Northwestern fourth-year Jenna Howard-Delman hadn’t stepped foot on the Northwestern Main Stage for almost two years. In October, she returned to a full house.
Howard-Delman, a Theater major in the Music Theater Certificate Program, performed in the first in-person performance at Northwestern since the pandemic began. The musical titled, “The Battlefields of Clara Barton,” was a folk-rock musical put on at the Wirtz Center through the American Music Theatre Project. This performance at Northwestern was an opportunity for the playwrights and directors of the musical to receive feedback and make changes according to the audience reactions. For the student performers, it was an opportunity to get back to what they loved doing most.
“This was the first show back as a real story musical on stage, and we had a lot of precautions to deal with. We had our masks on for pretty much the entirety of the rehearsal process, but we still got to perform unmasked, and it didn’t really feel weird,” Howard-Delman said. “It felt normal to be going back to real, in-person rehearsals. It felt like the right thing to be doing.”
The show was a drastic change from the performances she had been doing the past two years of the pandemic–Zoom shows. Though Howard-Delman’s stage was now one of automated boxes and computer screens, she tried to make the most of the situation.
“Theater doesn’t translate online very well. I would say I was the happiest when instead of trying to do a normal play over zoom, I tried to engage with the medium that we had in a more interesting way. During the pandemic, they did these storytime videos that were brought in by students. You could kind of do anything you wanted, so I directed and performed in two of those,” Howard-Delman said.
A silver lining emerged from this situation: increased accessibility to performances, a hard-to-come-by facet of theater.
“I found that stuff very fulfilling during the pandemic. Because, in terms of outreach, we are able to reach so many more people that way, and I think it’s a really good way to reach people who aren’t able to afford the theater, which is why I’m really glad that they are still streaming productions now. Especially when we’re trying to tell stories that are meant to be hear by a broader audience, I think it’s a really good thing that they seem to be taking an initiative to improve accessibility”
This aspect is something that the Wirtz Center hopes to keep long after the pandemic ends, starting with “The Battlefields of Clara Barton” being available for streaming. And the show wasn’t something any audience member, whether in the theater or at home, would want to miss.
After a long period deprived of the stage lights, of a packed auditorium and real interaction, Howard-Delman described her return to the stage as an incredibly emotional process.
“The Clara Barton cast was almost entirely seniors. There were a lot of people who are very important to me, and it was very much a show about connection and sisterhood. To get to come back to live theater with all of these incredible women who I care about so much was very, very emotional. It was a really exciting process,” Howard-Delman said.
The show was a massive success, and the packed audience left with smiling and tear-stained faces after every night of the show’s run. The message of Clara Barton–the ability to forge a path of light and hope in periods of darkness–was especially relevant for the first in-person performance in the Wirtz Center after the pandemic.
Now that the ball has begun rolling, the Wirtz Center has a stacked list of upcoming shows for the Spring, with a performance of “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” scheduled for April 22nd to May 1st and “The 91st Annual Waa-Mu Show” scheduled for April 29th to May 8th. Carrying the momentum from the success of “The Battlefields of Clara Barton,” the Wirtz Center Main Stage is soon to be graced by Northwestern talent yet again.
