By: Rey Zinck
Gabbie Cruz says they “felt the giddy energy of all the actors” Thursday at Sock ‘N’ Buskin Theatre Company’s opening night of Dracula.
The performance at Carleton University featured actors running off the stage and into the audience – something that hasn’t been possible for almost three years.
“This is what they love doing, and you can really feel that in the way they perform,” said Cruz, the co-artistic director of Sock ‘N’ Buskin, a student-led theatre company founded in 1943.
“We’re all very grateful.”
COVID-19 restrictions seriously disrupted live theatre, darkening many stages for months on end. As mask and vaccine mandates began to lift in advance of this production season, Ottawa’s local theatre scene is making a comeback.
Janne Cleveland, co-ordinator of drama studies at Carleton, called the 2020 onset of COVID-19 a “dire circumstance” for live theatre.
“In the beginning, when everything shut down, theatres shut down … it was the right decision, but it was very hard on the industry,” Cleveland said.
According to her, many cast and crew were forced to leave the industry to find other work. She says this caused a persistent shortage of technicians.
For Adrian McCarthy, a 22-year-old theatre student at the University of Ottawa, the pandemic forced a production he was involved in to shut down just a couple of months before opening night.
“It was pretty heartbreaking,” McCarthy said.
Jane Pick, director of the Kanata Theatre box office, said a loss in income was another challenge live theatre faced during the pandemic.
“When you have a lockdown, you do not have income coming in, but you still have the expenses of running the building,” Pick said.
Cruz said Sock ‘N’ Buskin dealt with the pandemic’s challenges in innovative ways. In its first entirely online production season, the company offered virtual shows specifically designed for Zoom.
Cleveland says many theatre companies made a similar effort to move their productions to an online-friendly format, but this method, according to her, had its pitfalls.
“A lot of it didn’t work very well because you didn’t have that liveness,” Cleveland said. “You need that three dimensionality for this medium to work.”
On the other hand, Vishesh Abeyratne, who works at the Great Canadian Theatre Company’s box office and is artistic facilitator for Teesri Duniya Theatre, said Zoom was an “ideal platform” to test out scripts and hear how they sound.
“The pandemic provided me time to write, which I milked for all it was worth,” Abeyratne said.
Now that pandemic restrictions are beginning to lift, local theatre is starting to look like it did before the pandemic – with one noticeable difference.
Pick said she noticed about 95 per cent of Kanata Theatre’s patrons now wear masks despite mask mandates being lifted.
According to Cleveland, this culture of COVID-19 safety in live theatre might be related to the high stakes of live theatre.
“If your actors are out, your show is down, you’re not making money,” Cleveland said.
“The lesson that I’ve been trying to teach people is just to take care of themselves,” Cruz said. “I think everyone’s super excited to get back on stage, but I wouldn’t want them to put themselves at risk for any reason.”
Another shift in live theatre spurred on by the pandemic is a heightened awareness of the need for community, Cleveland added. “There were people who just broke down and cried when they entered the theatre because they were overwhelmed with the sense of coming back,” she said.
Abeyratne has observed the same thing. “There’s a real hunger for live theatre.”
“There are many people who are just really starved for that level of connection and community that theatre does provide,” Abeyratne said.
Back at Carleton, Cruz said this year’s production of Dracula is the closest-to-normal show Sock ‘N’ Buskin has produced since the beginning of the pandemic, namely because of the live audience and full staff backstage.
“Dracula has done a lot of cooler things that we couldn’t do if we weren’t in person,” they said. “It actually feels like an actual production, and now we get to experiment a lot more.”
Dracula runs from Nov. 17 to 20. For more information, visit www.socknbuskin.com.
