In a time when shared experiences are moving online, the St. Louis performing arts community is figuring out how to spread creativity virtually. Still, we’re all eager to come together again. So when St. Louis city and county began relaxing stay-at-home orders, allowing businesses to reopen with certain restrictions in place, St. Louis theater companies wondered how they were going to stage live experiences while protecting audiences, actors, and crew members.
There might not be a group of artists better suited to the task.
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“The thing about theater is, you’re always making everything out of duct tape and a stapler. It’s the life we live,” says Mike Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director and executive producer. “It’s not like we don’t have the toolkit. We are a spunky bunch.”
Isaacson is one of the members of the new St. Louis Theatre Community Task Force, formed by Sharon Hunter, artistic director and producer of Moonstone Theatre Company. Hunter figured that all of the city’s theaters—from the big guys, like The Muny and The Rep, to niche troupes such as Stray Dog Theatre and That Uppity Theatre Company—had to be asking themselves some of the same questions.
How do we conduct auditions and rehearsals? Hunter asked herself. The more she interacted with her fellow theater professionals, the more questions came up.
Hunter reached out to her network—artists, directors, venue operators, and more—and convened the task force. The group has been meeting (online, of course) since late April to contemplate theater’s place in the new and ever-shifting normal.
“This is not about budgets and who’s bigger and who’s smaller, who’s union and not union,” Hunter says. “This is about theater companies’ coming together to be a united front, to project to the audiences, the actors, the creative teams, and the technical teams—they need to know we’re working together to keep them safe.”
At the first coalition meeting, Hunter invited Dr. Shephali Wulff, an infectious disease specialist and member of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, to provide a clear-eyed public health perspective.
Hunter says audiences can expect single-ticket sales with two seats in between, temperature checks and masks upon entering venues, entering and leaving from specific doorways, and mingling-free intermissions. Theaters and artists will see more understudies in case actors get sick. There’ll be masked rehearsals, and two-performance days will be eliminated to allow for cleaning. Air conditioning, singing, and laughing audiences will have to be evaluated for the potential to spread the virus.
“Everybody’s saying, ‘OK, what are the questions?’” says Isaacson. “You take something as simple as a prop—How is it cleaned? Who’s in charge of it? In a rehearsal scenario, how are people positioned? Does everyone need to be in a room at all times? You take your normal process and you evaluate it step by step.” On Monday, the Muny announced a historic first: It would be delaying its 2020 lineup until 2021.
Isaacson is quick to credit Hunter for putting the task force together and says that the meetings have been useful for defining the scope of the issues at hand, as well as how a return to “normal” will look.
“It’s a lot, but it’s necessary while we trickle back,” says Hunter. “The goal is to bring people back. I believe it will happen. It’s just going to take time and creativity.”
