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Serious new pieces are still in danger of disappearing, never more than today. But creative virtual productions, such as “The Wolves” and “Heroes of the Fourth Turn,” offer hope.
By Jesse Green
It is very good that some theaters take advantage of the pandemic generating what can only be called quasi-theatre: magic shows, murderous mysteries, a hundred diversifications in “Christmas Tale”. I will not congratulate you here; that your source of income is your own reward. Hopefully, they can keep the spark of functionality alive to appease it another night.
The theaters I must greet now are those that produce plays of artistic value in an environment even more hostile than usual, it is a harder job, but it is the one that will make the eventual reopening of our stages value it.
These are corporations that have doubled their production of fleshy classics and serious new jobs, reconfiguring entire seasons for socially remote delivery systems. Watch the stage company’s shorts steppenwolf, the updated verse comedies from Moliére in the Park, and the audio programming of seven Williamstown and Audible Theatre Festival productions.
Among the new and classic works, however, is a particularly threatened category: the recent pieces that emerged in culture in general after a successful start in New York when the pandemic reduced its production options. language and ideas, those pieces do not offer themselves as centers of rapid profit in an industry that seeks to pivot at the same time.
So it was comforting, before this fall, to see that the Maryland-based Olney Theatre Center offered such a creative Zoom edition of “The Humans,” Stephen Karam’s 2015 play about a family’s economic and non-secular turmoil. year, “Paradise Blue” by Dominique Morisseau, a black jazz drama that was presented at the Signature Theatre in New York in 2018, will get the Williamstown-Audible remedy for which it seems, in its intense musicality, even more suitable.
Right now, however, I’m floating in the most sensible way to see, in new formats, two pieces that I enjoyed the first time. One is “The Wolves” through Sarah DeLappe, a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist who the Philadelphia Theater Company offers an exciting Zoom that will last until December 20. The other, Will Arbery ‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’, a Pulitzer finalist before this year, can be seen until December 13 in a devastating film and film hybrid at the Wilma Theatre. also in Philadelphia.
It’s not just drama; were abundant dramas to produce. For starters, “The Wolves” has a giant distribution; Follow nine teenage women on a futsal team for several months as they stretch, literally and figuratively. The expectations were also excellent. Paige Price, the company’s artistic production director, said “The Wolves” had already damaged early sales records when local Covid-19 regulations forced her to avoid production two days before rehearsals began in March.
As Price describes it, a frantic process began without delay about what to do besides “destroying the whole”. With all those price ticket winnings eliminated, she and the director, Nell Bang-Jensen, had to start from “No one needs to do recorded Zoom readings,” Price explained, and “The Wolves” in particular, with their snowfall from cross-conversations, would probably fall fatally into this format.
But as summer progressed, so did the flexibility of technology. By sending each actor not only their costumes and accessories (Amazon’s crutches!), but also their own sound device and green screen kit, the production team may vary the framing. in each of Zoom’s boxes, a massive improvement over the early pandemic reports that were essentially around the neck and as visually appealing as the tick-tac-toe.
On the other hand, because the theater may not send high-resolution cameras, the screen budget was $55,000 instead of the $350,000 spent on the level, production had to be content with the smartphone sequences that did. Unusable screen close-ups.
In the end, the technological constraints and craftsmanship of photographs do not detract from the value of history. With nine players, the 3-3 zoom grid turns out to be a powerfully expressive element. After all, it is a work composed almost entirely of stagnant women developing, using their identity as herds – the team is called wolves – as a type of privacy screen from which they become individuals. Zoom, to be multiple.
The cast is excellent, the jokes nothing less than pathetic, but what stands out from this virtual production is how DeLappe had already shaped the audience parallel to that of the girls, we only discern express lives in the undifferentiated mass faces and swimsuits (fun, to zoom, the sweaters have their numbers facing the front rather than backwards). When we notice them, they notice themselves.
“Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is a far more desperate piece, less about discovery than deepening confusion. In a series of painful confrontations, he tests the ethical clarity of his main characters: 4 young adults associated with a deeply conservative Catholic school in Wyoming What he finds, one night, in a time after a protester was killed at a nationalist rally White in Charlottesville, Virginia, is that everyone struggles with ideals they can no longer understand.
Packing so much pain and intensity in a Zoom grid would have been an aesthetic monstrosity, a Greek drama on the set of “The Hollywood Squares. “Then, when Wilma’s planned production level was closed, such as “The Wolves”, its director, Blanka Zizka, who is also one of the company’s 4 artistic co-directors, to recreate “Heroes” as a specific production virtual site. For two and a half weeks, the actors and the team quarantined five Airbnb rentals in the Pocono Mountains. The garden of one of the Airbnb was its decoration; the night was his soundscape, with dying crickets ruining the catches.
The work is so written and so accurate about its characters that I wasn’t surprised to locate the finished production, at least at first, greatly reflecting Danya Taymor’s very good original staging for Playwrights Horizons.
But very quickly, when the camera went from the scene of the other 4 young men drinking, chewing and fighting for religion to a photo of Orion in a massively starry sky, Zizka’s version, the first since Taymor, took an absolutely different side further. cosmic, if not less public than the original. The virtual delight of a genuine position, unlike what live theater offers you: a true delight of a virtual position, tilts the brain towards abstractions.
The work works perfectly this way as well, and Zizka obviously appreciated the new opportunities offered through filming. Inverted angles and close-ups encompass composition and also offer the possibility, not available in theater, to tell a component story through the appearance of how characters listen. “The theater will only see who is speaking, ” said Zizka.
The bad side?” Theatre is not a building, it is other people: actors and the public face others,” he continued. “But now that the work is in progress, she is lonely. I have no idea how others feel.
Well, I know how I felt: once I broke my back. And the news for “Heroes,” as for “The Wolves,” is that pandemic productions as beautiful as those will continue to disappoint the audience until they can combine to face live theater. Back.
The Wolves Available on duty until December 20; philadelphiatheatercompany. orgHeroes of the Fourth Turning Available on request until December 13; wilmatheater. org
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