Jewish Senior Theatre Ensemble Embraces Online Art and Performance
(Laura Levine Gumina, March 20, 2021)
This is a  pandemic.  A lot of differences have  occurred in our daily lives.
Most notably for the Jewish Senior Theatre Ensemble, and nearly all indoor performing arts venues, our style is drastically changed.  We’ve become a different shape, different sound.  A totally different medium, two dimensional and digital.
So, how do we simulate live theatre virtually in the 20th &  21st Century?  On ZOOM, of course, the application for all displaced would be crowd-gatherers. ZOOM. The  COVID-19 pandemic has moved our lives into a virtual reality..
But, you see, theatre  happens anywhere and as a culture we are moving into an exciting  new time of theatrical style.   We are asked  to think “out of the box”;  to  discover other elements of storytelling in this new and very different approach.  We are not in a darkened theatre, we are in our homes.  The actors are not twenty to eighty feet away from us, but close by on a screen.   Our ‘sets’ are not built on a stage.  They  have become widely diverse virtual backgrounds.
This is fun.
We can go easily to 19th Century Paris – at night – without ever picking up a paintbrush.
In our current show, “The Necklace,  the author Guy de Maupasssant sets his short story in 1880 Paris, France.  We  searched for the virtual backgrounds for every of the thirteen  scenes in our adapted story.
Our talented Tech director/stage manager Joseph Long of Lawrence Technological University explains his contribution in the following manner.
“The pandemic required us to take the onstage view through which we normally watch a live play and shift our perspective to incorporating facets of broadcast production as seen in news rooms.  The lighting and sound board operator roles get merged in with the stage manager, and that person becomes the studio booth technician.”
Long uses  free computer program Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), which allows the group to take a Zoom window showing on one PC monitor, then “mirror” each actor’s video output rectangles on that Zoom screen as if they were camera sources for OBS.  The end result is that in OBS, for any given scene of the performance, he can put whichever characters that need to be in the scene “on stage,” create a background ‘scenery’ image,  layer that to the screen…”and then it’s up to the actors to carry on,” he said.
Through this marriage of technology and art,  through the combination of a powerful script, and the interpretation by our actors we find the familiar again. The dramatic tension and emotional force of good literature reaches through the screen, impacts us and we respond.  Along with audiences everywhere- we watch as the power of  theatrical  expression carries us into a world of the imaginary.”

The Jewish Senior Theatre Ensemble provides an opportunity for participation by our older population in life enriching, purposeful and creative activities in theatre. “Getting in on the act” with the JSTE contributes to establishing interpersonal social skills and good mental health.
We have a collection of short plays and one acts that we rehearse until performance ready. Our director, a senior herself, is an acting coach and professional director. Since we work in a “reader’s theatre’ format no memorization is required. We develop character and relationship, work on pace, overall tone, and interpretation of the story. This allows our minds to stay active and creativity to flourish..
Extensive research shows that seniors who are isolated and lonely are at greater risk for heart disease, dementia, and premature death than seniors in community. Pursuing the production of readers theatre, staged reading, improvisation and full plays fulfills this necessary need in our lives.
Also, our just ‘showing up’ helps to dispel the negative stigma associated with old age in our culture.
Learn more about Jewish Senior Theatre Ensemble on Facebook.