“We learned already things can change just fundamentally,” Plevin said. “We’re going to listen to the science. But what we’re hearing from our audience is we can’t wait.”
Across town, Jackie Taylor’s Black Ensemble Theater isn’t waiting. Where other theaters have been holding back, Taylor said she began calling her team in Zoom meetings right after the shutdown and calling construction crews soon after that.
The backstage area of the theater has been expanded into downstairs. No concessions will be served, some partitions have been added, ticketing will be paperless and there will be separate entrances and exits. Temperatures will be taken upon admission. As for hand-sanitizing stations, Taylor said, “I have bought 20 of them, for all over the building. People can walk 2 feet and wash their hands three times if they want.”
It’s all in service of making her audiences feel comfortable and her staff safe.
“Also, I hired a designer to come in so all this didn’t look crazy,” she said. “So it looked like a beautiful theater and not a pandemic shelter.”
When she does open a show — “and that’s a big ’when,’” she said — audiences will be capped at about 30, with casts and staff making up the balance of the 50-person limit.
“Getting used to all this is vitally important,” Taylor said. “We will do it in shifts. I think people are so hungry and in need of something, and I’m basing that just off myself. I am just sick of not producing shows.”
Rivendell Theatre Ensemble is another exception, in that to some extent it is indeed ripping out its auditorium with COVID-19 in mind. The Equity theater on Ridge Avenue that specializes in telling stories about women, by women, is taking out its bolted-down theater seats and buying 55 moveable, interlocking chairs from Steep Theatre, which was recently displaced from its longtime home in Edgewater.
The plan, said artistic director Tara Mallen, is to space 20 to 30 of those chairs out in the room. The lobby will be closed; instead audiences will wait outside on benches until the show begins. The first show might be later in the spring after it warms up.
“Sitting there touching elbows, as much as I really like that, I think it’s a thing of the past,” she said.
Beyond that, Mallen said all Chicago theaters need to get creative with playmaking.
“I’m thinking back when we were still an itinerant company, and we didn’t have a theater,” she said. Before 2011, Rivendell staged shows in former firehouses and remounted a production of its popular “These Shining Lives” in a high school in Ottawa, where the story of women at Radium Dial was set.
“We need to blow the dust off those kinds of ideas,” she said.
Downtown at the Goodman Theatre, one stage, the Owen, has some flexibility; the other, the larger Albert mainstage, has none. With its plush seats, good sightlines and space for 850, it’s as traditional a venue as you’ll find among Chicago’s nonprofit theaters.
“Radical redesign is not something we’re exploring right now,” said managing director John Collins.
That’s not to say the Owen’s flexibility won’t be used, or a long list of sanitation procedures, MERV-13 filters and other upgrades won’t be put in place. Communication with the audience is something the Goodman is stressing now, he said, letting people know, when they do decide to return to the theater, what they can expect and what the rules and policies will be.
The Goodman has announced an eight-show season for 2021, likely beginning with “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play” and including a pre-Broadway production of a musical based on S. E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders.”
Shows at the Goodman, when they resume, will ultimately be about coming together to see shows communally, together.
Because that’s what theater is, fundamentally.
“There’s no question here that our audiences miss live theater,” Collins said. “What’s been heartening is the great amount of support and love that’s been expressed, that they understand what theaters are going through.
“The audiences still believe in our mission.”