How One Theater Company Is Facing a Dark Spring

By Helen Shaw

If you time the Theater Shutdown from Thursday, March 12, then we’re through day seven. Seven days of turning into the City that Never Gathers. Seven days! Time enough for God to make a world. But as we move further into the crisis, it also seems to have been enough time to rock ours to its foundations. New York culture exists right at the survivalist brink at the best of times, and with the violence of its forced closure starting to reverberate through a hand-to-mouth sub-economy, doubts have started to grow. How exactly are we going to reboot all of live performance? How far do these repercussions go?

To try to understand the complexity of a situation that was changing minute by minute — last Thursday, we still had a full theater calendar for April, for instance — I talked to members of one downtown company: Elevator Repair Service. The ERS production of Gatz was a standard-bearer of the 2010s; the group’s networks and orbits contain many of my favorite artists; they and their artistic cohort had a lot of projects on the boil for the coming months. When corona clotheslined them, a new show at the Public Theater was under discussion — ERS was talking to the Public about bringing its Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge into the lineup in late spring. So the first day of March found them in a bright place, and although their longtime producing director Ariana Smart Truman was leaving at the beginning of the summer, they still felt stable, confident, as though they knew what was on the horizon.

John Collins, artistic director and director (Gatz, Measure for Measure, Room Tone) is just now getting used to video meetings — when we spoke, he was about to inform the staff that the Baldwin and Buckley project at the Public was definitively canceled. That conversation would be grim. “It had been such a great thing for us,” Collins said. “We were excited because even though we were heading into some 11th-hour fundraising for it, it was going to make up a deficit.” ERS spends huge amounts of time in the devising process — rehearsals and workshops can go on for years. So in a cycle when they’d lost their Mellon grant (“A very unexpected and major blow”), they were borrowing from the previous year’s surplus to develop a new version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Still, losing Baldwin and Buckley would have simply put them back to square one. By last week, though, they’d realized they also needed to cancel their May 11 gala. Could they get their $19,000 deposit back from their venue, Tribeca Rooftop? (Turns out that it’s good for a year.) “The conservative estimate is that we’re looking at a loss of $200,000,” Collins said.

Excerpt from “How One Theater Company Is Facing a Dark Spring” by Helen Shaw. Read the full article here.