Photo by Alexandra Flory
Constraint creates a new kind of innovation. This is something the cast and crew of Lewis & Clark’s spring production of “The Secretaries”, performed March 12-14 and 17-19, know all too well. With the continuation of COVID-19 restrictions, live theater has experienced a new “normal.” However, those who worked on “The Secretaries” used these constraints as opportunities for ingenuity rather than limits on their performance.
The plot follows a cultish group of secretaries who murder local lumberjacks due to their frustrations with the patriarchy. As the show goes on, it becomes evident that the real violence is not murder, but internalized sexism and homophobia that manifests itself in interactions between the women. It fully embraces campiness and hyper-femininity as themes of the play. Though these themes were effectively displayed in a COVID-19 world because they do not require physical touch, other aspects of the show were more challenging to incorporate into a hybrid format.
For example, the play has a lot of physical intimacy among the characters that could not be directly translated onto the stage. This did not limit the creative capacity of the play, but rather enhanced it. To deal with the elimination of any kind of physical touch, Postdoctoral Fellow of the LC Theater Department and Director of “The Secretaries” Jenna Tamimi proposed incorporating a puppet show into the play.
“The puppets enact all of the physical intimacy in the play as a way to keep the actors distanced and safe but to still show that element to the audience,” Tamimi said.
The puppets, which are all Barbie dolls, act as doubles to the human actors in the play. The choice to use Barbies specifically came out of convenience, and their applicability to the play’s themes.
“Barbies were floated as an idea because it kind of fits the theme of the show,” Puppet Master Karen Wingard ’22 said. “I pushed it hard because you can buy (Barbies). You don’t have to originally make puppets and you can buy clothing for them. Barbies are especially campy and kind of fit the hyper-feminine criticisms that they’re making.”
A fairly general consensus of the cast and crew was that everyone had to learn how to adapt. Other than adding a puppet show to the play, other changes such as Zoom rehearsals, face shields, plexiglass stages and preset props were made.
“Theater is so much about problem solving and this is just another problem solving that’s different than we’ve done in the past,” costume designer Jenny Ampersand said.
The main stage in the Fir Acres Blackbox Theater was used only for the puppets. The five main actors each used their own plexiglass box above the audience, where they could take off their masks safely. The actors’ performed to two separate audiences: one viewing from the comfort of their own homes, while the other was a small in-person audience of 15 people who viewed the performance below the actors inside the blackbox theater. The in-person audience was able to watch the show from swivel chairs that allowed them to look at all six stages. Despite all these changes, the integrity of the show was upheld and even made “traditional” live theater seem routine. Nowhere in a non-COVID-19 world would six stages, a puppet show and a full livestreamed show happen in addition to all the other elements typical of live theater.
“Together, I feel like we really made some lemonade out of some pretty sour lemons,” Tamimi said.
In seeing the show, it became clear how sweet that “lemonade” turned out to be. The cast and crew of LC’s spring production proved not only how theatrical creativity can persist during a global pandemic, but how the arts can be fostered in such conditions to create something truly unique.
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