According to a PBS report, Miami New Theatre has thumbed its nose at COVID and found a safe way to deliver live theatre to live audiences by performing short plays with small casts in storefront windows. The audience stays outside the plate glass and moves from windows to windows.

Somehow, though, live theater is happening. In fact, Miami is now home to the largest live production in the country right now. Jeffrey Brown has our look for our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.

Judy Woodruff–pbs

In their case, they asked seven noted writers to write a short play around each of the seven deadly sins. This is truly theater on the move.

Here’s a link to the PBS report on the Miami experiment in live theatre: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/in-miami-making-live-theater-work-during-the-pandemic?fbclid=IwAR0Ji1X9rr70cTQj78KkDD5wXCK66dxpFsm-GlOlvZBIYHZk-g_c-lIgk-o

Right now, most of us have a lot of empty storefronts. And people have developed their own “bubbles” of acquaintances which whom they can safely share space. Using masks and social distancing, these “bubbles” can easily from show to show and experience an evening of theatre.

Creating evenings out of short-shorts or monologues is not a unique idea. But putting them in storefront windows and moving the audience is a new spin on site-specific theatre. Even in a colder climate than Miami, a theatre could take advantage of some empty storefronts in malls that are no longer functional.

This could be the signal of a new era for site-specific dramas. These dramas are written to be performed at specific sites–playgrounds, train stations, parking lots, etc. They are not to be confused with plays in which the director has merely opted to change the setting of the play–Hamlet set on stage in an amusement park, for example.

Site-specific dramas are not new. The Asphalt Jungle series produced by Flush Ink Productions takes its audience through plays written for specific sites in downtown Kitchener. A creation of Paddy Gillard-Bentley, a prominent playwright herself, Asphalt Jungle is described as:

At the intersection of Theatre & Reality!An evening of site-specific theatre you will not forget. If you’ve never seen Asphalt Jungle Shorts – it is theatre on the streets. 14 site-specific plays.The plays are all set in different locations, where they were meant to be performed. 

Flush Ink Theatre

Junita Rockwell’s full-length play “Between Trains” was written to be, and has been, performed in a train station.

Other than site-specific dramas, short-shorts and monologues make the ideal genre for this genre.