THEATER
Keeping Theater Alive in a Pandemic
Keen Company hosts livestreamed chats while Broadway remains closed down
BY DAVID KENNERLEY
During the long months
since the Broadway
shut down last March,
New York theater
groups have been scrambling to
generate online content to keep
their mission alive.
The Off-Broadway Keen Company,
now in its 21st season, has been
assiduously successful in producing
fare for the socially distanced
minded. Last fall they presented
“1993 by fi nkle,” an episodic, queer
musical journey set in Alphabet
City, as part of its Hear/Now radio
play initiative. On Monday nights
they host Keen After Hours, a series
of live-streamed interviews
with theater luminaries proven to
be wildly popular. From time to
time, they produce benefi t broadcasts
like “War of the Worlds” and
the upcoming “Sorry Wrong Number”
(February 15 at 7 pm ET).
During a recent chat with Gay
City News, the Keen Company’s
impassioned artistic director
Jonathan Silverstein detailed
the extraordinary challenges of
soldiering on during the age of
COVID.
“While of course we would
rather be performing in front of a
live audience, Keen Company has
found creative ways to pay artists
and connect with our audiences
in manners we never dreamed of,”
Silverstein said. “Personally, I have
been grateful for the work, both as
an artist and producer.”
Silverstein, who has directed
nearly all their events since the
pandemic hit, said the aim of Keen
After Hours is to foster meaningful
bonds between the theater community
and their supporters, both old
and new. Plus, he and his plucky
Keen cohorts, Ashley DiGiorgi and
Billy Recce, have a blast spending
an hour each week with some truly
gifted people. The Zoom-style format
lends itself well to these intimate
group chats, often punctuated
by pregnant pauses and bursts
of laughter.
Because Keen is part of a generous
community of theater makers,
Dramatist Chisa Hutchinson started writing her own scenes to tell stories about people of color.
there are plenty of guests to choose
from.
“We seek out diverse voices,
whether they be alumni artists,
other theater companies, or professionals
from the fi eld,” Silverstein
explained. “We also like to
choose people who we think would
enjoy sitting in our offi ce for an
hour. Indeed, many of our guests
have!”
Highlights from past programs
include Marsha Mason recounting
her days as a race car driver
and George Salazar’s inspirational
tales of doing “Little Shop of Horrors”
with MJ Rodriguez.
A couple of weeks ago they
sat down with dramatist Chisa
Hutchinson, who certainly fi ts the
bill for diverse voices. Hutchinson,
who wrote “Surely Goodness and
Mercy” that the Keen mounted in
2019 to warm acclaim, is a woman
of color who identifi es as a member
of the LGBTQ community. It was
the Keen’s fi rst production written
KEEN COMPANY
by a playwright of color.
Hutchinson described the hurdles
faced breaking into theater
as a Black girl growing up poor
in Newark, New Jersey. When she
was a teen, she took her fi rst acting
class but couldn’t fi nd any monologues
that spoke to her. She had
scant interest in doing yet another
rendition of “Antigone.”
“This whole ‘Let’s shoehorn
some Black and Brown people into
these traditionally white roles’ was
not gonna cut it,” she said. So she
started writing her own scenes to
tell stories about people of color,
mirroring the real world.
“When you’re a person of color
in a white role, you are a political
statement, you’re not a person.
And that’s not fair,” she asserted.
Her goal is to tell smaller, intimate
stories to “get more young
kids who look like me in the audience.”
She worked hard and got into
Vassar College, where she was the
sole Black drama major, and later
got her MFA at NYU’s Tisch School
of the Arts. Since then, she’s had
more than 10 plays produced, including
“She Like Girls,” which won
a GLAAD award. She wrote a play
as part of the Keen Teens program,
but production was halted due to
the pandemic.
On February 1 the Keen gang
chatted with the furiously prolifi
c Michael Urie, who wowed audiences
in the Broadway revival
of “Torch Song” a couple of years
back. Silverstein directed Urie in
“The Temperamentals” in 2009-10
and he’s has been a cherished collaborator
ever since. The out-andproud
actor even did a star turn
in their benefi t reading of “Arsenic
and Old Lace” right before the
shutdown.
Urie regaled viewers with anecdotes
from his career and how he
got bitten by the acting bug. In high
school he wanted to be a director,
inspired by Tim Burton and Steven
Spielberg. But since so few boys
were willing to try out for productions,
he was recruited to perform
on stage. One day he improvised a
line and the audience roared with
laughter. He had an epiphany that
he craved the spotlight.
“That was the moment,” he said.
“It was a choice that I had made,
not in the script. I thought, this
laugh thing is so great. It felt so
unique to theater. I owe my career
to a couple of big laughs in high
school.”
After a year at community college,
he studied drama at Julliard.
“Going to Julliard is the best ticket
to show business you can get,” he
enthused. “Of course there are no
guarantees, it’s such a fi ckle business.”
After his breakout turn as the
fl amboyant assistant in “Ugly Betty,”
where he parlayed a brief stint
into a regular role that lasted for the
entire run of the TV show (2006-
2010), many acting gigs followed,
including the solo show “Buyer &
Cellar,” a big hit Off Broadway in
2014.
➤ KEEN, continued on p.37
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