LOUISVILLE, Ky. — If you want to watch Actors Theatre Louisville's production of "Erma Bombeck: At Wit's End" this week, you won't be doing it inside the theater hall on Main Street. Instead, you can watch the play streamed into your own home.
"This is not a stopgap measure," Actors Theatre Director of Communications Elizabeth Greenfield said. "This is really the next phase of the American theatre, and specifically for Actors Theatre Louisville, really key to the way we will be fulfilling our mission moving forward."
According to Greenfield, Actors Theatre decided to pivot towards streaming its production just weeks after being shut down last March by the coronavirus pandemic.
"All of a sudden the barriers to access about you had to be in Louisville in a chair at a certain time on a certain night, with those barriers eroded, we were able to share our work with folks all over the country, all over the world," she said.
Actors Theatre has been working with Overture+, a new streaming service dedicated to working with local theatre groups to showcase its productions. Theaters working with Overture+ can also add other theaters' productions to their own digital season, which is what a local theater in Pennsylvania has done with Actors Theatre's production of "Erma Bombeck" after having to cancel its own show last year.
"It's really been interesting to see this shift now to beautiful content that's being filmed directly for streaming and figuring out how streaming is actually going to play into our industry as we continue to work through this and reopen," Overture+ co-founder and chief operating officer Ashley Dinges said.
The pandemic has devastated the theatre and entertainment industry over the last year. Greenfield said Actors Theatre is down 90% of its staff, but being able to stream its productions has been a silver lining.
"The impact can't be understated," she said. "It has been an absolute decimation of the industry, and out of that has emerged some incredible innovation."
Streaming will likely not disappear whenever the pandemic does, according to Greenfield and Dinges, who both believe theatre will move into a hybrid process that will marry an online experience with the traditional in-person one.
"This is not something that we would have ever been able to do prior to COVID, so there is this really amazing tide that's turning," Dinges said.
"Erma Bombeck: At Wit's End" will be available for streaming through Thursday, Jan. 28.
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