BCTC theater gets ‘huge honor’ for livestream, turns production into new film
When in-person teaching at Bluegrass Community & Technical College shut down in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, it hit the school’s theater program hard. Not only did BCTC Theatre’s spring play, “The Get Back” by alumnus Jeremy Gillett, have to be canceled just days before opening night, there were suddenly no prospects for producing live theater for the foreseeable future.
But as all theater folk know, the show must go on, and so it did. “The Covid Monologues,” a series of pieces about life during the first months of the pandemic written and performed by BCTC students, faculty and friends, was filmed in a classroom space and livestreamed in December. It was then one of 10 productions invited by the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival for streaming at its Region IV virtual gathering in February — the only show by a two-year junior college to be showcased.
“It was a huge honor for our program,” says BCTC theatre coordinator Tim X. Davis, who conceived and directed the show. “It turned out bigger and stronger than I ever imagined, and we got a great response from it.”
A recording of the livestream is on BCTC theatre’s YouTube page.
‘The Covid Monologues’ as a movie
But now “The Covid Monologues” has been filmed again, this time as a work of cinema rather than a stage production, which will be screened by an invitation-only audience at the Lyric Theatre & Cultural Center on May 27.
“We’re weaving together all the stories in a way that connects all the characters,” BCTC film coordinator Stephanie Fitch, who adapted the screenplay from the original stage script, says at a recent filming session on campus. “During the pandemic, everyone’s been living separate lives, but in the movie, they’re watching each other on their phones or computers.”
One of the biggest surprises in “The Covid Monologues” is the breadth and depth of the subject matter it tackles. The monologues address not only COVID-19 itself, along with its attendant isolation, fear and economic challenges, but also several other current events and themes that flared last year, including the social justice demonstrations in the wake of the George Floyd murder.
The various monologues also touch on stress and loneliness, evictions and homelessness, and the politics and interpersonal implications of mask-wearing. There’s even a monologue about “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling’s Twitter criticism of transgender people.
“The show covers a lot of ground, and I think some really interesting ground,” Davis says. “It’s very raw, very open and, as a lot of people have said, very moving. And I think it’s a really good snapshot of what things looked like during those first few weeks of the pandemic and all through the summer. I was really blown away. It’s stunning, in a good way, how these pieces resonated with viewers.”
Monologues hits a variety of issues
Two different monologues feature teachers grappling with online instruction, including one by Leif Erickson, whose laments take the form of dark satire: “In this Unit, we will focus on the primary text for the course, Discourses on an Escalating Collective Existential Port-a-potty Fire and the Radical Transformation of the Self Into an Empty Husk of Insecurity, upon the completion of which we will compose cause and effect essays on rolls of hoarded toilet paper and craft them into masks.”
The other teacher — To’nia Ruby, a substitute teacher from the Cincinnati area and friend of the BCTC theatre program — used her real-life observations of COVID-era instruction in her monologue.
“I got to see one on one what the teachers are going through,” she said in an interview immediately after filming her scene. “They were very stressed. They still are. It’s difficult when you love your students and you see them struggling, or you don’t see them at all. You don’t know if they’re eating. You don’t know if they’re safe. And even if they show up at your online class, it’s hard to tell if they’re paying attention.”
The monologue by Thomas Kinchen, a theatre major from Lexington, is about the sadness he felt while coping with the fact that his sister was getting married during the pandemic and moving away to California. “We’re super close, so doing the play was basically my way of flushing out my emotions,” he says in an interview. “Shooting the film was a surreal experience, because it was like me going back into that moment of letting my emotions out, feeling them all over again.”
His classmate Tiffany Madden, also of Lexington, had a similar sense of pouring her feelings — in her case, about missing her friends and going to the Bluegrass Fair — into her monologue and onto the screen. “I used to be a social butterfly, but when the pandemic started I had to stay in the house all the time,” she says in an interview. “It’s been hard on all of us, which is why the movie has been so important. It’s letting us tell our stories.”
Davis says the film will not be screened for the public until next year because they plan to enter it in film festivals and rules prevent them from releasing it until after they compete. But they plan on having a local premier in late Spring, 2022.
This story was originally published May 24, 2021 at 6:00 AM.