Of Optimism and Adrenaline

BY ZI ALIKHAN

Nothing can really prepare you for a phone call from your artistic director, 20 minutes before opening-night curtain, saying, “Zi, we have to cancel the show tonight”—unless you’ve been making your play through the birth and height of Omicron. Then, dear reader, you are prepared for anything.

Rehearsal started on December 21. The meet-and-greet was a joyous gathering of staff and makers from Portland Center Stage and Artists Repertory Theatre, the two institutions collaborating on our production of Lauren Yee’s THE GREAT LEAP, the first play “back” for both theatres that’d had no work or considerations made for it prior to the start of the pandemic. The room felt electric: 60 or so teammates in a rehearsal hall again, christening this play for its voyage with speeches and well wishes, optimism hanging in the air, and the adrenaline of the “first day of school” in the veins of the artists who were about to embark.

It feels important to mention that this optimism and adrenaline didn’t just magically appear in our room that day, that they were not there by accident or happenstance, that they were the product of process. The moment I knew this was going to be a project that would be a major barometer for how I lead a company of makers into the future was my very first conversation with PCS’s Artistic Director Marissa Wolf and Production Manager Katie Nguyen. In several experiences before this one, before the pandemic, I found myself in meetings with artistic leaders where it became very clear that my hiring was more about creating a “diverse narrative” on a grant application than my experience, skills, or story. I found myself fighting to be heard, fighting to be seen, sometimes even just fighting to be looked at instead of the older, white colleague sitting next to me in the production meeting. With Marissa and Katie, our first conversation started with “How do you see the world of the play? What do you need,” without caveat, their eyes looking into mine, separated only by the mechanics of Zoom. The care of this simple moment opened the doors to such radical honesty in our early conversations. This emboldened me to approach each subsequent conversation, interaction, meeting, and moment of rehearsal starting from that care, starting from their deeply collaborative approach and reaching into my own, always beginning with “How do you, my colleague, see this world? What do you need?”

One of the first doors this honesty opened was around my desire to hire an all API-identifying team to collaborate on this play. Curating teams with intention in a way that considers the players beyond actors and writers is a major tenet of my directorial ethos, and one that is shockingly hard to get supported when the considerations of money and prior relationships to an institution come into play. When I brought this up for GREAT LEAP, what I was not expecting was an immediate “Of course”—but that’s exactly what I got. From here, we hired a dream team of makers to bring our story to life with: Chika Shimizu (scenic), Cha See (lights), Fan Zhang (sound), Nicole Wee (costumes), Sunny Hitt (movement), Barbie Wu (associate direction), Kristen Mun (stage management), and Andrea Zee (casting). This team was already unlike any I’d ever known assembled: we are all API-identifying, I am the only male-identifying member of the team, and half of the group was born outside the United States. Redefining a mold simply in our coming together, all made possible by the simplicity of a “Yes” from an institution, our process was off to a start full of support and engagement, a start that asked each of us to continue considering our own methods of care as we began collaborating with each other and our teams over the next several months.

And now—flash-forward to December 21 again, the electric room, the artists and the optimism and the adrenaline. Our first two days of rehearsal springboarded from this energy into every word of our tablework, every breath of our early movement exploration. And then, on the morning of December 23, we all woke up to the thing we had been dreading all along, the one email we didn’t want to get after the two years we’d spent waiting for this week: the PCR test results from our first day of rehearsal had come back and half our cast had tested positive for COVID-19. We quickly pivoted to a Zoom rehearsal that morning, and my mind started spinning through the Rolodex of ways I knew how to lead (or, at the very least, cope). Then, something flashed clearly across my brain: that this process had started with someone asking me “What do you need?” and I was currently meeting the ultimate opportunity to pay this energy forward.

Our Zoom rehearsal started with making space for us all to breathe, to talk, and to be together, no expectations, just people first; the care the institution had embraced me with was something I endeavored to pass on to the whole company that day. You could feel in the Zoom that even though we’d only known each other for three days, by the way we voiced our fears and sadness in those hours, we were going to forge something close in these tenuous moments of making together. I knew from that day that our collective honesty and mutual embrace would see us through to a bright beyond.

Zi Alikhan rehearsing THE GREAT LEAP, a joint production of Artists Repertory Theatre + Portland Center Stage, over Zoom

PHOTO c/o Zi Alikhan

Two days of Zoom felt like agony at the time, but today, knowing what would come to pass over the next five weeks, I can indulge myself in a hearty LOL about it. In short, as a team, our process weathered:

• Those two positive COVID-19 tests on day three.

