Post Script

Bonnie Balke’s voice waivered a bit as she stood at the podium in the mostly empty lobby of the Bartell Theatre earlier this summer to announce plans for Mercury Players’ upcoming 2020-2021 season, live over Facebook. “It’s been so long since I’ve heard applause,” she said anxiously, as socially distanced colleagues offered a muted ovation.

As it turns out, Balke and all the performers and audiences for Mercury Players, Stage Q, Strollers Theatre, KRASS, and the Madison Theatre Guild will have to wait much longer than anticipated to bask in a wave of applause. The slate of announced productions will have to wait too, including an interactive Clue musical based on the board game; an original holiday panto based on superheroes; Hir, a dark comedy by “genius grant” award winning performance artist Taylor Mac; the Wisconsin premiere of Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses; and yet another historical feminist drama from Lauren Gunderson.

In 1887 The New York Times reported that a “mysterious waif” with a “wild, haunted look in her eyes” was committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. But this “waif” was not mentally ill; she was the pioneering young journalist Nellie Bly, on special assignment from Joseph Pulitzer to infiltrate the hospital and write about the deplorable conditions she found inside. After a week and a half of witnessing rancid food, torturous and unsanitary baths, drugged patients and cruel staff, Bly was rescued from the asylum and began to craft her expose.

After her columns appeared in Pulitzer’s newspaper, The World, the horrifying accounts raised public awareness about abuse, and eventually led to reform. To preserve Bly’s reports, they were assembled into the book Ten Days In A Madhouse. This marked the beginning of serious investigative journalism and cemented her legacy as much more than a “girl detective” and “stunt journalist,” even before she bested Jules Verne’s fictional record of traveling around the world in 80 days.

At this time of year, audiences at American Players Theatre are usually ambling up the hill — after a delicious picnic on the grounds — to see the second half of the repertory season debut. Successive opening nights on each August weekend draw us back to the woods for one more evening under the stars, seeing our favorite performers in a new round of plays, both classical and contemporary.

Of course this year everything is different. But the company that has enchanted audiences for decades with their extraordinary summer offerings have one nice surprise in store for us — an extra weekend of summer theater. Far from the starry skies of Spring Green, APT is bringing recordings of live Zoom performances into living rooms across Wisconsin for an extended period — until August 9th. The “Out of the Woods” series of six virtual readings has been an enormous experiment for actors, directors, and audiences, as we all adjust to the advantages and disadvantages of theater presented through, and altered by, technology.

“Most people in America, when they talk about race, they have absolutely no context.”

This observation was made by playwright Carlyle Brown during the talkback portion of American Players Theatre’s most recent Out of the Woods series of live staged readings, after the performance of his play Have You Now, Or Have You Ever Been…. The quote is striking because the piece -- focusing on the writing, philosophy, politics and public life of poet Langston Hughes -- is all about context. Available to view for free, on-demand at pbswisconsin.org through July 26, it centers on the impossibility of separating an artist and his work from his lived experiences, and the stark truth that moments of rage and calls for revolution are not the product of moments of injustice. They are the result of a much larger context; a lifetime of oppression.

As part of Overture Center’s survival plan, board president Betty Custer is talking with the city of Madison and Dane County about obtaining additional support, including potential funds from the HEROES Act, a second national COVID-19 relief package currently being considered by Congress.

“The door is open for more discussions,” Custer said at a June 25 news conference. Overture announced earlier that day that it was canceling its fall season. That is on top of recent news that the arts center was cutting 60% of its staff. At the news conference, Custer and Chris Vogel, Overture’s chief financial officer, said they were taking these steps to protect the organization so it is financially stable enough to open again in 2021.

Holy crumbs!

Milwaukee Opera Theater’s musical homage to pulp fiction magazines is back, in an all new, COVID-19 safe format. After debuting at Broadway Theater Center in 2018, Doc Danger and the Danger Squad has transitioned from live theater performance to an “old time” radio show. Instead of one evening filled with intergalactic evil-doers and sensational superheroes, the re-imagined comic book opera – written, composed and narrated by Jason Powell – is now four, 45-minute audio episodes which will air on successive Thursday evenings through July 16.

The dreaded news has arrived: Overture Center will scrap its fall season and remain closed until further notice.

This comes less than a week after the performing arts center, which went dark in mid-March, announced emergency cost-saving measures that resulted in cuts to 60% of their staff. Like venues across the country, Madison’s premier performing arts center has declared an “intermission” for events in the building, at least through the end of November. Overture leaders frame the news as a “preservation plan” — with the hope that performances can resume with some holiday programming in December, and a regular slate of plays, concerts, dance and visual arts offerings in 2021.

I have a very pleasant memory of seeing Shakespeare’s As You Like it at American Players Theatre in 2018. On a hot night in June at the beginning of the season, I vividly remember Melisa Pereyra’s calculating grin as she played the smitten maiden Rosalind, dressed in a newsboy’s cap and trousers after being banished from court by her ursurping uncle (a stern Brian Mani). Escaping to the Forest of Arden in disguise, she could not hide her growing love for the also recently evicted Orlando, or her delight in manipulating him to “practice” his wooing on her alter ego, Ganymede. Pereyra’s Rosalind also reveled in every love note tacked to a tree (and there were many!) written by the prolific and equally infatuated young man, a wronged younger brother searching for justice and the woman who stole his heart.

Everyone who loves the theater, including actors, producers and audience members, was caught flat-footed this spring when — over the course of just a few days — all live performances were closed down, from Broadway to your local community theater. In an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19, plays that were about to open were shut down. National tours were halted in their tracks. A few events were rescheduled, but most were cancelled. Right now every single stage in the country is dark. It is safe to say that nothing like this has happened in a century.

In this strange moment of Covid-19 and quarantines we have all lost our everyday interactions with others; well-worn routines of going to work or school, gathering with friends, going out to restaurants and of course, going to the live performing arts events like concerts and theater. As summer begins, there is also a loss of rituals – from graduations and weddings, to the Dane County Farmers Market, to the Fourth of July fireworks.

For many of us, early June is synonymous with another beloved ritual – bringing a picnic basket and a bottle of wine to the grounds at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, hearing the musical cue that the performance is about to begin, and carrying blankets and bug spray up the hill to see the first play of the season, performed by the consistently extraordinary APT company. We settle into our seats, surrounded by the sounds of Wisconsin wildlife. We marvel at the rustic, outdoor stage. We lean forward in our seats, waiting for our favorite actors, as well as the new class of interns, to transport us to Renaissance England or Ancient Greece, Denmark or New Orleans. We revel in the stories and luxuriate in the words, as the sun goes down and the stars come out overhead. We even like the bats that regularly swoop in and out of the scenes.