“The live performance industry was one of the first to close and will be the last to come back.”
Those are the words of Keith Stevens, managing director of the Peterborough Players, and it’s what he’s been saying since early 2020.
The arts and entertainment industry has been decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, really any event that gathers people together was greatly affected by shutdowns, guidelines and mandates and made it nearly impossible to move forward with business as usual in 2020. But not all was lost.
The ability to pivot or adjust, to stay engaged and relevant became vital for arts organizations and event organizers during the first global pandemic in more than a century. And while everyone longs to be back to normal, the result has shown what the use of technology and some quick thinking can lead to.
The Peterborough Players decided to cancel the summer season last April and have not produced a play since.
“It became clear we really needed to not produce in the summer of 2020,” Stevens said of the decision. While it was difficult, there was no way audiences could be welcomed into the Players Theatre in a safe manner. Then the thinking quickly shifted to how they could still provide content.
“What can we do to engage with our patrons, engage with the community?” Stevens said. Under the umbrella of Players Online, they held the Players Backstage virtually to mark what would have been their opening night, a virtual gala and online auction, a cabaret, and most recently, Playgroup, where participants get a peek behind the curtain at the workings of a production in an online space.
“We found those were very successful ways to engage with our audience,” Stevens said. “But it was never meant as a replacement. It was going to be a supplement.” But that success has shown it has a place in the future, even when audiences fill the seats.
Other theater companies did make the switch to virtual performances, Stevens said ” but for us it did not fit what we thought was good for the Peterborough Players to do.”
Canceling the season meant the Players lost 100 percent of its earned revenue for the last three quarters of the year. Thankfully, the community rallied with their giving and funds from the CARES Act and other funding sources like the EIDL and PPP helped keep the lights on.
“That was absolutely instrumental is keeping us going,” Stevens said. “That support is why we’re still here.”
Stevens said, “we absolutely intend to produce live theater in 2021.” When and how that will happen is still very much up in the air.
“We know we will produce plays for people to come and see in 2021. We need to produce plays. That’s our mission,” he said. “To say we’re working on it is the understatement of the year.”
The Players conducted furloughs early on and have since brought some of those employees back.
“Absolutely it’s been a long, hard year,” Stevens said. “But it’s clear that what we do is missed. And we absolutely want to be part of the recovery and rejuvenation of our area, including culturally, emotionally and economically.”
MacDowell Resident Director David Macy remembers March 12, 2020 vividly. That was the day MacDowell began sending artists home from their residencies.
“We decided we couldn’t sustain operations safely,” Macy said. They gave the artists 10 days to make arrangements and informed others on the schedule for future residencies at MacDowell that they would not be happening. The organization was also just about to email invitations for summer residencies, but instead those fellowships were pushed back to 2021.
“If people kept arriving and the staff kept living their lives then it wouldn’t be safe,” Macy said. “And that was hard because we’re in the business of saying yes.”
After all the artists went home, Macy said they connected with Monadnock Community Hospital officials and offered the cabins to doctors and nurses as a place to stay sequestered from their families.
They canceled their application deadlines in September and January and began looking at how they could safely reopen. Macy said they enlisted the help of Ricardo Nuila, a two time fellow and doctor, as well as MCH’s Chief Medical Officer Michael Lindberg for guidance. In the meantime, they did host a group of artists in a virtual platform.
The turning point came in August, Macy said, when they were able to set up structured testing using Hearthside Family Health and Quest Diagnostics.
MacDowell reopened for fellows on Oct. 21 with some noticeable changes. Instead of rolling arrivals and departures, everyone now comes and goes at the same time. Fellowships were cut back to four weeks and only the 14 live-in studios are used, reducing the number of artists at one time in half.
“It’s definitely limited to what the social scene typically is for residencies at MacDowell,” Macy said.
Safety protocols include quarantine upon arrival and mandatory testing after four days. Dining is limited to the individual studios and only upon the return of negative testing results may fellows gather around the outdoor fire place. Use of the James Baldwin Library is by appointment with the use of masks.
“The artists have been really appreciative of the sanctuary, just the safety of this place,” Macy said.
Applications just resumed for residencies starting in October through May of 2022 and Macy anticipates a high volume. While it isn’t the same as it was before, Macy is just thankful to have some life around the property again.
“It’s vastly better than sitting idle,” he said.
