Photo by Gwen O on Unsplash
By John Morris, Staff Writer
Susquehanna’s theater department performed “The Three Sisters,” written by Anton Chekhov and adapted by Jeanne Tiehen, with a little twist due to the pandemic.
After classes were moved to an entirely virtual format beginning on Nov. 11, the theater department had to scrap their original livestream idea and instead upload a video to YouTube from a Nov. 10 dress rehearsal.
The play’s Zoom adaptation is self-aware and lighthearted. The performance uses the introduction to comment on the decision to choose Chekhov’s play, influenced partially by it being in the public domain and thus easily transferable to a Zoom format without royalties or licensing issues.
“It was a super meta piece of theatre and that’s always great,” sophomore Assistant Director Brittany Runk said.
Specific lines used the tension between wanting to do traditional theater and wanting to stay safe and follow guidelines. One example included when senior Tomas Torres as the Dramaturg, said:, “They kiss… via Zoom. We didn’t know how to properly stage it without weirding you, the audience, out. So, here I am. Underutilized as a Dramaturg, to tell you they kissed via Zoom.”
“It was a very humbling experience. It taught me not everything I was doing was going to translate or be the same as in person, but I think there was so much comradery for the project that everyone was giving their best,” Torres said, “I was a little heartbroken about not doing it live on Zoom, but at least we made theater, and being part of it was more than I could’ve asked for.”
The students used the intermission to provide important context for the play and went into detail on the culture and the historical period the play takes place in.
The play’s dress rehearsal video can be found on YouTube.
