WORTH THE RISK?
Pittsburgh theaters deserving of support until they can reopen
Barcelona’s Gran Teatro del Liceu opera house reopened in June for a live audience, and the Internet went wild. It wasn’t so much that Uceli Quartet performed Puccini’s “Crisantemi” (Chrysanthemums) on that day in June. It was the audience — nearly 3,000 potted patrons.
Having witnessed a live indoor event as few have since mid-March, the “live” plants were donated by a nursery and distributed to health workers.
So hungry are we for new in-person experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, that if you do a Google search of “Barcelona, opera and plants,” you get more than 4 million clickable options.
Clearly, when it comes to in-person performances, it is a time of: Will they or won’t they? Will we or won’t we?
In other words, will theatermakers and audiences risk a return while there is no vaccine to combat the deadly coronavirus?
In recent days, the path has been muddied by findings from different sources.
On July 9, The Actors Equity Association representing 51,000 performers and stage managers released a list of resources “geared toward producers looking to resume live theatre.”
Its four core principles come with complex and compelling measures from the union’s public health consultant, Dr. David Michaels, and with the conclusion: “It is not yet possible to re-open theaters in a way that protects the safety of members, as well as production workers and audiences.”
There was more optimism last week in a study geared toward musical education and performance, The first of three stages of an aerosol study commissioned in May by the National Federation of State High School Associations, the College Band Directors National Association and more than 125 performing arts organizations has “yielded preliminary data and considerations that could help prevent the cancellation of performing arts activities amid the coronavirus pandemic.”
Recommendations include fitting HVAC systems with HEPA filters and students facing in the same direction. “Teachers can reduce their own emissions by using a portable amplifier to keep their voices at a low conversational volume,” was one suggestion. The study also suggests using the “handy risk estimator tool” developed by pharmaceutical company UCB, which detects “the aerosol transmission risk relative to the unique elements of rehearsal spaces.”
Theatermakers and educators have good reason to take stock and assess risks involved with reopening. The people who depend on in-person performances were among the first to see their livelihoods wiped out in one fell swoop in mid-March, with a way forward to be determined. Most employers big and small — from Broadway to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to the community theater nearest you — are committed to remaining dark until at least next year.
When you hear that organizations may cease to exist, you may feel badly about the entertainment that will no longer be available to you, or the loss of the power of theater to entertain, to uplift and hold up a mirror to society.
But its absence also represents tens of thousands of workers, including reliant businesses.
Just before the pandemic shutdown, on March 8, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts released a report that the arts contribute $763.6 billion to America’s economy — 4.2 percent of the GDP, and more than agriculture, transportation or warehousing.
Allegheny County counts direct expenditures of $686 million annually by cultural organizations, and their audiences generate $410 million in household income, $74 million in tax revenues and 20,550 full-time equivalent jobs as of 2017, according to the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council.
The state of Oregon gets it. Its legislature last week committed $50 million to supporting its arts institutions, including the 85-year Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which has gone digital for 2020.
In the United Kingdom, where theaters were said to be in a state of collapse, Parliament stepped in with nearly $2 billion — in a country with about one fifth of the population of the United States. On Friday, less than two weeks after news hit of the bailout, it was announced that indoor performances in theaters and other venues in England could begin again Aug. 1, with social distancing rules in place, according to Variety. No mention was made of masks.
A statement by Jon Morgan, director of Theatres Trust, did not address health risks. Combined cases in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland gave the U.K. the highest number of COVID deaths in Europe by early May, with the vast majority in England.
Since mid-May, it has been reported that new cases in the U.K. have steadily dropped to a daily average of around 850, with 40 deaths. However, it could be fewer, On the same day theaters greeted news of a reopening, “Britain ordered an urgent review Friday into how coronavirus deaths are counted after a study suggested health authorities are overestimating the
toll by counting people who died long after recovering,” according to medicalxpress.com and based on an article for Oxford University’s Centre for EvidenceBased Medicine.
“Alongside the support package and performing arts guidance announced last week, this is a step in the right direction, but for most theaters it will not be economically viable to reopen with 30-40% audience required under social distancing,” he said.
London’s West End is its equivalent of Broadway, which is closed through the end of the year and represents about 96,000 jobs.
The U.S. government, by comparison to the U.K., has committed a total of $75 million to all nonprofit arts institutions, distributed among 50 states and territories.
No wonder theatermakers and artists are desperate to take risks, even as COVID-19 cases and deaths in the U.S. are on the rise in some states.
Who’s in, who’s out
It used to be when people talked about theater as a big risk, they were talking about Broadway investors. Now, it’s about health, safety and economic survival.
