Adapting to the Pandemic: Greg Parmeter’s new Misanthrope | Greg Parmeter in conversation with Sydney Smith During the COVID-19 shutdown, live theatre productions all over the world were shut down, and theatre had to adapt. At the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Assistant Professor of Theatre Greg Parmeter wrote and directed a production for Zoom called Influence, a piece inspired by and adapted from Moliere’s 17th Century satire, The Misanthrope. Having been fully conceived, written, and performed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Influence stands as a prime example of a significant new phenomenon in the theater world. Sydney Smith talked to Greg Parmeter about this ground-breaking work in Spring of 2021, with the end of the pandemic shimmering—real or a mirage?—on the horizon line. Sydney Smith: For Influence, what was your inspiration for picking The Misanthrope to adapt? Greg Parmeter: Loaded question! We wanted to do something that was royalty free. I knew that I didn’t have time to create something brand new, so originally the goal was to find a play that could be done on Zoom. But after looking into it, one of the things that annoyed me about a lot of the Zoom plays is that they’re not written to be done that way, “we can’t have a live performance, we can’t be onstage, so let’s just put it on Zoom and see how it works,” and so fundamentally none of them work. The few that have been written for Zoom have been really kitschy. So, once I started, I was like okay, what we need to do is create something that is designed specifically for Zoom, which means taking a piece that already exists in the public domain and adapting it. I am a huge fan of Moliere, and so I was thinking back to which of his works would be the most adaptable. I thought about The Misanthrope because it follows the unities, so it really stays very tight to a time and a place which solves a lot of problems. Also, those characters are dealing with a society and a world based on falseness, who you present yourself to the world versus who you really are behind the scenes. It just struck me that there are a lot of parallels to social media and being online during the pandemic. The Misanthrope just struck me as the one that had the most to say about what we're experiencing right now. SS: What was your process for going through and doing the adaptation, what did you think about as you were going through?
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