Executive Director Philip Himberg said MacDowell was impacted in many different ways. Thankfully, they do not depend on earned income, but downturns in the investment market did have an impact on the endowment funds that had been invested.
“That made us relook at our budget for 2020,” Himberg said. But one thing the MacDowell board committed to was keeping the staff employed through the end of 2020.
And the world of funding changed, Himberg said, as people shifted their giving priorities to the relief effort, social justice movements and the presidential election.
“That was challenging and we navigated that funder by funder,” he said. MacDowell switched its annual gala to online and the end result was a surprise.
“We actually raised more money this year than we did in our (live) gala last year,” Himberg said.
Himberg, who was hired as executive director in May of 2019, has spent more time on the job during COVID-19 than not. And he has tried to maintain a positive outlook.
“We decided this was an opportunity and not a tragedy,” he said.
Andy’s Summer Playhouse was set to celebrate 50 years in 2020, but instead were forced to cancel all of its plays and all the planned events in remembrance of the previous five decades. But while Andy’s didn’t produce live theater, they pivoted to the Digital Renaissance Project over the summer, an online platform that connected Andy’s kids from beyond the Monadnock region to artistic talents across the country.
While the organization is still deciding how to proceed in 2021, the success of the Digital Renaissance Project has shown there’s another avenue in the creative process, and one that is likely to hang around well past the pandemic.
Firelight Theatre Workshop had episodes 6, 7 and 8 of the “We Were Friends” episodic planned for 2020 that imagines the enigmatic and complex relationship between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. There were also two full-length plays on the schedule. The plays didn’t happen, but the “We Were Friends” saga continued. The sixth installment was a series of letters delivered to ticket holders and No. 7 was a phone conversation that people were able to listen to over the radio. And there are big plans for 2021.
Project Shakespeare embraced the outdoors in 2020 instead of the intimate indoor spaces they are typically known to perform in. There were four socially distanced performances of “MacBeth” during the summer, followed by a one-time only outdoor show, “In Their Own Words…. Finding Agency through Shakespeare”, where students shared their feelings in their own words and did a staged reading of Shakespeare monologues that best amplified those feelings. Last month, Project Shakespeare founder Deborah Thurber said they will be doing in-person plays beginning in May. In what form depends on COVID-19 guidelines and safety protocols.
Peterborough Concert Series had a full slate of offerings planned for the Peterborough Town House – and then they didn’t. Shows began getting canceled and rescheduled, then canceled again and rescheduled, until finally they were just canceled all together.
Left with no music to present, series organizers Seth McNally and Mike Chadinha took a model that had proven to work in European countries and created Drive-In Live – essentially a drive-in concert at the Cheshire Fairgrounds in Swanzey where occupants of a car got their own defined viewing space. The success was apparent early and it turned out to be just what the region’s music lovers needed, a safe place to see a show. For 2021, Drive-In Live has been rebranded as Northlands and it will be more like a true concert experience, but with safety protocols in place.
Electric Earth Concerts made the switch to a videocast model for its season. Monadnock Music held an outdoor concert in the fall and its weekly Listen & Lunch Series. Peterborough Folk Music got in on the livestream craze and also had a few outdoor house concerts.
Tina Kriebel, chair of Children and the Arts, said it was really hard to cancel last year’s event, which would have been No. 27 and not just because the planning was mostly done.
“This is something that’s very special in our community,” Kriebel said.
So in December, they put together the lantern installation in Putnam Park, entitled “Home Sweet Home” and recently had a meeting about what May could look like.
“We’re trying to do something in May that will celebrate kids and the arts, like our mission says,” Kriebel said. “But we’re really just in the idea phase.” It will look decidedly different with no planned performances or hired artists and more along the lines of another installation, but that’s just the way it has to be.
“Performances just bring people together,” Kriebel said. “And it just doesn’t make sense to do that.”
Regardless of what it looks like, Children and the Arts will return.
“I just want the community to know we’re going to be back,” Kriebel said.
With no new movies coming out and widespread skepticism about being in a movie theater, both the Peterborough Community Theatre and the Wilton Town Hall Theatre had a rough go of it in 2020.
PCT reopened in July after being allowed by the state, but it lasted for just one-week due to limited customers. Wilton made it a few weeks, but was back in a pause before the end of July. They still host Saturday Afternoon Classics and the Silent Film Series, but most nights the theater is dark.
Both adapted to offering private theater rentals, which have been very popular, and it helped them both survive and keep the lights on until the movie industry comes back.