Doing Theater Without a Theater
In New York, you don’t need a theater to produce a theater-piece. Plays and musicals are mounted every year in parks, parking lots and playgrounds. But what if a venue can lend verisimilitude to the setting of the show? What if a site is in some way connected to the script? What if—in the extreme—a particular space enables the audience to imagine that what they are seeing could have happened right there?
It’s challenging. But some New York production companies regularly take up those challenges to do site-specific theater: to mount productions in unconventional spaces; to make theater in venues that add value to their shows.
Amahl and the Night Visitors, in Holy Apostles Church (Undated photo for On Site Opera by Dan Wright)
“First comes the story,” says Eric Einhorn, who was Co-Founding General & Artistic Director of On Site Opera from 2012 to 2023. “What are we telling? And where is the best place to tell it?”
“Sometimes we find the venue and look for a story. Or we find the story first and then the venue,” says Sarah Meyers, who produced local site-specific theater pieces before becoming On Site Opera’s Artistic Director at the start of 2024. “Both can work.”
According to Anne Hamburger, “It’s not about using a site as a set. That’s reductive.” Her production company, EnGarde Arts, began doing site-specific theater pieces around the city in 1985. “The challenge,” she says, “and the greater interest for me, now, is to figure out how to bring the larger historical and sociological aspects of a community to life.”
In the ’90s, Hamburger produced Marathon Dancing, a Depression-era drama of exhausted dancers desperate for the prize money. Where? In a vintage Masonic Hall ballroom. She also produced a bleak, surreal Orestes amid the skeletal ruins of a pier on the Hudson River.
Orestes on the Hudson (Photo by William Rivelli)
Hamburger left the city to work at the celebrated La Jolla (CA) Playhouse; though after a year, she says, “Disney called; and I spent nine years producing major stage shows, parades and lagoon spectacles with theatrical artists in their theme parks.” In 2024 she mounted The Wind and the Rain—the story of Sunny’s Bar—in a barge moored across from the bar itself, on Brooklyn’s Red Hook waterfront. (Read Hal’s story.)
The Wind and the Rain, performed in The Waterfront Museum: a barge on the Red Hook waterfront. (l-r), Pete Simpson, Pete Lanctot, Paco Tolson, Jen Tullock, and Jennifer Regan (Photo by Maria Baranova)
On Site Opera’s first production was The Tale of the Silly Baby Mouse: a children’s book set to music by Shostakovich, presented in a small outdoor amphitheater at the Bronx Zoo. A commissioned children’s opera, Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt, was performed in one of the dinosaur halls of the Museum of Natural History. Puccini’s tragedy Il Tabarro, which takes place on the Seine, in Paris, was done on the East River at the South Street Seaport.
Meyers staged an adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart, composed and adapted by Gregg Kallor, in a crypt under the Church of Intercession in Harlem. And she staged and directed an adaptation of Frankenstein, produced by the Death of Classical concert series with collaboration from On Site Opera, in the catacombs under Green-Wood Cemetery.
In 2024 her first production as Artistic Director of On Site Opera was a new piece called Lucidity, about a classical singer coping with the onset of dementia. It was done in a theater— the Abrons Art Center’s Playhouse Theater in the Henry St. Settlement—but deliberately skewed and off-kilter, with the audience on stage and the performers in the house.
Logistical challenges abound. It’s rare for a space that isn’t already a theater to be “turnkey,” i.e., ready for a production. Audience comfort can’t be overlooked; hardly any non-theatrical venues have plush auditorium seating. Which makes a show’s running time a critical consideration. Not surprisingly, On Site Opera generally mounts one-act operas.
A dinosaur upstages Jennifer Zetlan as she sings the title role in Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt, produced by On Site Opera in the Museum of Natural History (Photo by David Andrako)
“There’s a difference between a stone wall and a painted flat of a stone wall,” says Einhorn. “In effect, we are guests in somebody’s house. Can we climb up here? Can we move that furniture? You have to follow their rules, respect their space, compromise and negotiate to craft your theater piece.”
Meyers says, “A big challenge is when you think you have a perfect match of story with venue, but the venue can’t participate. Or it’s not available when you need it—the timing doesn’t work. You can’t just transfer the whole thing to another venue. But if you start with the story, the story won’t disappear on you. You just look for a new venue.”
Bach’s Coffee Cantata, as performed in SoHo at The Lost Draft coffee shop, with singers Christine Lyons (on the counter) and Bernard Holcomb (standing) (Photo by Dan Wight)
On Site Opera presented Bach’s Coffee Cantata last winter in The Lost Draft, a coffee shop in SoHo. “One of the things that can really make site-specific work successful is when you have a strong and symbiotic partnership with the venue,” says Meyers. “For the Coffee Cantata we had exactly that. The shop’s Director of Operations, Kolby Runager, became the show’s ‘coffee designer.’ He selected coffees for tasting and helped to decide when in the score they were to be served.”
