New ways to do plays
TheaterWorks at forefront of theaters reinventing productions during the COVID-19 shutdown
While COVID-19 shuttered thousands of theaters across the country, TheaterWorks in Hartford is emerging with a raft of accomplishments drawing accolades from around the country. The small independent theater, known for its intoxicating creative spirit, has taken up the available tools and innovated new ways of making and sharing theater, at the same time creating timely new shows and delivering a full 2020-21 season.
TheaterWorks jumped in the way most theaters did in the spring, creating a weekly video theater-themed talk show, “Get Sauced with Rob Ruggiero,” and adapting its existing “Living Room Concert” live music series as a streaming show with performers setting up rudimentary broadcasts using their phones or other devices. They also negotiated a screening of a video made of the acclaimed 2017 TheaterWorks production of the musical “Next to Normal,” augmented by interviews and panel discussions with the reunited cast and creative team.
“The driving force,” adds TheaterWorks Director of Marketing and Communications Freddie McInerney (whose job encompasses aspects of what a Managing Director would do at other theaters), “was to keep it as agile as possible, easy to engage.”
Unimpressed with some of the results of these early efforts, TheaterWorks kept setting higher standards and exploring new techniques. As Ruggiero puts it, “In June we said, ‘We can’t offer this in September.’ We need to get better.”
“At one point,” McInerney says, “Rob said ‘What if we do 12 plays?,’ and we all jumped on it. We weren’t sure what that would look like. We had to learn to stream, and do it well. We have definitely gotten better at it.”
The learning process gave way to exploration and innovation.
“We had all this opportunity to explore how filming and live theater can mate,” says Rob Ruggiero, who has been directing shows at TheaterWorks for nearly 30 years, and since 2012 has been running the theater as its producing artistic director. “The challenge changes from show to show.”
Trusting its creative instincts has paid off. “Russian Troll Farm,” livestreamed in November, put TheaterWorks Hartford on the national radar. A co-production with TheatreSquared in Arkansas and the New York-based The Civilians, Sarah Gancher’s dark comedy was based on the real-life social media disinformation campaign that intended to sway the 2016 election. “Russian Troll Farm” earned not just a rave review from The New York Times but “Critic’s Pick” and “Best Theater of 2020” status as well.
Gancher and directors Elizabeth Williamson and Jared Mezzocchi sought to preserve the feel of a live theater production while leveraging all the technical tools available.
“We’re doing things on Zoom that shouldn’t be possible,” Gancher said at the time. “We’ve already broken Jared’s soft
ware, we had so many cues. There’s video within the scenes. There are sound gags. There are cutaways to images. You can direct an audience’s eyes much more precisely than with theater.” Special lighting kits were sent to each of the show’s five actors, who performed separately from their own homes, so that there is a consistency to the presentation.
The show was acknowledged, not just by critics but in the theater industry, as groundbreaking in its use of computer design programs, multimedia effects and a consistent presentational style which masked the fact that the actors were performing in separate Zoom-like boxes from their homes.
New York Times critic Jesse Green called “Russian Troll Farm” “one of the first new full-length plays I’ve seen since theater moved online that is as rewarding as a text, makes the most of excellent actors and approaches full engagement with the new, hybrid form.”
Other publications took notice of TheaterWorks’ streaming-theater designs and challenging shows as well. TheaterWorks has gotten attention everywhere from NPR to the theater-tech publication Lighting and Sound America and the site On Stage Blog (which covers all of North America) for its ability to create engrossing, issue-laden, high quality contemporary theater while theater buildings remain closed.
A Massachusetts-based theater site, In the Spotlight, raves “While many theaters are experimenting with reaching their audiences with virtual programming, TheaterWorks has deftly delved into exploring the medium of video and the distribution form of streaming with exceptional success.”
If the cutting-edge “Russian Troll Farm” was all TheaterWorks had produced during the shutdown, that would be an amazing achievement. But there’s been so much more: a solid new production every month, and a constant raising of standards and expectations as the company explores what is possible in this new artistic realm.
TheaterWorks Hartford’s 2020-21 season actually involves more shows than if the shutdown hadn’t happened. The theater traditionally does six shows a year, each of which run for around five weeks. In going online, the theater decided to present a new experience every month for at least a year, at affordable prices.
In shifting to its one-show-month streaming schedule, TheaterWorks also shifted from a traditional season-subscription model to a new “membership” model costing just $20.20 per month or $195 for a year.
Of TheaterWorks’ 5,000 existing subscribers, 2,300 joined on for the new membership program, either paying month-bymonth or for a whole year in advance. “Many of our subscribers migrated over,” Ruggiero says, “but we had no idea how to predict how many would.”
The expectation was that even longtime patrons would test the waters with a month-to-month membership, but TheaterWorks was pleased to find that most of them went for the full-year option. This helps create what McInerney describes as “a healthy cash flow” during uncertain times.
In addition, there are those who buy single tickets to specific shows and don’t go for the membership. The base of single-ticket buyers has broadened for online. TheaterWorks’ streaming shows have attracted theatergoers in 46 states, McInerney says, the majority of whom would be unlikely to visit the theater in person in normal times.
When in-person theater returns, “future live shows may be simultaneously livestreamed to theatergoers who still prefer to stay at home,” McInerney says, to maintain that national audience.
TheaterWorks creates new membership model, promising monthly shows in whatever form COVID allows
“We do feel we’re not alone,” McInerney says of the current COVID-conscious challenge. “There are definitely other theaters nationally doing what we are doing. We felt like we had a choice to hunker down and let it pass, but we saw we had an opportunity to maintain our connection to our audiences. People need you to be constant. From the beginning of this, when we did the podcasts, we got emails saying ‘It’s so great you guys are doing these things.’
Upcoming TheaterWorks offerings in the monthly membershipbased 2020-21 season:
A reading of the workin-progress “Talkin’ to
This Chick Sippin’ Magic Potion,” Jan. 10-29;
Mr. Parent” by Melinda Lopez, described as a “filmed to stream play in development,” Feb. 7-26;
Adam Rapp’s 2019 drama “The Sound Inside,” set at a Yale writing program, March 7-26;
the musical “Fun Home,” April 11-30 and a new project by playwright Harrison David Rivers, May 9-29.
“We keep trying to figure out what makes it a TheaterWorks experience,” Ruggiero says. “Regardless of whether it’s your kind of thing, this is our artistic team behind it. We’ve worked hard to make sure that’s the case.
“Everything falling to pieces around you really takes the pressure off. We were pulled apart, and it freed us up to be braver and find new audiences.”