In Massachusetts, where the curve has been flattened since mid-May, a prominent theater is making waves by returning to live performing, with heavy duty precautions.
The Berkshire Theatre Group in Pittsfield, Mass., is about to present live, inperson, indoor concerts of Broadway stars, on July 24 and 25. Tickets are $100 each, and marked “low availability” on the Berkshire Theatre website.
Masks are required to see Tony Award-winners Kelli O’Hara and James Naughton, with singing members of the Naughton family, onstage, while practicing “procedures and protocols in a manner that is consistent with current Actors’ Equity and state and local mandated health and safety guidelines.”
According to the website, “A doctor/nurse will be on duty for all performances. Additional safeguards will also be in place.”
Similar precautions are listed for the group’s “Godspell Under the Tent,” scheduled through August.
One Greensburg company is going full-steam ahead — with summer camp performances. Stage Right will offer in-person performances — with cast and audiences in masks — at Smail Auto Group Amphitheater in Hempfield Park on July 24, 25, 26. The company promises “spacious socially distanced seating and a big pavilion“for Disney’s “The Descendants” and “Footloose.”
However, Pittsburgh’s Quantum Theatre has said its planned August show of “An Odyssey” is postponed.
As coronavirus cases in Allegheny County climbed last week, the decision was made to indefinitely delay the planned production at the Schenley Park Ice Rink.
In an email, artistic director and founder Karla Boos assured supporters that Quantum will return.
“We’ll make theater in a new way, until the three wonderful shows we conceived and went very far toward realizing can happen live,” she wrote, “We are now a fierce global community of performing artists in dialogue with each other, and there’s a Pittsburgh branch . ... Together we are finding inspiration, and we will share our experiments. Soon. We live to work.”
In Detroit, Michigan resident Jeff Daniels, who was to star in the Pittsburgh-filmed TV series “Rust” before the COVID shutdown, filmed a video about our current “intermission.” It’s filled with messages of hope and inspiration, but not reopening.
In Indiana, where COVID19 cases and deaths have been rising after a dip in June, the Beef & Boards Dinner Theater in hardest hit Indianapolis is soldiering on.
Open for business this summer, the theater has added precautions such as new filters for the HVAC system and cast and waiters wearing plastic shield masks, along with social distancing practices.
The measures are explained in an upbeat video that ends in owner Doug Stark — not socially distanced or wearing a mask, from his masked employees — saying, “So as soon as you’re comfortable, we’re here to entertain you.”
The climate for opening changes almost daily. On Thursday of last week, the Hale Centre Theatre in Salt Lake County, Utah, which tested the COVID-19 spread by reopening July 1 with a production of “Mary Poppins,” announced it was suspending performances after a second cast member tested positive for the virus.
The suspension comes after a complaint filed with the county health department said there was a scarcity of sanitizing wipes and that the theater sometimes ran out of disinfecting supplies, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune.
As of Friday, theaters in Dallas and Houston have similar stories to tell — reopening, cast members test positive — yet the Hale Centre has announced it will return to the stage July 28.
Will they come?
Even with reduced capacity and a mountain of precautions, will there be enough risk-takers to make reopening worth everyone’s while?
While theaters are finding creative ways to stay in touch with audiences via the Internet, they are hurting. Venues remain closed indefinitely, and companies are writing and rewriting budgets, hoping audiences will be there if they wait out a vaccine, or a tested and verified safe return to gathering.
One local company is putting out feelers now about its planned return in October. Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company has announced an ambitious, hybrid slate, starting with three one-woman, one-act shows this year. They will run indoors for a socially distanced audience of up to 25 people, be filmed and later available for a ticketed online audience.
Artistic director Mark Clayton Southers has been doing some surveying on Facebook, asking, would people be willing to return to an indoor theater now, with precautions in place?
The results are mixed, with a resounding “Yes!” here and there, and emphatic “No’s” as well.
There are other ways to support organizations and individual artists right now, and with good reason.
With so many theaters dark, and all of the job loss that represents, the Americans for the Arts Action Fund notes that on Aug. 8, the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program will end with a more than $130 billion surplus, according to the website.
“We are urging Congress to use these funds to allow the arts and culture sector, including nonprofits and gig workers, to have an opportunity to apply for a second forgivable loan with these surplus funds.”
To some of us, any amount that ensures survival of American theater, at whatever date it is safe to reopen, is a small price to pay. So many have said so eloquently that theater is an essential art form — essential to civilized society, to democracy, to the economy.
For me, children’s author, animator, educator and whimsical doodler Mo Willem put it best when he said:“Science will get us out of this pandemic. Art will get us through it.”