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If you time the Theater Shutdown from Thursday, March 12, then were through day seven.
Seven days of turning into the City that Never Gathers.
Time enough for God to make a world.
How exactly are we going to rebootallof live performance?
How far do these repercussions go?
That conversation would be grim.
It had been such a great thing for us, Collins said.
ERS spends huge amounts of time in the devising process rehearsals and workshops can go on for years.
Still, losingBaldwin and Buckleywould have simply put them back to square one.
By last week, though, theyd realized they also needed to cancel their May 11 gala.
Could they get their $19,000 deposit back from their venue, Tribeca Rooftop?
(Turns out that its good for a year.)
The conservative estimate is that were looking at a loss of $200,000, Collins said.
Next years tour to Antwerp is a question mark.
Conversations aboutSeagullsfinding a theater are on hold.
With no word on when restrictions will ease, nobody can even plan rehearsals.
ERS has a core staff of seven, so payroll is one immediate concern.
We have a full-time fundraiser, Collins said, a full-time company manager!
And those people are supposed to take care of a wider constellation of artists.
Thats probably 50 people interns, artists, everyone.
One of those artists is the Obie Award winner April Matthis.
She wasnt going to be inBaldwin, but she was ready to go back into the rehearsal room onSeagull.
The TV and film opportunities all seem to be on hold too.
Theres no emergency fund, and what we had in savings was about a months rent, she said.
But Matthis hasnt started panicking yet.
Were just checking in to see how everyones doing mentally and foodwise, she said.
(Wednesday afternoon, Truman invited the whole ensemble to a virtual happy hour to check in.)
She is greeting the situation with agalacticlevel of perspective.
I had my moment of Oh no!
she say, laughing.
And now Im like, The survival of the human race!
And, at least on day four, when we spoke, Matthis was still focused on the art.
And in a future where theater comes back time only helps an ERS show.
There are non-financial damages from the postponement-pocalypse that are hard to quantify.
Im not looking at it as a loss, Sargeant insisted.
It buys me more time, to hunker down to learn it, to get this message out!
Well,poof,its gone away.
And too, when ERS plays at the Public, big things can happen.
For certain, my career changed because of that run at the Public, Shepherd claimed.
Before that, Id only worked with ERS and the Wooster Group and occasional other projects.
I wasnt really playing that game.
So Williams and Sargeant are left wondering what might have been.
Everything has gone into cryogenic storage; hopefully, some of it will wake back up.
What were being told to do is the opposite of theater, said Collins.
To take the fundamental ingredient and nullify it?
Just adopt another medium?
That cant replace what we do.
Every person I spoke to at ERS was more worried about someone else.
Evenwiththat, restaurants will fail!
I know we cant claim some special privilege.
The good news is we didnt get into this business because it was supposed to be profitable.
Were not doing this for money, so hey, a big money problem cant stop us.
So hows everybody filling the time?
Hes paying for it with his credit card.
Sargeant is keeping his spirits up and working on his Baldwin.
Shepherd is learning piano; Lioce is getting out of town; Collins is in a meeting.
Matthis is being a human and baking.
If ERS doesnt make work, we wont survive, said Lioce.
Scale that up 10,000 times you get the picture.
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