Yesterday the Newton Nomadic Theater kicked off a weekend of the first live theater by any theater group. any where in Greater Boston (I believe) since the lock-down began in March.

Given how all our lives have played out over the last six months I don’t think we could have come up with a better choice then Waiting For Godot – Covid19 Edition featuring Noni Lewis (left), Linda Goetz (right) and Tomi North .  The weather was perfect, the performances were wonderful and the audience was keenly appreciative  to be outside, safely watching some great live theater for the first time in a very long time.

We’re immensely grateful to Historic Newton for working with us to make this happen on the grounds of the lovely and historic Durant-Kenrick House.

For the theater it was a very interesting undertaking with everything totally different from our usual shows.  The first challenge was creating an abridged version of Waiting for Godot that we could bring in to an hour run time, with only three of the original characters.  Rehearsals were totally different since they all had to be done outside to keep the actors safe.  An ingenious blocking and staging had to be invented to keep the characters apart on stage while having some fun with all of the Covid19 protocols.  For the performances, rather than packing the audience into a small intimate space, we instead spread them apart all around the grounds and mic’ed the actors so they could be heard every where – even in spite of nearby barking dogs and an intermittent chain saw.

The final curiosity of this production is that the director Nicole Galland who came up with the whole concept, reworked the script and worked with the actors for four or five weeks of rehearsals, left two weeks ago to begin a year of study in Ireland.  She passed the production off to Paddy Swanson, another great director, and good friend of Nicole’s.  Paddy picked up where she left off and brought the show along for the final two weeks of rehearsal.  For yesterday’s performances we set up a camera on the lawn and Nicole Zoomed in and watched the show live from her quarantine quarters in Dublin.

All four of this weekend’s performances, including the two this afternoon (Sunday) sold out almost immediately.  Stay tuned though, we have some tentative plans that we’re working on to perhaps add one (or two) more additional performances at another outdoor locale in the immediate future.