It’s a well-known mantra in the theatre that “the show must go on.” Now, in this frightening and challenging time of global pandemic, theatres all over the world are struggling to uphold our age-old adage. No theatres want to cancel shows, but unfortunately that has been a common outcome of this crisis. Many have closed their curtains, some for the final time. We have adopted new mantras about taking intermissions or leaving the ghost light on (a theatre tradition of leaving a single light bulb glowing on the dark stage to ward off spirits and protect the space when the theatre is unoccupied). Many have tried to get creative about continuing to produce content, streaming performances, postponing shows for live audiences, hopeful that we will all get back to the business of show someday soon.
Before COVID-19 changed the game, the Cloverdale Playhouse was gearing up for a very exciting stretch. We had special editions of our two music series: a St. Patrick’s Day Guitar Pull- complete with some great musicians sprinkling traditional Irish songs among their original works- and a Playhouse Cabaret celebrating the work of the great Stephen Sondheim on his 90th birthday. We were excited to start another 8-week term of our wonderful Playhouse School for K-12th graders. We were also about to begin rehearsals for our second mainstage show of the ninth season (themed “Seeing Through Different Eyes”), Jane Anderson’s beautiful play The Quality of Life.
The current irony of that title is not lost on us.
The health and safety of our patrons and our artists is our first concern, of course, and so we began cancelling the immediate things, unsure how long this situation would last or how optimistic we should be. But a play that wouldn’t be performed for almost another month would be okay, right? Wrong. So, how to proceed? Our love of this play filled with incredibly powerful messages (especially now), the exceptional cast of actors who have been so generous with their support and eagerness to make this work, and our enduring need as artists to keep creating in good times and bad kept us hopeful that we could find a way. The show must go on… but how?
Obviously, we postpone in the hopes of doing a regular run in late May. Meanwhile, we pursue every other option we can think of: live-stream a performance to the audience, move the play to our outdoor Courtyard Stage with fewer seats measured 6-ft apart, create a touring version of the set that can be moved outside later in the season without affecting our calendar for the rest of the year, etc. With the ever-updating cycle of information in the fight to understand, address, and recover from this crisis, there really is no way to predict or plan with any certainty. But, if we prepare for many options now, maybe we will be able to bring this play to you someday!
So, the idea was born to document our journey on the road to keeping this production a reality.
Lift the veil (ahem, the curtain) of the behind-the-scenes challenges, triumphs, bumps and bruises along the way to making a play in a pandemic. For many, the usual process of producing theatre remains a mystery. How do we get to that final step of the performances that audiences see? We asked ourselves, “Why not share with our audiences the way things might have developed under normal circumstances while addressing the sudden and unique challenges we will face along the way in these new parameters?”
The Playhouse has a display in our hallway for each production that we lovingly call the “Journey Board”.
On this board, we exhibit designer sketches and photos from every phase of the rehearsal process starting from the first day.
Our new “Journey Blog” and video diary will be a way of bringing that idea along for this unusual production.
We hope you will follow along and share the adventure with us!
