BWW Blog: The New Normal?

A few blogs ago, I wrote about my experience doing auditions on Zoom and how strange it was. Well, I'm pretty sure I've topped that now. I thought auditions were weird on Zoom, but they're not as weird as doing an entire production on Zoom. I spent the last few weeks rehearsing for and performing in a virtual production, and it was every bit as strange as I thought it would be.

Marking my first show as a student at the University of Central Missouri was Kristiana Rae Colón's thought-provoking play Tilikum, which takes the story of a real-life killer whale and turns it into a story about oppression and slavery. Before our production, Tilikum had only been produced once, back in 2018 when it premiered in Chicago. We were not only the first college to ever do the show, but we were only the Second Company to ever do it, so that felt like a pretty big deal. Unfortunately we weren't able to do the show onstage, so the designers and technicians had to come up with a way for us to still do the show live, but using Zoom.

Rehearsals started a little over two weeks before the show actually opened. The first week was spent doing read throughs and beat work, with the next week being designated for blocking. Once tech came along, it added a whole list of challenges, for the actors and designers alike.

The designers were tasked with coming up with scene changes and lighting cues for a virtual setting as opposed to in a theatre, and the actors were tasked with (on top of everything else) doing those cues ourselves. Let's just say that tech week was really interesting. In fact, the crew was still working out the kinks the night before the show went live.

It was tricky. Several of us agreed that doing theatre this way just doesn't really work. We found ourselves burdened by technical difficulties and connection issues, and I asked myself if we were really going to be able to pull this off at the level we were aiming for. Luckily every problem we'd been having was solved just in time, and we had no issues come opening night.

Even though there weren't any issues with the show once we finally went live, we all still had the same feeling we did days prior. We did not like doing theatre this way, and the question of whether or not this could become the new normal has honestly left us a little terrified. While it's nice to still have resources that allow us to continue doing live theatre, doing it this way really becomes a whole new kind of headache.

Will this become the new normal? Or will we be able to go back to the way things used to be? All we can do now is keep our fingers crossed... and our masks on.

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