Bounces Back

Then the theater rallied, thanks in part to a Neighborhood Cultural Vitality Grant from the city. Only weeks ago, when Ziner and Sepulveda finally started work on the set for Barbecue, did the space start feeling reborn again.

“It was hard to come back into this space and see it frozen in time for so long, and feeling like it really wanted to come back to life,” Nelson said. “We really tried, everybody tried to have Skeleton Crew come back and it just—the world changed. Things changed. It was hard to see it here.”

Weeks later, the set extends into the first few rows of the audience, making attendees feel like they have a stake in the action as it unfolds. And they do: Barbecue leaves an audience with something to chew on, served sizzling hot.

It also opens a discussion for the theater, where incisive social commentary has often come only on dramatic form, around who gets to tell specific stories. When Covid-19 hit, Singleton was still relatively new to his job at Theater Squared, a Fayetteville-based stage that now has him commuting to Arkansas from New Haven at least once every three or four weeks. Nelson joined Westport Country Playhouse, where she is now the director of education and community engagement.

When they read the show, Nelson said, they knew it was the one. She can’t remember the last time she laughed out loud at a script, she said. Singleton, who has known about the work for nearly 10 years, said it set the right tone to bring an audience back. That isn’t to say it’s a soft landing: Barbecue gives a viewer plenty to think about, no matter what their lived experience may be.

And if Barbecue is a nesting doll of a play, it also reflects the new normal into which Nelson, Singleton, and the cast are stepping. Beyond masked rehearsals, weekly testing regimens, and temperature checks at the door, there’s been a reckoning with white supremacy and an equally strong backlash that wasn't quite the same in 2020. Nelson said the past three years have pushed her to think more critically about what plays she should be directing as a white woman, and what plays she should step back from to make space for new directors. That’s also her hope for the show.

“You sit in this theater, you have a communal experience with a group of people you’ve never met, that you may never see again, you have an experience together,” she said at a rehearsal Tuesday night, as actors ran through warmups beneath a pavilion built into the set. “Which is what makes theater so special. That thing of sitting in a dark space with a group of people, having the same shared experience together, is really what theater does best.”

Robert O’Hara’s Barbecue runs at Collective Consciousness Theatre, 319 Peck St., from March 23 through April 8.