By Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director Barry Edelstein and Audrey S. Geisel Managing Director Timothy J. Shields
How does a theatre fulfill its purpose if its performance spaces sit empty?
In March 2020, The Old Globe shut down for the first time since World War II. The theatre was in the thick of its winter season and was building a Globe for All touring production while also beginning preparations on another banner summer season. For an institution that operates year-round, serving audiences both in Balboa Park and across San Diego County, the idea of ceasing operations was outlandish. But the swift, stark realities of COVID-19 required it, as they required so much of everyone around the world. The Globe switched off the lights and locked the doors.
While the Globe has faced war, fires, and other catastrophes in its 86-year history, the pandemic was an especially devastating period. Friends, neighbors, and colleagues were taken by the virus. Freelance performers and artisans who count on work in our theatres were left without sustaining employment. Approximately 70 percent of the Globe’s full- and part-time staff were furloughed, and still more took pay cuts or worked reduced hours. Our three theatre venues, places of empathy and joy, were silent, bereft of their audiences, who spent painful months isolated at home.
But The Old Globe’s commitment to serve the public good through theatre art did not abate. Theatre innovates in times of despair. It always has. The ancient Greek playwrights turned major conflicts into thrilling works of art. Shakespeare used the closures caused by the bubonic plague to write new plays and tour his work to new audiences. And now too the Globe found resilience and creativity in its extended intermission.
Host Laura Zablit with Associate Artistic Director and Director of Arts Engagement Freedome Bradley-Ballentine in the pilot episode of Word Up!, May 2020.
The Globe’s Arts Engagement Department responded to the shutdown immediately with a wide range of online programming. Successful longtime projects, like Community Voices playwriting classes and free AXIS celebrations, found new life on digital platforms, broadcasting via social media to thousands of homebound San Diegans. And staff quickly developed new programs that harnessed virtual forms. Writing, music, poetry, and design proliferated in collaborations between artists and viewers with programs like The Poet’s Tree, Creative Youth Studio, and The Living Room Play Workshop, bridging the digital divide with flair. In fact, programs that started online, like the interactive artmaking event Word Up!, are now taking place in person on our plaza, bringing the creative process full circle.
Only two months into quarantine, as digital conferencing platforms quickly entrenched themselves in our daily lives, the Globe called on reowned comic performer Bill Irwin to present his new work In-Zoom on YouTube Live. This short play, which hilariously mired Irwin and fellow actor Christopher Fitzgerald in the quirks and frustrations of screen-to-screen communication, was one of the nation’s first theatre pieces devised for the shutdown, and brought some comic relief to its audience of beleaguered tech users.
Meanwhile, The Old Globe’s favorite mainstays, Shakespeare and The Grinch, found ways to delight audiences while their stages remained dark. Barry Edelstein adapted his acclaimed Thinking Shakespeare Live! series online to focus on the writer’s greatest sonnets, drawing parallels between the Bard’s world and our own. In partnership with KPBS, the Globe also brought Edelstein’s acclaimed 2017 staging of Hamlet to the radio waves in a thrilling audio production, which can be enjoyed on the Globe’s YouTube and podcast channels now. And after 22 straight years as San Diego’s favorite holiday tradition, Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! would not take a year off, also partnering with KPBS Radio to reach families across the county and the nation and spread some holiday cheer.
The Globe also responded with a slate of other programs, including new podcasts and digital humanities initiatives. What Is Theatre Now?, another exciting effort, asked six gifted artists to imagine forms and technologies that might translate onto digital platforms or live theatre, or might introduce new hybrids of the two. This new initiative has informed the Globe’s trajectory moving forward, even as it reshapes and remakes this ancient art form for an extraordinary new era. Some of these works, like Patricia McGregor’s reimagining of Samuel Beckett’s towering Krapp’s Last Tape and Johanna McKeon’s adaptation of Juan José Saer’s short fiction Anonymous Biography, are now becoming available to view online for free.
The Globe’s Social Justice Roadmap buttressed all of this work. Officially adopted in October 2020, this five-year plan builds on our recent strides toward greater equity, diversity, inclusion, access, and belonging, meeting the deep reckoning in the theatre, and in America at large, that followed the murder of George Floyd. This ambitious document addresses every aspect of our work and operations now, and will continue to do so, as we commit to making every constituency in our community feel an equal sense of connection to this great theatre.
It takes leadership and support to weather a crisis, and the Globe had the great good fortune to be sustained by philanthropists from all areas of the region. Our Board provided thoughtful guidance and deep generosity to keep the Globe producing work for the community while the doors were closed. Government relief provided much-needed support as well: two federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans were essential to the Globe’s operations, as was the Congressional relief package that included the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant. And the Globe was grateful for significant funding via our GlobeRISING campaign. Indeed, it is because of those who gave to this campaign, even amid their own struggles, that the Globe met the many challenges it faced and has now risen strong again.
And through it all, The Old Globe’s professional staff persevered, facing the hardships of the pandemic with grace and ingenuity. They made deep sacrifices and navigated terrain that changed often, sometimes by the hour. Their faith shone through. Such is their skill and tenacity that the Globe not only survived the pandemic, but produced great work throughout it, and now met this reopening with a schedule brimming with activities, including the production you’re seeing tonight.
The Old Globe is once again humming with activity: full-scale productions on our stages, free family events on our plaza, excited audiences in our seats. It’s almost like normal. And yet, what we consider normal is forever changed. Our artists, supporters, and staff learned that we are capable of more creativity and determination than we ever knew. And we understand that with our abilities comes a renewed responsibility to share the transformative power of our art form with everyone. Though COVID-19 still casts its shadow on the world, in our little corner of the culture we are heartened as we glimpse a future brighter than before.
