Hedgerow Goes Virtual
Jared Reed and Jessica DalCanton star in “His Girl Friday,” available at hedgerowtheatre.org. Photo: Ashley Smith, Wide Eyed Studio
What is it like to be a theater company during a pandemic?
“It’s lonely,” says Jared Reed, Hedgerow Theatre’s managing artistic director. “It was always great to be in the lobby shaking hands with people after the show.”
But Rose Valley’s Hedgerow has an advantage during COVID-19 that most theaters don’t: the company lives together. “We can keep working actually next to each other,” Reed says. “As opposed to something on a Zoom call you’re going to splice together.”
Reed and his company are taking advantage of that proximity to reinvent themselves — temporarily, anyway — as online storytellers. “How can we be a sort of homegrown Masterpiece Theater?” Reed wonders. “How can we be our version of Prairie Home Companion, with our own writers and actors, putting out stuff that interests us, and, we hope, other people?”
Every three weeks or so, the company releases a new video work on their website. (“Now our competition is Netflix,” Reed jokes.) Many of these works, like their recent “Robin Hood” and upcoming “Wizard of Oz,” are geared to children. In between, they release weekly half-hour episodes of ongoing audio stories. “We’re starting a sci-fi serial drama,” Reed says. “There’ll be a murder mystery after that.”
Hedgerow offers dramatic readings of public-domain works, too, including Robert Smythe’s unsettling series of “Stories for Late at Night” and Adam Altman’s rendition of James Joyce’s “The Dead.”
Freedom and Self-Reliance
One benefit of this new way of working is freedom, Reed attests. Opening night is not set in stone. If a work isn’t ready, Hedgerow doesn’t have to release it.
Self-reliance and developing new skills are part of the package, too. The outside directors, set builders, and costumers who used to play such a large role in staged productions are absent now. “Everybody has gotten more empowerment and agency,” Reed says. “There’s an inventiveness.” Carpentry and sewing skills are improving, and actors are rewriting scripts to fit their own visions.
Take “Hansel and Gretel.”
“We wrote it,” Reed says. “And then we looked at it, and we said, this doesn’t work.”
The problem was Hansel. He was too much of a guy, with too much of a sense of himself as needing to be tough. Then the actor playing the character decided Hansel could realize it was okay to ask for help. Indeed, that could be the moral of a story that doesn’t usually have much of a moral, beyond (as Reed says) “Don’t go off to the woods with weird people to gingerbread houses.”
Reed says Grimms’ fairy tales are good for middle school kids because they’re about “change happening in your life. All of a sudden my parents don’t understand me, and that’s why they’re all wicked stepmothers or absent fathers.”
The company hopes that the audience will become part of the conversation. Reed is planning virtual talkbacks and considering ways to rework shows after audience feedback.
The company also hopes its audience will support it by becoming subscribers. Shows can be purchased individually, but a $15 per month subscription buys access to everything and helps sustain the company. “We’ll take suggestions if people want to see something,” Reed says.
As much as he misses shaking hands with live audience members, Reed is excited about the future. “Lots of interesting art will happen now,” he predicts, venturing that the pandemic might have a silver lining. Perhaps, he says, it will “flush out bad old ways of doing things and bring in something new and exciting.”
