Co-Op High Puts Its Stamp On Pandemic Theater

Two murder mysteries. A string of love letters. A Choose Your Own Adventure-style story. And testimony after testimony of the things lost and found during the pandemic.

Co-op High School’s theater department has joined a national theater-by-mail festival, and in doing so, will have a chance to show New Haven and beyond how a high school theater program can continue to make art even when stages have to stay dark.

The festival, called Post Theatrical, began in February and involves a dozen theater companies around the country. Tickets for Co-op High’s production, called Lost and Found: Coming of Age in a Pandemic, go on sale from April 9 to April 30, with mailings then beginning on April 30. Those who buy a ticket will receive a letter each week, some including interactive components, for five weeks. The final envelope will be a return envelope that gives the audience member a chance to write back.

“The experience of receiving a letter and opening it and having a story there — it’s exciting,” said Co-op drama teacher Charley McAfee.

Theater by mail has become one way that theaters have reacted to the pandemic environment. The idea for Post Theatrical came from Molly Rice and Rusty Thelin, artistic directors at RealTime Interventions, a Pittsburgh, Penn.-based theater company. RealTime was already organizing one of Rice’s plays, The Birth of Paper, as the Covid-19-induced shutdowns darkened stages everywhere, it struck Thelin that The Birth of Paper was a prime candidate for adaptation for ​“the time that we’re in now.” The play, which had its first run in 2003, had involved asking audiences to continue the story by mail after the performance, and Rice said that she continued to get mail for two years afterward.

“I became really interested in that connection between theater and the post,” Rice said. In the spring, RealTime got involved in the New York City-based Orchard Project’s Liveness Lab, which found almost 150 artists sharing ideas on how to do theater when people couldn’t gather. As Rice put it, ​“if we’re not sharing space, can we still be live?”

Many theater companies experimented with Zoom theater. There was theater by robocall. Why not theater by mail? It was a chance to do a national season of theater” and ​“bring together all these different companies.” Rice said.

Rice and Thelin began asking around to see who might be interested in creating a theater-by-mail festival, and ended up with several pieces from companies spanning the country. Among the people Rice reached out to was McAfee, who was a playwriting student of Rice’s. As they talked, the idea emerged of not just one piece, but a series of pieces involving Co-op’s students. Rice was interested in what it might be like for high-school students ​“to use pen and paper — this old technology” as the medium for the art when ​“we’re so dependent on screens.” And she noted that ​“people are really excited to know what this time has been like” for others. ​“Everyone’s experience is unique, but there’s also a sameness to it,” she said, a ​“loneliness that is universal right now.”

To create the content for Lost and Found Co-op’s drama students and some of its creative writing students divided into six groups. ​“They had to create a story that utilizes at least four mailings,” McAfee said. ​“They went a lot of different directions” — from audio and video to Google forms to animation and letters. His students started sending him drafts. ​“I’m getting so much mail,” McAfee said. ​“I’ve never gotten this much mail in my life. One of them is a serial killer story — I’m getting bloody letters in the mail. The possibilities are limitless. It was overwhelming at first, and they just went forward — I knew they would, that’s what I love about them — and they came up with some really awesome stuff.”

For example, Co-op student Tain Gregory ​“had this 205-page play” based off of a jump-and-run video game. He figured the rest of his group wouldn’t be interested in figuring out how to adapt it to a theater-by-mail piece. He was wrong. Together he and his group divided the play into chapters and created audio for it. ​“I’m still working on the video,” he said. Audiences will be introduced to the work by getting a letter that’s from a character in the game, talking about what’s going on and how they’re trying to survive the game. A QR code will then take them to an unlisted video that they’ll be able to watch to continue the story.

Co-op student Sofia Carillo’s group ran with an idea based on The Purge movies, about a society that has one night a year in which anything is allowed. ​“You have a few hours to do anything illegal,” Carillo said, except that their iteration of the idea is ​“more organized.” On a signal from sirens that go off at the beginning of the allotted time, ​“there’s three tasks you have to complete in order.”

The letters from this group are told in the second person; the subject of the letter ​“is you and what you’re doing. You’re walking to a car and you hear the sirens.” The letter is accompanied by audio and documents that show the audience what is happening around them. In addition, the story employs Google forms with choices that affect what letters you get next. Who are your teammates? In a certain situation, do you fight or run? The story changes based on what you decide.

On her own, Carillo would not have written ​“something so complex and interactive,” she said; she usually writes about ​“love and family.” With the group, though, she put herself more in the mind of a potential audience member: ​“If I were sitting at home and getting an envelope, what would I have been interested in reading?”

Co-op student Christopher Cazarin helmed a murder mystery, about ​“a serial killer on the loose in Salt Lake City.” In his group, the killer writes letters to the audience. ​“I try to talk about his psychology and why he does the things he does,” Cazarin said. But meanwhile, other characters contact the audience to help identify the killer. ​“figure out who it is.” So the audience member is trying to help the police catch the serial killer even as the killer continues to send messages. ​“It was fun to write as a different character — especially with the people I’m working with,” Cazarin said.

Another group project makes the question of where the pandemic came from into an unraveling mystery. Another project revolves around love letters. In addition, Co-op student Lauren Widenmann is ​“working on the national project,” which will be web-based. ​“We asked all the theater students and creative writers, ranging from freshman to senior, to write about what they lost in the pandemic or what they found in the pandemic.” The plan is to organize them on the website graphically as a tree, half denoting losses and half denoting gains. ​“We’re receiving a lot of letters right now,” Widenmann said. ​“We have some amazing writers in our school — the creative writers are insane.”

“We’re kind of having it be a coming-of-age,” Widenmann said, noting that she saw one theme running through the letters that ​“you never know how good you have it until you don’t have it.” She herself came to realize that ​“so much of my identity is in school” — from her classes to her social life — and the unmooring due to distance learning has been something to puzzle through.

McAfee said he saw in the letters a lot of ​“real introspection — being able to sit with yourself for long periods of time. I think a lot of people have gained a better sense of what is important to them and who is important to them. A lot of students wrote about finding out who their real friends are.”

McAfee said he also found plenty of reason for hope. ​“I was surprised by how many positive letters there were,” he said. Students were ​“finding out about themselves, getting to spend more time with their family,” and ​“just making the best of it.” As a teacher, he knew, of course, that many students have struggled with the past year, academically and socially. But reading the letters gave him a sense of balance, of getting to grasp the fullness of his students’ experience. Readers of the letters, when they are published, ​“will understand all the suffering and the loss, but there’s victory in it all too.”

McAfee is glad that the project has given the theater program a sense of everyone working together at a time when traditionally the program would be putting on a play or musical. ​“I’ve never gone this long without doing a play,” he said. ​“We’re still missing that immediate audience interaction.” But ​“it was cool to discover something to hold the place of live theater.”

“We haven’t stopped,” he added. ​“We’re still making art. It’s different but we’ve made the best of it and discovered something new.”

Visit Post Theatrical’s website for tickets to Co-op High’s theater-by-mail production, Lost and Found, and to learn about the other productions in the festival, running now through June.