The Smith Department of Theatre’s fall show, The Amplifier Project, is now live. The show takes the form of a collection of 29 individual pieces, all of which can be viewed online at The Amplifier website. Though they range in style and subject matter, most of the pieces are video, totaling nearly two hours of footage. The project was put together by 85 participants from across the Smith community, working together remotely from three different countries and 18 different states.
In some ways, the Amplifier Project is very different from normal theatre at Smith. Writers, directors, stage managers, editors and actors collaborated on their pieces remotely, sometimes from hundreds of miles apart. At a livestream to celebrate the project launch, Daniel Elihu Kramer, Professor of Theatre and the project director, recalled being unable to tell how the project was progressing, so removed from the normal rhythm of a show. “We were inventing the process,” he said. “People say, ‘Well I’d like to act in something. I’d like to design something.’ Normally we think we know what those words mean. We had to go, ‘Well, we’ll have to figure out what that word, what that role, what that function means.’”
But, he recalled, the Amplifier Project also followed the same trajectory as any live production, miraculously coming together just before its premier. Kathleen Hablutzel ’23, a member of the team of developers who built the project website, recalled coding late into the night the week before the show’s opening: “It was like a tech week for us.”
In its collection, the website now hosts short films, documentaries, monologues, poetry readings, dance, a choir performance by the Smiffenpoofs and even still visual art. There are musings on social distancing, loneliness, fear, ethnic identity, loss.
One particularly striking piece is the short film “Waiting Room,” directed by Isabelle Stevens ’22, which stars Hero Hendrick-Baker ’22 as a woman trapped in a dark room with nothing but a table, chair and a ringing phone. The piece is a testament to what art can be produced even under COVID-19 restrictions. Hendrick-Baker gives a great performance even when the co-star she is playing off of, Adriana Piantedosi ’AC, is physically absent, just a voice on the telephone.
But even moments of failure serve to enhance the experience of the project. There is a pervasive technical awkwardness to many of the pieces, the result of actors who might ordinarily have acted on stage adjusting to video, directors and editors who had to make use of new tools (both typical video equipment and of-the-moment solutions like simulated Zoom calls filmed using the platform itself), stage managers who had to mail props across the country, writers who had to adapt their scripts to allow for social-distancing.
In the final moment of the short film “Us, While the World Burns,” directed by Fiona King ’22, Edweyza Rodriguez ’22 reaches out to take Jenine Jacinto ‘21’s hand. Filming from different locations, Rodriguez’s arm reaches through a split screen divide as King grasps hands with an unseen, physically present actor. The two arms flicker together, overlapping unevenly. The shot is far more affecting than it would be if they were seamlessly blended.
According to Kramer, The Amplifier Project was so named to mark its commitment to amplifying student voices in a year when traditional theatre may not have felt resonant. The project itself does nothing but resonate. Each piece is about COVID-19, whether clearly or elliptically, and above each textual layer lingers the metatextual, the way each piece of art about the pandemic was itself shaped by the pandemic. The result is a collection that simply buzzes with the anxiety of the times. Pieces that are, said Kramer, “perhaps fact, perhaps fiction, but always true.”
The Amplifier Project can be viewed online at sophia.smith.edu/theamplifier/enter.
