When the pandemic shut down theaters in New York City and around the country last March, Mara Lieberman, Executive Artistic Director of the Bated Breath Theatre Company, made the most of the situation and created a whole new experience for her audience.
“I knew there had to be a way to continue to do live theater safely,” she says. “We're just not thinking about various configurative alterations that would allow us to keep doing our art form.”
With a little inspiration from her sister, the idea for Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec was born. The audience would be small, masks would be required, and the majority of the play would be outside, with scenes taking place in the street and behind the windows of stores and bars around Greenwich Village in NYC.
The play became one of the only live experiences that ran in New York throughout the pandemic and was able to put many theater artists back to work during an extremely difficult time.
“The coolest thing about Voyeur is that New York is our scene partner,” explains Lieberman. “You can imagine this play that's supposed to be happening in Paris, 1899, colliding with modern-day pandemic New York – and the cool thing is that it works. We love the way the city and the show interplay with each other. What's really exciting for me as a maker is to see the way the life of the city collides with what we've created.”
Voyeur is unique in many other ways as well. Unlike most shows, the cast is never actually together, with tour guides leading the audience from one scene to the next.
Lieberman also notes that the play has been rewritten multiple times to accommodate unexpected changes in venues: “Our spaces have changed several times because a vacant storefront that we were using got rented. I have had to rewrite the play several different times to ensure that the timing of the walk worked. This is like the play that's never done – I was always writing more to figure out how to cover the route as we changed sites.”
Groups for Voyeur are limited to 15 (up from eight during the height of the pandemic), giving the experience a sense of intimacy, which Lieberman says has been important during the pandemic.
“There's a final scene that involves puppetry, during which the puppeteer brings the puppet in front of everybody and has the puppet do a different gesture. Sometimes it’s a bow, sometimes it’s a kiss,” she explains. “One of the things that I decided when I was making this is that every person in the group should feel seen because of the isolation of the pandemic. I feel like that's part of the healing process from the pandemic. It's a really important part of the show.
As the pandemic slowly comes to an end and indoor activities resume, Voyeur will live on, if in a slightly different iteration. “We’re starting to create a version of it that is more inside and less outside,” says Lieberman. “We’ll do a piece of the tour outside, and then another good chunk in the cabaret theater at The Duplex [on Christopher Street]. So the audience will be able to enjoy, drink, revel, be together – all the things we couldn't do before. It is changing for a post Covid world, but it will still go as long as people want to see it.”