NIKKI INDELICATO
Staff Writer
If you listen closely, you can hear the faint sound of applause in the background.
Lights are starting to brighten and breaths of anticipation are coming from the actors.
The curtain rises.
You are finally home again.
After a year of something you love being taken away from you, it’s hard to imagine how you could ever get it back.
Yet at the Marvel Theatre, they showed it was possible once again.
The Fredonia Department of Theatre and Dance put on their first live production of “Our Town” this past weekend in front of an in-house audience.
“I walked across the Marvel Stage three months earlier and in the darkness I heard ‘I want my art back’ and it was really wonderful to see and hear people back in the theater,” said “Our Town” director Ted Sharon.
With COVID-19 safety protocols in hand, the entire cast and crew has to learn and adapt to the new environment that was put in front of them.
“It was difficult sometimes because there were a lot of things you’d typically be able to do in a show that we weren’t able to do,” said actor Rose Clark.
One of the main aspects of theater is being able to have a certain type of connection with the other actors onstage.
This could simply be holding hands or being staged close together.
The cast took advantage of as much space as they could on stage to keep themselves safely distanced from one another.
Another challenge the cast had to face was performing a show while wearing facial coverings.
“We included additional physical gestures to call attention to the speaker so the audience didn’t get lost behind the story,” said Sharon.
With the help from the costuming team led by Dixon Reynolds, they worked alongside the creative team to create a palette for the characters.
They created masks to go along with the characters, so it helped it feel more natural by having that addition.
The next part of creating the show fell onto the audience.
“When the curtain goes up, is when we know how to do the show,” said Sharon. “You have the audience as your partner. It is essential to feed off them, feel that live energy and adjust accordingly interpretations so that things are clearer.”
The moment you walked into that theatre, you could feel the excitement from every single person that was about to witness what could have been their first live show after a very hard and long year.
There is nothing quite like the feeling of getting to see a live performance.
The actors were also quite grateful for being able to play off of and receive the energy from a live audience.
“Honestly, it didn’t hit me till the end of the show, but it was so surreal being able to perform for a live audience again,” said Clark.
It’s the little things like getting to perform on stage with your friends or sharing laughs with fellow audience members that helps after such a crazy time, to bring a sense of normalcy back into everyone’s lives.
Act Two is finally starting to make its appearance after a long-awaited intermission.