Keeping The Arts And Entertainment Afloat

For the last three decades before entering the Maryland General Assembly as your delegate, I worked as a performer, director, arts educator and arts administrator. I taught theater with our Anne Arundel County Public Schools performing and visual arts (PVA) program, a curriculum which I created called “Cultivating Kindness through Theatre Arts,” which uses theater games to teach communication, team building, empathy and compassion.

When the pandemic first hit, I knew that my industry would be one of the first to close and last to return because the arts, and the performing arts in particular, rely on audiences; live theater, though it can be captured onscreen, is simply not the same artform when it is not live.

I was proud to be a voice for artists, knowing the unique challenges posed by a complete shutdown of venues, lowered capacity, mask restrictions, and other protocols essential to the health and safety of our community but so detrimental to the financial well-being of the performers and venues. I understood the need to pivot and also knew the resiliency and ingenuity of my community who trade in change and adaptability but also often rely on a cobbling together of gig work to sustain themselves, much of which dried up seemingly overnight.

I was proud to be there advocating for our community, having some small part in Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), the federal unemployment program that provides aid to gig workers, sole proprietors, and independent contractors who prior to the pandemic had no programs or social safety nets available despite their financial contributions to our local, state and federal coffers, a concern which I voiced to Senator Chris Van Hollen, the chief architect of the PUA extension in the CARES Act.

Even as we worked to ensure federal and state aid for restaurants and hotels, I continued to lobby for the arts, because arts, entertainment and hospitality are three legs of the tourism stool. They cannot survive independent of one another, a fact of which, as someone with three decades of experience in entertainment and hospitality, I was keenly aware.

I also knew that the relaxing of capacity restrictions would not guarantee audiences, which is why I continued to fight for aid even as audiences began to return.

At the end of July, my world came full circle because we were able to successfully and safely mount a production of “Camp Rock,” which I co-directed with my partner Luke Tudball, whom many of you know as my community relations director. He is also my partner in our production company, which has been on hiatus since the start of the pandemic while I worked to ensure our community had what they needed to stay afloat.

Of course, everything is far from normal. With summer colds and our young people still ineligible for vaccination comes a level of concern we’ve not experienced before. Is it a cold or is it COVID? With increasing breakthrough cases with the more virulent delta variant, vaccine hesitancy, mask resistance, and as we await vaccine approval for our 4- to 11-year-old populations, we have to remain vigilant but also flexible, something I know is a challenge for so many.

Understandably, we want answers, we want some sort of assurance and finality, an end in sight, but when I talk about the arts, I often compare them to sciences because not only are the arts foundational and a bridge across disciplines, but they also teach us to adapt, to be changeable, to improvise and, much like science, they teach us that failure is informational. For what is an experiment but a series of failed experiences based on a hypothesis which draw ever closer to an answer? Each attempt tells us something.

With this new variant, with new information coming from the Centers for Disease Control, and as we continue to prioritize getting to some sort of finish line, we must continue to adapt, to be changeable, to improvise, and to learn from the science, but most importantly, we have to approach each other with patience.

Our businesses have had to adapt again and again to protect their employees and their patrons; our arts communities have had to do the same. Recently, tickets went on sale for the Maryland Renaissance Festival, the largest arts festival in Maryland in the heart of District 33, at the venue that launched my professional career. They too have had to adapt to ensure they could open. I’m hoping and working to ensure we can quickly get our latest surge under control and that everyone will do their part whether it’s getting the vaccine, wearing a mask, doing regular testing, or in some cases, all of the above. I’ve just begun rehearsal for “Into the Woods,” but we’re not out of the woods yet.