By Troy Heard

Inside.

The traditional theatre-going experience exists inside a dark auditorium with a group of strangers sitting shoulder-to-shoulder sharing space with live performers telling a story.

This is what springs to mind when somebody mentions “theatre,” or “Guys and Dolls,” or Shakespeare (although his plays were originally performed outdoors - but we’ll get to that).

People are reluctant to hug a friend now, much less sit next to a stranger who, by luck of the draw, bought a ticket to a seat adjacent to yours. Go ahead, rub shoulders, and try to stifle that sneeze.

So. Is theatre dead?

The Great Ones (primarily the New York Times drama critics) have been asking that very question almost as long as the theatre has been in existence. Public tastes change. The cinema brings spectacle on an epic scale. The television puts comfort and convenience right in your living room. Netflix combines the two.

And what would we have done without Netflix the past three months?

Jesus, what would we have done?

So we’ve seen the compromise of the new normal. Photographs of Brecht’s fabled Berliner Ensemble theatre shows a beautiful jewel box of a showroom with 50% of its seats removed. Literally removed. Not marked with duct tape, or covered with plastic garbage bags (oh, the beat-up multiplexes of my youth - the ushers would do a quick fix on a busted seat by tossing a Hefty bag over it in between screenings). No. Entire sections have been removed, leaving a single red velvet theatre chair every six feet. Occasionally there’s a pair for those daring lovebirds out on a post-pandemic first date.

The audience experience is decimated. We’re no longer sharing the experience. We’re observing an experience. Like scientists.

Theatre is dead.

Fortunately, I’ve never been limited to the concept of traditional theatre. I’m a child of the 80s, Gen X slacker, raised on a diet of Saturday morning cartoons and horror flicks. Stranger Things is my biography, minus the Demogorgon. My first taste of live performance was the annual Jaycee’s Haunted House, and don’t tell the eight-year-old me that those hearty volunteers weren’t turning in Tony award-worthy performances. You buy your ticket, enter the old dark house, and maneuver the winding hallways encountering spooky tableaus of werewolves and bloodthirsty maniacs mid-mayhem. Linger too long and they’ll turn on you, effectively guiding you down the next path toward your safe exit.

That Was Theatre! No plush seats and false division by a proscenium arch. The storytelling enveloped you. You were on your feet, walking in a space. You were Outside of the showroom.

Outside.

I opened Majestic Repertory Theatre four years ago as a DIY venue in the heart of Las Vegas’s arts district. Although our rep consists of a range of scripted shows from the canon old and new, we pride ourselves on crafting unique audience experiences. Whether transforming the space into the Kit Kat Club for Cabaret, or recreating a small town church basement for Our Town (audiences were invited to eat a potluck-style dinner with the cast during the show), we lean into removing that proscenium.

But no amount of fourth-wall-demolishing could have prepared us for a complete and total shutdown.

At the time, we had just closed our co-production with the stellar body percussion group Molodi, and had one of our hallmark immersive productions, The Garden Party, playing at a location off-site. And we had two more interactive shows on deck to wrap up our fourth season. All these interactive shows centered on physical contact between the performer and the audience. That involves a great deal of trust between strangers.

Enter Virus, stage right.

I’d heard the word coronavirus mentioned in the occasional news piece. My wife Kady, a dancer, had a weeklong gig in California canceled because of “some flu from China.” But buried deep in the heat of production, these were insignificant factoids at the time. Until March 12 when the W.H.O. declared a pandemic.

Cue my encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies. This was straight from every zombie movie made in the past 20 years.

And, of course, my first step was to protect my artists and audiences. Majestic went dark.

But not for long. The need to tell stories is a deep one in us creative types. We’ve been spinning yarns since primitive man recounted around the campfire his great hunt for the sabertooth - their meal for the night.

After processing this crisis for a day or so (that’s really all it takes, right?), we faced the challenge headfirst. Two of my colleagues had been quarantined together by default - Natalie, my co-director, and her boyfriend Mike, an actor, were both in The Garden Party. So we decided to take the venerable Reverend Eugene Dolor online. We turned Majestic into an ad hoc film studio with our iPhones and repurposed tripods. That weekend we premiered Dial ’S’ for Salvation, an interactive dial-in show we broadcast on our Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Over the course of four freewheeling installments, the Reverend would make callers pray away a variety of disasters facing the fictional town of Wycliff Falls, from a roaring tornado to a chickenpox infestation. When we mock crucified the Reverend on our Very Special Easter Episode, we decided to call it a wrap.

So we pivoted once again: the following Sunday, the three of us debuted Day Drinking with Majestic Rep. Again broadcast on our social media, we answered viewer questions live while imbibing drinks du jour. We wrapped that show a few weeks later when the only question on anyone's mind was "What comes next?"

Certainly, it wasn't going to be "theatre," not as we knew it in the Before Times. And anything interactive was off the table. Or was it?

When Nevada Governor Sisolak eventually loosened restrictions on our lockdown allowing retail businesses to provide curbside pickup, we leaped into action. We geared up our merchandise production, printing masks, t-shirts, and stickers with our cheeky #MajesticAF logo. We presold packages to carloads of people, with specific directions when and where to pick them up.

Although we were still unable to reopen, nobody said we couldn't do curbside service with flair. And we happen to have some of the most talented "customer service representatives" in the world.

Every 15 minutes a carload would arrive at the alley behind the theatre. They had strict requirements: they must remain inside the car at all times and any engagement would be done with a mask. When they turned the corner, they entered the MRT Decontamination Zone and were confronted by a large mountain of a man in a full-body hazmat suit, with goggles, an N95 mask, a clipboard and a bullhorn.

After being subjected to a barrage of questions ("Have you left the house in the past two months?" "Have you made bread during that time?") the car was sent down to another checkpoint. With an eerie sci-fi sound pad playing in the background, the car was "decontaminated" by more suited scientists and prepped for their "relief." When the all-clear was sounded, the back gate was opened revealing colorful lights and a cloud of smoke, from which emerged a performer. Guests could encounter a burlesque routine, a knife-toting clown, a disco-dancing virus, and, on occasion, Quarantine Carrottop.

Was this theater? In the broadest sense, yes. Was it entertaining? Judging by the smiles and laughter coming from the cars, yes. But most important of all, it reaffirmed the need for connection, to be an audience, to share space. I was the mountain-sized interrogator, and each time I asked, "Have you left the house?" I'd see this look cross their faces. It was a mixture of exhaustion and relief. For some, this was indeed the very first time they've left their house in months. They could stream Netflix into their living room and order in groceries, sure. But for the opportunity to experience a live, visceral connection, they left their homes and drove downtown.

Those hazmat suits became uncomfortable as the temperature crept into the triple digits, and the new eruption of protests around our nation responding to the death of George Floyd, rallying against racial discrimination and police brutality, made the thought of escapist entertainment seem disrespectful. Moments after we served our last drive-thru customer, hundreds of people marched down in front of the theatre chanting "No justice, no peace." They were responding to a real horror, not just a Jaycee in a rubber mask.

And the question emerges again, "What comes next?"

My answer, as always, "We'll figure it out."

Troy Heard is currently in his fourth season as Artistic Director of Majestic Repertory Theatre in downtown Las Vegas. His immersive theatre creations range from the intimate one-on-one "Serial Killers You Know and Love" to the freewheeling rock-and-roll takeover of the Thunderbird Motel for Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey. He holds an MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and a BSEd in Theatre Education from Columbus State University.

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Pivot, Step, Walk, Walk, Walk