Pittsburgh Playhouse virtual season has theater, dance, speakers
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Point Park University’s Pittsburgh Playhouse will open a season of virtual productions on Saturday with a new play-reading series.
The season includes theater and dance productions, the Dance Speaker Series and a re-imagined Media Innovators Workshop & Speaker Series, building on expertise gained in mounting previous online performances, according to Steven Breese, Pittsburgh Playhouse Artistic Director and Dean of the Conservatory of Performing Arts..
“This past fall, we presented a robust season and plays and musicals (by creating a) safe production environment that allowed us to convert our performance venues into mini-sound stages. This allowed us to safely isolate actors/performers in unique environments and film them one at a time,” Breese said.
Footage was edited to create the illusion of live entertainment, he said.
“This bold experiment resulted in an astounding array of virtual productions that showcased our students and artists and, in many ways, re-invented/re-imaged online performance,” he added. “There were few educational institutions in the country that were able to produce as much as we did as well as we did.
“I think we’ve learned that the pre-production processes (and some educational processes), can and should be continued virtually. This surprised me – but the more time I spent in virtual production meetings, the more productive I found them. I think we will leave some of them in place — they are efficient and, well, they work.”
Theater personnel are looking forward to the return of live audiences, possibly in October or November, Breese said.
“My sense is that audiences want to return to the theatre. But, of course, they want to gather safely. So, as soon as it is possible, we intend to invite audiences back to the Playhouse,” he said.
The upcoming season includes:
• Pittsburgh PlayLab: A New Play Reading Series @ the Pittsburgh Playhouse, March 6-7
“Stage Struck,” by Tracy Brigden, follows a troupe of players in the 1980s downtown New York theater scene as they navigate the sex, drugs and rock and roll atmosphere of the era while mounting a production of “Dracula.”
• ChoreoLab 3, March 10-14
Conservatory dance students and faculty collaborate in a program of original works.
• “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” March 10-14
The “wildly imaginative comedy” by MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl explores how we memorialize the dead – and how that remembering changes us – as a woman confronts her own assumptions about morality, redemption and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.
• “Polaroid Stories,” March 10-14
Naomi Iizuka’s work blends classical mythology and real-life stories told by street kids, journeying into “a dangerous world where myth making fulfills a fierce need for transcendence, where storytelling has the power to transform a reality in which characters’ lives are continually threatened, devalued and effaced.”
• Student Choreography Project, March 17-21
“A creative variation of the live performance, this fresh, new take will feature the works and the dancers of tomorrow performed today.”
• “Dance Nation,” April 28-May 2
Clare Barron’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist play follows as “an army of pre-teen competitive dancers plots to take over the world,” starting with national competition in Florida. “A play about ambition, growing up, and how to find our souls in the heat of it all.”
• “Passing Strange,” May 5-9
“Part musical theatre, part rock concert, part performance art, ‘Passing Strange’ traces the creative life of a young bohemian who charts a course for ‘the real’ … from Black middle-class America to Amsterdam, Berlin and beyond on a journey towards artistic and personal authenticity.”
• ChoreoLab 4, May 12-16
Conservatory dance students and faculty collaborate in a program of original works.
Final guest lists for the Spring 2021 Dance Speaker Series and Media Innovators Workshop & Speaker Series are still to be announced. The Media Innovators Series will present a workshop titled “TikTok 101” on March 24. Additional events also will be announced.
Updates and tickets for all programs are available at playhouse.pointpark.edu.