First Stage, Milwaukee’s leading theater for and by young people, is announcing its upcoming, entirely virtual season of plays. Starting with The Quest for Solomon’s Treasure, which will start streaming Sunday, Sept. 20, through October, the season includes five virtual plays.
The choice to go all-virtual for this season was driven by First Stage’s position as a theater primarily aimed at children. “The largest theater that we perform in is the Todd Wehr Theater at the Marcus Center, which seats 500 people. To appropriately distance audience members, we could maybe have 150 people at the fullest capacity. So, we were looking at a very decreased revenue,” says Betsy Corry, First Stage’s managing director. “And the other big thing is that First Stage usually does 10 to 12 performances a week with school matinées. It became more and more clear that, even if school districts decide to do in-person classes, they are not taking field trips. For us, that removed a huge amount of our performances.”
Instead, they have chosen to stream performances online to recreate the “special experience” of theater from the safety of people’s homes. Starting on Tuesday, Sept. 1, tickets will be available for purchase: $200 for a family season pass, as well as single tickets.
Exploring Opportunities Online
Photo credit: Dave Zylstra
John Maclay of First Stage
With the help of their playwrights-in-residence and taking advantage of the online platform, the company has devised an uncommon theater season. The season starts with The Quest for Solomon’s Treasure, written by First Stage playwright John Maclay. Rather than resorting to filmed theater, the company chose to explore new opportunities given by the virtual medium. The piece will be a seven-episode web series focusing on local history—the Solomon in question is Solomon Juneau, one of Milwaukee’s founders. Each episode will feature a different young performer, as well as a number of clues for audiences to put together.
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“We consulted with Milwaukee historian John Gurda on this piece,” Betsy Corry confides. “There is a lot of history of Milwaukee’s neighborhood; they were actually filming outside in different parts of the city. This is part of the fun! We really want this to be fresh and fun and exciting.”
To face the unique challenges of an online theater season in the middle of the pandemic, each play is teeming with creativity. The second play of the season, The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus, is a one-woman play (featuring a cat!) played by adult actress Karen Estrada, followed by the more mature She Kills Monsters and William Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, both of which are aimed at teenagers.
End with a Bang
First Stage intends to finish the season with a bang starting in January 2021. Escape From Peligro Island is a “choose your own adventure” play, meaning that audiences can vote and decide in real time what the actors will do. The play follows Callaway Brown on a magical adventure: “Will Callaway time travel to the Wild West and meet a talking horse? Develop superpowers and fight crime in the future? Or have a crush on a vampire? The choice is yours!” First Stage promises.
“We had done an experiment with that, letting an audience choose what the next step would be for actors—we did a reading of it a couple of summers ago,” Corry explains. “People could make choices on their phones, and the result would appear on a screen to tell actors which way they should go. It was so fun, and everybody loved it so much! We decided that if ever there was an opportunity for us to try something like this, we would, but we kept struggling to put this show into a regular performance season. So, putting it into this virtual season just seemed so right. Doing it virtually is actually going to be an opportunity!”
First Stage took the chance to not only offer their regular content on a new platform, but they are actually seizing the opportunity to expand what they can do and what audiences they can reach. First Stage is one of the nation’s premier theater companies for young audiences, and they get for the first time the chance to address their season to the entire nation rather than Milwaukee only.
This is also the philosophy driving the company’s mission of education. “Normally, First Stage is in school classrooms all year,” Corry says. “We are serving, depending on the year, anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 students in their classrooms with arts programming. The work that we do in that space could actually be shared across the nation, not just here in our region. We are really excited to be able to engage with more people than just who can come and sit in a classroom or a theater. There are ways in which we are engaging people that we have never been able to do before,” she continues. “The whole company is feeling like we are doing some things with this virtual work that we probably will not let go of even after all of this is behind us.”
For more information about the virtual season, visit firststage.org.
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