Theaters challenged whether to be or not to be
Part of the enchantment of theaters is their quirks. The acoustics, the boards, the sight lines are as unique from one playhouse to another as any two actors’ readings of Lady Macbeth.
One constant is something audiences seldom see: the ghost light that serves as the sole illumination when stages are otherwise dark.
Ghost lights have been lonely symbols of darkened theaters around town, the nation and the world through this spring and summer. Some have already been permanently extinguished.
The pandemic revealed something about Stamford’s Curtain Call that is as obvious yet as easy to overlook as a phase of the moon.
While Curtain Call typically stages about a dozen shows a year in its 184-seat Kweskin Theatre and the Dressing Room Theatre, which seats 100, it has also hosted “Shakespeare on the Green” on midsummer nights for the past 17 years.
“The Green,” on the fringe of the Sterling Farms Golf Course complex that hosts the theaters, is Curtain Call’s secret weapon.
While Executive Director Lou Ursone has been Zooming with counterparts around the United States about strategies in the age of the coronavirus, he realized the value of having a 16-year head start on staging outdoor shows. While others are plotting how to transform parking lots into auditoriums and loading docks into stages, Ursone is staging a greatest hits of the previous 16 years of Shakespeare productions, along with songs from musicals inspired by the Bard, such as “West Side Story.”
“We’re all picking each other’s brains and I was the first to do something like this,” he says of conversations with heads of other community theaters.
Reviving live theater with this show could not be more appropriate, as Shakespeare wrote many of his greatest works while the Globe Theatre in London was shuttered by outbreaks of the plague.
Ursone & Co. have been vigilant, wiping microphones with Clorox after each performer steps away, and keeping actors masked until they enter stage right, but this has been one case where Gov. Ned Lamont & Co. may have been too cautious.
The shows, which launched July 24 and conclude with sold-out performances Sunday, Aug. 2, limited audience members to gather in 5-by-5 foot squares spaced a minimum of 15 feet apart. The state set the measurements, which reduced a standard audience of more than 350 to a maximum of just 125.
Ursone made the argument any reasonable person would make: Why is the mandated distance between tables at indoor restaurants only 6 feet, while outdoor theaters are required to maintain 15-foot gaps?
“I yelled at every legislator,” he says. Apparently, there aren’t many theatergoers beneath the gold dome, as Ursone got responses that audience members tend to drift during shows. Part of the problem may have been the dearth of arts and culture representation in the early stages of Reopen Connecticut.
The change was finally made to 6 feet in recent
Ursone & Co. have been vigilant, wiping microphones with Clorox after each performer steps away, and keeping actors masked until they enter stage right.
days, but the final shows will stick to the grid painted in the lawn. Ursone says he expects to leave a distance somewhere between those two measurements in the future.
He’s taken note of mistakes made by peers around the country. A production of “Mary Poppins” in Salt Lake City, Utah, canceled performances after crew members tested positive for COVID-19. Large-scale musicals aren’t supercalifragilistic at the moment.
Then there were warm weather states that opted to experiment with dinner theater.
“One of the theaters was doing buffet,” Ursone says. “They couldn’t have done anything more wrong.”
So he’s sticking to “the two-handers,” which skew dramatic. Putting two people alone on stage requires a unique casting call. They plan to present “The Gin Game,” which focuses on a pair of seniors who develop a relationship at a nursing home over gin rummy. Though the characters meet as strangers, he needed two actors who currently live together. He didn’t have to look far to find the perfect pair, veteran local actors Gail Yudain and her husband Ted, who happens to be the chair of Curtain Call’s board of directors.
Ursone jokes that his own wife, Jan, “is not getting on stage with me.” But he hopes to co-star in another two-person play, “The Guys,” about a New York Fire Department captain who gets help from a journalist in preparing eulogies for eight of his firefighters who died on 9/11. In this staging, they can maintain 6 feet of space between one another. If all goes as planned, they would perform it outdoors on the anniversary of the tragedy.
Given the limitations of the size of the crowd, he’s only considering shows that have streaming rights available in hopes of picking up much-needed extra income.
In addition to revenue lost from the shows, Curtain Call canceled its biggest fundraiser, the annual “Dancing with the Stars,” as well as summer youth programs. It was the right call. A children’s theater camp in Fort Myers, Florida, shut down after two children tested positive for COVID-19.
“Shakespeare,” at least, looks like it will break even (“We might even put a dollar and 98 cents in the bank!” Ursone jests). One audience member revealed “I’ve never come to your Shakespeare stuff because Shakespeare is not my thing, but I love what you guys do and I need to see live theater.”
That’s the kind of audience appreciation — not just for Curtain Call but for the soulful nourishment of theater — that’s needed to keep the ghost light burning.