In every site-specific production there are economic issues. Small theater spaces make for small audiences. If a show’s run cannot be extended, neither can its revenue stream from ticket sales. And yet, according to Meyers, “because of the cost involved in each individual performance, adding performances does not always mean more revenue; it usually means the opposite. The cost of putting on a single performance is often far more than the price of tickets will cover.
“The coffee shop could seat only 46 people,” she says, “and income from ticket sales covered less than twenty percent of what it cost to put on each performance. Donors who had enjoyed the show volunteered to cover the cost of adding two performances. Even if the shop had been willing to add even more shows, it would always have cost more than we could bring in, unless we raised ticket prices. And we really try to keep our performances affordable. So the show was fun because it was intimate,” says Meyers, “but we had 500 people on the waiting list whom we couldn’t accommodate.”
A site may pose challenges beyond the logistical. For Frankenstein, the producers were able to get all the musical instruments, including a piano, into Green-Wood’s catacombs. “But a film of moisture on the walls, and the constant chill, adversely affected the cello. And,” Meyers notes with a shiver, “there’s life down there: silverfish, and large, dark spiders . . . .”
Frankenstein’s “creature” (Joshua Jeremiah) searches for his creator in the Catacombs beneath Green-Wood Cemetery (Photo by Kevin Condon)
For seeing a play, will the audience stay in one location? Or be asked to get up and follow the actors into different spaces? The Irish Repertory Theater made the latter decision this year, for staging James Joyce’s The Dead. The parlor, the dining room and one of the upstairs bedrooms in the American Irish Historical Society’s mansion on Fifth Avenue lent a period-appropriate ambiance to the play’s 1904 setting.
The audience is in the parlor with actors Kate Baldwin, Una Clancy, and Christopher Innvar (far left), for the Irish Rep’s production of James Joyce’s The Dead (Photo courtesy of the Irish Repertory Theater)
“A play can be as little as ‘one-audience-one-actor,’” says Einhorn. “But an opera needs more than that. It’s like a dance. Where will we put the orchestra, and how many musicians can we have? Where will the singers go? Where are the audience chairs?”
He worked closely with Geoffrey McDonald, On Site Opera’s musical director to ensure not only that audiences would be able to see and hear everything, but that the singers and musicians would be well served too. “Geoff and I talked for years about putting on a 90-minute condensed version of Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti. But it has an aria sustained by a French horn. If we have room for only ten players, do we include the French horn? Or try to cover the horn line with another instrument? We opted not to do that Cosi, in favor of other productions.”
The Tale of the Silly Baby Mouse in performance at the Bronx Zoo.
Some challenges are simply unforeseeable. “At one of our Baby Mouse rehearsals in the Bronx Zoo,” Einhorn recalls, “two Zoo staffers came up and asked us to lower the volume of the music. Apparently, the piccolo was agitating a baby camel nearby.”
For the right script, a church can be an appropriately site-specific venue. Meyers collaborated with the Park Avenue Christian Church and The Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School for the Blind, to produce Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (Noah’s Flood) at the Park Avenue United Methodist Church.
And On Site Opera has mounted Gian Carlo Menotti‘s Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors three times in Holy Apostles Church in Chelsea, which operates a soup kitchen there; so audiences are asked to bring canned goods.
“When I first started out, I wanted to do a show in the Morgan Library. They turned me down,” Hamburger recalls. “New York has fewer places available, now, than it did when I was starting out. And I’m no longer focused on doing productions that are exclusively site-specific. I see EnGarde Arts being at the intersection of theater and social change, bringing theater into communities. But wherever we go, the city is our stage!”
The opening photo is from On Site Opera’s production of Il Tabarro (The Cloak). Puccini’s opera is set in Paris, on a quai and a barge along the Seine. Here on the East River, the South Street Seaport stands in as the quai, with the Ambrose lightship as the barge. Photo by Dan Wright.
In 2025, EnGarde Arts will present Space Bridge, by Irina Kruzhilina, a multimedia show with 19 teenage performers, 11 of whom are Russian refugees living in shelters. Also on tap for 2025 is Seagull F*cker by Sasha Molochnikov, a poignant piece about freedom of speech and how artists struggle to create, wherever they go. And plans are underway to revive The Wind and the Rain in Red Hook next year. For more information, and for the production history of EnGarde Arts performances, visit the website.
Some videos of On Site Opera’s productions are currently streaming. Next December, the company will bring back Amahl and the Night Visitors. To receive notice of the 2025 schedule, visit the website.
The Irish Repertory Theater’s production of The Dead runs through Jan. 5. For information and tickets visit the website.
