‘All Arts Organizations Are Media Companies Now’: How the Pandemic is Transforming Theater

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A series of immersive audioplays performed and mixed live, using tech developed by theatrical sound designers and engineers. A summer festival’s entire season of new plays and classics released on …

, has languished, resourceful artists and producers are making work that incorporates video, gaming and interactivity into hybridized digital-theater forms that, rather than serving as mere stopgaps, stand poised to endure even after the return of theater as we knew it.

“I see it shifting already in the way people are thinking,” said Shanta Thake, the associate artistic director at the Public, which has seen its COVID-era programming evolve into digitally-distributed audio dramas , new plays written for Zoom and livestreamed performances from Joe’s Pub, among other initiatives.

Audio entertainment came to the fore early, benefitting from the podcast boom’s revitalization of the form and its pre-existing distribution network. Creatively, too, the shift from stage to audio could be relatively smooth, thanks to theater’s heightened focus on language and the rigorous vocal training of its performers.

Williamstown is just one of the theater companies forging new partnerships during lockdown, establishing relationships and experimenting with production models that look likely to endure. New York’s Working Theater, for instance, teamed with six other companies around the country to produce and stream its live interactive theater event, “American Dreams,” a project that began life onstage.

“Our hope is that we’re not just making things that could be made as well by any media production company,” said Aaron Malkin, the literary director and dramaturg at NYTW. “We’re really trying to figure out how to make community, how to make live-ness, and how to work an act of collective imagination that is asking the same thing from an audience and from an artist as a work of theater.”

 

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