HANNAH LARKIN HOLBROOK

Director’s Note

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“The theatre is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It's so much like life.”

-Arthur Miller

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”

-Bertolt Brecht

 

As someone who started acting at an early age, there is one lesson I have heard countless times from numerous directors. To summarize it, “If you make a mistake, the only one that will know is you; the audience doesn’t know so keep going.” While this may seem like an odd way to begin a director’s note, I feel like it is crucial to the art of putting on a show. The beauty of live theatre is that mistakes happen, things do not always go as planned (or rehearsed), but we push through and persevere.

 

Almost every theatre artist has a story about a performance where something went wrong, either at the last minute or on stage. For the Hay family, Moon Over Buffalo is that story. Despite everything going wrong as the family prepares for the stage and tragedy striking during their matinee performance, they go on to prepare for the next performance that evening.

 

As we have reached the one-year anniversary of Covid-19 closures and lock downs, it is apparent that we have had to adapt and learn to live everyday differently. This is more than true for the theatre community. We have adapted and found new ways to bring our art to the stage, even if that means coming through your screen. The theatre will continue to thrive if we remember the quote from playwright Arthur Miller above. While change may come as an accident (or a global pandemic), theatre reflects life and is our way of shaping an unpredictable world into the reality we want.

 

The process of creating this show, as well as any other show during the pandemic, is finding ways to change our normal stage conventions to keep actors and crew members safe. We have adapted blocking to social distance, taken precautions before and after rehearsals and during performances to disinfect the space, props, costumes, and more. While it is not the process that we are used to, it has become the new normal.

 

On stage we bounce back up after tragedy, we forget a line, a costume malfunctions, or worse, and we stay in character and persevere to share our world with the audience. In the same way, we can change the course of our own lives after our paths have changed without warning. The audience does not know the next step. They do not know if you missed a line, or if you are recovering from something that did not go as planned. They are watching the story unfold as you tell it. In theatre, we create entire worlds on stage; we are responsible for the story. However, we have the ability to change its course. We have all learned the lesson during the past year: though things have changed in countless ways, the show must go on.

 

“The Theatre may be dying. The glamorous invalid may be crawling through the dessert with but a single lung in its feeble chest, but it's still breathing and it's all we’ve got. It is our lifeline to Humanity.”

-Ethel, Moon Over Buffalo

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Hannah Larkin Holbrook

Director