San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Union agreement paves way for digital theater postpandemic.
If much of theater has gone digital since the pandemic, a new agreement between two performers unions hints that the art form might have online options indefinitely.
On. Nov. 19, Actors’ Equity Association, which traditionally covers inperson, onstage work, and the Screen Actors GuildAmerican Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which deals with any show on a screen, resolved a monthslong jurisdictional dispute about streamed theater.
AEA now has jurisdiction over digital work that replaces a live stage show or whose digital audience supplements a live audience during the pandemic.
Among the stipulations is that AEA can’t cover work that’s created as TV or film, “including work that is shot out of chronological order, that is substantially edited prior to exhibition or that includes visual effects or other elements that could not be replicated in a live manner.”
Although the agreement lasts only through Dec. 31, 2021, its effects might well extend beyond the pandemic, according to some local theaters.
“We’ll always have to plan for, ‘ How do we capture this on film and do a play?’ ” says Susi Damilano, producing director at San Francisco Playhouse, which has been a local leader in employing union actors during the pandemic. “Prior to the pandemic, every contract with Equity, every royalty agreement explicitly said you could not film. So this is going to change everything.”
After being the first company in the region to welcome union actors back to its stage this fall, with a production of “Art” by Yasmina Reza filmed before an empty house, San Francisco Playhouse is now streaming Brian Copeland’s solo show
“The Jewelry Box,” available through Dec. 25, and the Jason Robert Brown musical “Songs for a New World,” available through Dec. 31.
“Ever since COVID hit, we were all confused,” Damilano admits. “Can we move forward? Can we work? What does this mean? And then who governs it?” The new agreement, she says, now offers “a little bit of certainty in this time of uncertainty.”
For San Francisco Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Rebecca Ennals, initial relief gave way to wanting more.
“I would love our unions to think as creatively as the artists they represent,” she says, calling the new agreement reactive rather than proactive. “This is a great contract for what we already did last summer.” For its “King Lear,” the company used Open Broadcaster Software to capture live video feed from the actors’ various shelters in place and reassemble their images on top of the same virtual background.
Though she can’t yet say what S. F. Shakes’ Free Shakespeare in the Park in 2021 will look like, “I have a feeling that it will not be a fully virtual or a fully inperson experience.” She reads the unions’ agreement, by contrast, as eitheror, not bothand.
Ennals knows some audience members won’t be comfortable attending a show unless everyone present is vaccinated.
“We want those people to have access to the art,” she says. “Does that look like simultaneous broadcasting? What about part of the show being online and part of it being live?” What if you watch most of a play from your distanced seat in the grass, but then an intimate
scene on your phone?
Even if all participants are vaccinated, S. F. Shakes wants to stay connected with audiences it attracted in England over the summer.
“We love live chat,” she says. “It’s a whole new level of getting to know your audience members. It inspires fabulous debates about Shakespeare — decolonizing and intergenerational debates.” And the company would be loath to give that up.
At San Francisco Playhouse, “there’s a lot of patrons, particularly that are older, that are nervous,” says Damilano. “Some of them are saying, ‘ I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to being in that big of a crowd.’ But they still love the art form.”
To ensure those audience members don’t miss out, she has taken to helping a few with tech support.
“One of our former board members told me that she had the Geek Squad from Best Buy coming over to install a Bose Soundbar,” in part to have a better audience experience with San Francisco Playhouse shows, Damilano says. And the theater’s patron services manager, Tiiu Eva Rebane, gets so many tech queries that the company now has a page called “How do I watch the show on my TV?” on its site.
If not all theater makers are as sanguine about digital technology in the art form, they’re also realistic.
Jim Kleinmann of PlayGround, which used SAGAFTRA contracts for its summer Zoom Fest and its Monday Night PlayGround series, views digital theater more as a pandemicera makeshift.
“This current situation is a blip in our organization’s and the overall theater community’s history,” he says, adding that the hope is they won’t have to “struggle with this for five years, 10 years.”
At the same time, he says he is exploring ways to make the Potrero Stage — the company’s Potrero Hill venue, where Crowded Fire Theater, Golden Thread Productions and Playwrights’ Foundation also perform — adapt to a hybrid reality, possibly with “broadcast capability,” he says.
Actor Melissa Ortiz says that in performing in “King Lear” with S. F. Shakes, “I had to come to terms with the fact that this isn’t theater.” Not being able to see her fellow actors or audience members made the show feel like a substitute or a BandAid.
Still, she appreciates the show’s technological achievement, the connection it brought S. F. Shakes’ community and the fact that she had a job during the pandemic.
But no one becomes a theater artist because they dream of working on Zoom. “The something in between, the hybrid of theater and film, to me feels like it’s mediocre in comparison to either fully one or the other,” she says.