Broadway will be a while. These venues say they’re ready now.
NEW YORK — The Park Avenue Armory’s vast drill hall has nearly 40,000 square feet of unobstructed open area. The Shed’s central performance space has a 115-foot-high ceiling. St. Ann’s Warehouse has 10 big double doors and a new air ionization system.
While the pandemicprompted closing of Broadway is expected to drag into next summer or fall, these and other adventurous performing arts organizations argue their futures need not wait that long. They are pressing state regulators to consider a series of architectural advantages they say should make their buildings easier to adapt for safety than the glorious but cramped houses that symbolize New York’s theater district.
Most significantly: Their venues all have flexible seating, meaning no chairs fastened to the floor, which they say makes social distancing much more feasible. Also implicit: These institutions are nonprofits, which makes it plausible for them to reopen with sharply limited seating capacity, because they don’t need to cover their production costs with ticket sales.
The coalition, which also includes BRIC, Harlem Stage, National Black Theatre and the still- under- construction Perelman Center, is pressing Gov. Andrew Cuomo to permit performances for small masked audiences.
“We need to start breathing life back into this carcass that is our industry,” said Alex Poots, artistic director and chief executive of The Shed, a cultural center that opened last year in the new Hudson Yards development on Manhattan’s West Side, and that has since revised its website to note the ease of social distancing in its cavernous space, which even has a retractable roof.
“We all know that theater, music and the performing arts are dying on their feet right now,” Poots said, “and if we can find a safe way of getting back to work, surely that has to be taken seriously.”
The New York Forward advisory board, which is shaping the state’s reopening strategy, is receptive to the argument that some venues should be allowed to open before Broadway does.
“New York Forward has been working collaboratively with all segments of the performing arts industry and are on a path to see performing arts return to New York,” Steven M. Cohen, co-chair of the advisory board, said in a statement.
Seating is not the only advantage these buildings have in responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Many also have high ceilings and large open floor areas, and some are not constrained by characteristics that complicate the reopening of Broadway: orchestra pits, backstage quarters, lobbies and even restrooms that now seem uncomfortably tight.
Their task force has put together a lengthy list of safety protocols for the governor’s consideration, and is arguing that the buildings can be at least as safe as restaurants, bowling alleys, gyms, churches, casinos and museums, all of which have been allowed to reopen. As has become the standard these days, all audience members would have to be masked, and parties of ticket buyers would have to be socially distanced from one another.
All the venues say they would radically reduce the size of their audiences to make an initial reopening possible. The Shed, which has held concerts for 2,300, says it could socially distance 300; the Armory, which often seats 1,000, proposes an audience of 96; Harlem Stage, which normally seats 160, is proposing audiences of 41.
“We have pivoted to digital, and pivoted and pivoted and pivoted, but until we can safely get audiences into our spaces, we can’t do what it is that we actually do,” said Sade Lythcott, National Black Theatre’s chief executive.