CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Theatre students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign were preparing for the final round of rehearsals of a political satire in March when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the performance.
Director Lisa Dixon, an acting professor in the theatre department, returned to the play this fall and restaged it for film. “Psh*tter! A Drinking Song for the Year of Our Lord 2020” will be available for free, on-demand access Dec. 3-12 on the Vimeo channel for Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
“Toward the end of the summer, as we realized the pandemic was going to go on longer than we thought, we had to figure out a way to work,” Dixon said. “The set was still up, the lights were hung and the costumes were made. As we moved to the fall semester, we decided to make it a part of the season.”
Dixon described the play – a mashup of “Macbeth” and a parody of the William Shakespeare tragedy – as “a really funny, timely political allegory.” Its themes include history, corruption and the pursuit of power, as well as humanity and personal choice.
“It’s grotesque in the true sense of the word, but there are some moments that are quite moving and make you stop and think,” Dixon said. “Right now, I think it’s even more relevant because things are so fraught. It challenges us in ways we might not have thought. It asks you to think about things in a different way, but always with comedy.”
Dane Brandon had several roles in the play before graduating in the spring. He came back to campus this fall to serve as the associate fight choreographer and the COVID-19 monitor, ensuring the cast and production team complied with safety regulations.
“The play has these moments of insane, loud, in-your-face farcical comedy, and the next scene is an old man picking up dead bodies and reflecting on the horrors of war and our place in history,” Brandon said. “I love that the play is so funny and so sad, and underlying all of that is rage and anger and disgust at what our current political landscape looks like.”
Dixon and her team reblocked the play, meaning all the actors’ movements and positions were changed to remain six feet apart. The play contains many fight scenes staged in part by using “violent clowning” in place of traditional fight choreography, Brandon said. Sword fights were filmed from the point-of-view of one of the fighters, so only one actor was in the shot. One character would move toward the camera to fight. Another take would show the other fighter reacting and fighting back.
“It was a great learning experience for me, working on a completely different medium. I’ve never choregraphed for the camera before. Seeing the tricks and possibilities we had at our disposal was really cool,” Brandon said.
The film crew used three cameras to capture the action from different angles. After filming, the footage was edited and captioned.
In addition to ensuring the cast maintained a six-foot distance from one another, Brandon’s role as COVID-19 monitor included keeping track of the time limits on rehearsals. The cast and crew might normally rehearse for a couple of hours at a time, but for this production, they took a 15-minute break every 45 minutes to allow the air in the theater to recirculate.
Actors had their own props that weren’t shared unless the storyline required it, and then they were sanitized as soon as possible after a scene.
Even the costume design reflected coronavirus concerns. All the characters wear masks. The ludicrous tyrant Daddy Ubu wears a mask with a pacifier sewn into it, and the ladies of the court have blingy masks with rhinestones.
“The play is so absurd and surreal, the masks actually fit perfectly into the world of the play and didn’t feel like they were an extra,” Dixon said.
The safety protocols exceeded the requirements of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state and the theatrical union, she said.
“I’ve worked on films before, but I never had to direct with these specific restrictions. It was very challenging. We had to find new ways to tell the story,” Dixon said.
“People from around the country are asking how we did things,” she said. “This is research into figuring out how to continue doing art in the time of COVID-19. We were successful in figuring some things out. It speaks well for the ability in the future to continue doing things.”