• Spending the next two days rehearsing on Zoom as we figured out our plan.

• Three federal holidays during our process spent in quarantine.

• Returning to work the week after our Zoom time to have one of our remaining actors sprain and strain his ankle playing basketball at the top of our first rehearsal day; Sunny and I subsequently spent the afternoon with him in the emergency room.

• Staging our entire first act with said actor in a boot because of said ankle (here’s where I’d like to remind us all that this actor was playing a basketball prodigy in the play).

• Finally having one of our COVID-19- positive actors return 10 days after his last rehearsal; the second would return three days before our designer run.

• The flight carrying half our design team getting canceled the night before our designer run.

• Coming down with a fever immediately following paper tech, causing me to lead our first tech rehearsal from Zoom (ZOOM TECH OH MY GOD).

• Making it through tech and previews to have, as previously mentioned, our opening night canceled at 20 minutes to curtain due to six positive COVID-19 tests in our production group. Nothing is more bizarre than seeing a bunch of artists in opening night outfits swabbing for rapid tests in an empty theatre.

• Coming back to rehearse two days the following week.

• Officially opening five days after our scheduled opening only to close down again the next day when another PCR test came back positive in a role we were yet unable to fulfill without a rehearsal.

• Rehearsing one last time, exactly a week after our scheduled opening, to train someone in that role. Seeing the show with my mom that night and then saying goodbye to our play and to Portland.

Sami Ma in THE GREAT LEAP, a co-production between Portland Center Stage and Artists Repertory Theatre, directed by Zi Alikhan

PHOTO Owen Carey

You could feel in the Zoom that even though we’d only known each other for three days, by the way we voiced our fears and sadness in those hours, we were going to forge something close in these tenuous moments of making together.

And yet bizarrely, impossibly even, through all this, I’ve never seen so many people show up to work every day and really, really show up. I’ve never seen a company that came to work optimistic about what was ahead and tenaciously endeavoring to conquer the obstacles that were seemingly falling out of the sky on an hourly basis. The care that had blanketed all of us, that trickled through every person, every exchange, every moment of eye contact, every shared breath, seemingly bolstered us to weather whatever making in this time might throw in our way, because we knew we were doing it together, for ourselves, and for each other, always. It became hard to keep count of the moments where someone’s words or their eyes or their embrace or the way they made me laugh or the way they validated my thoughts were the thing that kept me going that afternoon, and every time I felt this moment happen, I would endeavor to be that moment for someone else in return.

What would come out of the woodwork of our process was that a large percentage of folks involved in this production (actors, designers, artisans, crew members, even this director) had seriously considered pivoting away from the industry during the pandemic, unsure of how we’d find ourselves in work that was already so hard to find ourselves in before. What also came out was that the community we’d built making The Great Leap was, for many of us, reassuring that there was still so much work to do and that we’d find ourselves in the work in finding each other, our communities, in the rooms we’d walk into. In the darkness of a preview rehearsal, Chika leaned over to me to tell me how much she was enjoying our process, how it was the first time she felt surrounded by peers in the room, and how completely safe she felt making and making mistakes and finding successes together. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

A week after our “opening-not-opening,” I found myself in that last unexpected rehearsal, putting in a crew member after that last positive COVID-19 test I was in town for, sharing a house of 600 seats with just Katie Nguyen one last time. As I heard her laugh at a joke she’d heard at least 50 times before, I realized how much I still loved making this play and, really, how unending the joy felt being part of the care of this community. The embrace I’ve felt embraced by since that very first conversation, through the electric room, through our Zoom rehearsals, through both of our opening nights, through this one final put-in, through and through and through and through is an embrace I can’t wait to keep leading with, an embrace I can’t wait to keep putting into rooms as I walk into them in the future. So, yes, Omicron taught me how to not freak out when opening night is canceled 20 minutes before curtain, but this project taught me about the transitive property of care and humanity in our rooms and in our work, and both lessons will continue to grow and have value as I hopefully get to keep making theatre in community for weeks and months and years to come.

Zi Alikhan is a queer, first-generation South Asian-American, culturally Muslim theatre director, educator, and leader. Next, he’ll be directing Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s SNOW IN MIDSUMMER at Classic Stage Company.