PITTSFIELD (Massachusetts) • A hard rain thrummed on the roof of a festival tent. Nine masked performers, speechless, stared intently at centre stage.
The 28-year-old actor playing the Son of God, Nicholas Edwards, made it midway through the Godspell ballad Beautiful City when, rising to sing a lyric about rebuilding, he burst into tears.
It had been a long first week, and not just because there was so much to memorise.
There were the nasal swabs, the temperature checks, the lockdowns and the face coverings. And now, there were tape measures to double-check distances and translucent screens to enclose backup singers. Still to come were costume pockets to stash hand sanitiser.
The rehearsal halted. The keyboardist stopped playing. Edwards buried his head under his tank top.
"In the real world, we would come over and hug you," said director Alan Filderman. But complying with the rules of the day, he did not rise from his seat. Nor did the other actors, who extended air hugs instead.
Edwards took a moment, collected himself and finished the scene. "As I started to sing, 'When your trust is all but shattered', that took me out, really hearing that," he later explained. "We've lost all faith and trust in one another and trust in the theatre. Will it ever come back?"
The coronavirus pandemic emptied stages across the United States in March, as local officials banned large gatherings and the nationwide theatre actors' union barred its members from performing.
Now, for the first time in the country, some union actors are returning to the stage - two stages, actually, both located in the Berkshires, a treasured summer cultural destination in Western Massachusetts.
The two productions in Pittsfield - Godspell at Berkshire Theatre Group and the one-person play Harry Clarke at Barrington Stage Company - are de facto public health experiments. If they succeed, they could be a model for professional theatre during this period of peril. But if actors or audience members get sick, that would be a serious setback.
"The whole industry needs this," said Ms Kate Shindle, president of Actors' Equity Association, the labour union representing 51,000 performers and stage managers.
Ms Shindle, who planned to attend the Godspell opening last Friday, video-called the musical's actors on their first day of rehearsal with a message of encouragement and of caution.
"Not to put any pressure on you, but the entire American theatre is depending on you to be really smart," she said. "People are going to look to you to know that theatre can happen without anybody getting sick."
Equity agreed to allow the two Berkshire productions because the number of reported coronavirus cases in Western Massachusetts is low and because the theatres agreed to implement a dizzying array of prophylactic measures for workers and audience members.
The month-long production of Godspell, with 10 roles, is the more complex undertaking because of the cast size and the perils of singing, which produces potentially dangerous aerosols.
The 1971 musical remains enormously popular, with nearly 10,000 productions over the past two decades.
Adapted from the Gospel of Matthew, the show focuses on Jesus' uses of parables as a teaching tool. It has been staged in many ways (at a refugee camp, in a prison, among homeless squatters) and this production is set during the pandemic.
The visible onstage health measures - partitions, masks, social distancing - "become part of the parable of being a moral person", said the show's lighting designer Matthew Adelson.
The acting company - 12 performers, including two understudies - ranges in age from 20 to 34. A few have Broadway experience, but most are at earlier stages of their careers. At least three, including Edwards, have had the coronavirus.
They are exuberantly grateful to be working. "I'm just so excited to perform for people again," said Najah Hetsberger, a 20-year-old musical theatre student at Montclair State University. "I haven't done that for months."
NYTIMES
