Photo courtesy of Off the Wall Theatre
After cancelling its George Gershwin revue, Off the Wall Theatre is planning to reopen in September with William Shakespeare’s study of religious differences, The Merchant of Venice.
“Fortunately, I have been able to keep my cast together for The Merchant of Venice,” artistic director Dale Gutzman shares. In the play, he will be playing Shylock, the main antagonist. To face the unique challenges of a global pandemic, Off the Wall used some of the extraordinary creativity usually found in their shows to prepare the next season. “I've been doing a lot of mailing to my cast with notes, ideas and thoughts on The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare in general. They’ve been keeping up that way.”
Off the Wall is planning a very colorful rendition of Shakespeare’s play. “We're going to do it kind of like a Fellini film; it will be set in modern Italy and be very Fellini-ish, very surrealistic,” Dale Gutzman explains. “Next season, we’re going to do five shows rather than six because of time constraints.” The next show will be Canterbury Tales: The Musical, for Christmas, followed by Long Day’s Journey into Night, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and, finally, Man of La Mancha extending into June 2021.
Theater After Quarantine
“My hope is that things will be open enough by the end of July to have evenings at my house, bringing together actors in small groups of two or three to work on the major scenes of The Merchant of Venice,” Gutzman says. By mid-August, he hopes that the whole company will be able to meet, giving him six weeks to fully prepare the first show of the first post-pandemic theater season.
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Like all public spaces, Off the Wall Theatre will have to deal with challenges like the potential need to allow social distancing even half-a-year after the end of the state’s safer-at-home order. Off the Wall’s tiny black box theater hardly allows for many empty seats like larger rooms do. “We seat between 40 and 50 now. Originally, I had planned to do The Merchant of Venice with only 25 people in the audience; so we could seat one person in every other seat,” says Gutzman.
But even before facing the hurdles of reopening, the theater company has to find ways to remain afloat until September. Off the Wall is in a unique position in Milwaukee, as it barely breaks even and actors and staff are volunteers crafting small, independent theater. “We don't have salaries to pay, so we aren't really losing anything. The only thing we have to worry about is paying our rent,” Gutzman admits. “In order to pay rent, we put a GoFundMe up, and we made enough money to afford the rent for three months. So, we did okay in April, May and June... We still got to face July and August, because we won't open our new season until the end of September.” The plan, currently, is to send out season subscription forms in June and hopefully gather enough funds to keep the theater space open until ticket sales start rolling in. “And if I fall behind a little with the rent, I’ll pay our landlord later.”
“When we get back up and running again, we're going to offer a big free revue for all the subscribers for the shows they missed last season,” Dale Gutzman promises. “It'll be a musical event like Broadway, and it will make up for the Gershwin show that never got on.”
Off the Wall’s situation allowed them to wait out the storm, in large part thanks to a small but dedicated community of supporters. “My greatest fear was that we would start pushing next season, and then something might come up and the season would never happen. We didn't know when the virus was going to go, and we didn't even know when theaters would be able to open,” Gutzman says. But, he guesses, “the big companies like The Rep and Skylight, are actually going to have a more difficult time. Even though they have so much more money than us, their budgets are huge and they have paid a lot of paid staff.” Some of them, like the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, resorted to providing content for people to enjoy online, with songs, workshops and even wellness videos.
Milwaukee has the chance to have a thriving theater scene populated by numerous smaller groups and passion projects. “I think that some of them are going to close and not open again after this is over,” Gutzman deplores. But he maintains hope, as he thinks the performing arts are too deeply ingrained in the local scene and too beloved to vanish. “I think that theater will reform and new companies will come together in new spaces. I think that local actors have really made a niche for themselves, and they are not going to move away. Theater will find a way.”
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