Stage Left’s ‘Lonely Planet’ receives top national recognition
Spokane’s Stage Left Theater is one of 12 community theaters across the U.S. chosen to present a play at the American Association of Community Theatre’s virtual festival AACTFest 2021. According to AACT judges, Stage Left’s “Lonely Planet,” written by Steven Dietz and directed by Thomas Heppler, is among the best productions in community theater in America.
AACT is a nonprofit advocacy group representing the interests of more than 7,000 community playhouses. The organization selected productions to advance to AACT’s national competition from just two community theaters in Washington: Bellingham Theatre Guild and Stage Left.
Virtual AACTFest 2021 will stream all the finalists’ plays during festival week June 14-20, and the winner will be announced on the last day. “Lonely Planet” will be broadcast June 16 from 1-2:05 p.m. Registration and performance tickets are available at aact.org.
“Lonely Planet,” set during the 1990s AIDS epidemic, was the last live audience production Stage Left presented in February and March of 2020 before theaters around the world shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The shutdown forced Jeremy Whittington, Stage Left’s managing director, to abandon plans to enter the play into state and regional competitions.
“We knew we had a stellar production on our hands,” Whittington said. “But when we heard that state and regionals were canceled, we thought that was it. No competition for us.”
Rather than give up and remain dormant as theaters went dark, Stage Left pivoted, working to create new ways to bring stories to life for online audiences. Over the past 13 months, staff members, directors and actors mastered Zoom meetings, camera equipment and ticket-selling software to present livestreaming of one-man shows, monologues and virtual festivals.
AACT didn’t hibernate, either. When the national organization recently revived last year’s canceled festival with a call for online video submissions, Stage Left was ready.
“I jumped at the chance to have our show seen on a larger stage, so to speak,” Whittington said. “It was so beautiful and well-executed.”
While “Lonely Planet” is set in the midst of the AIDS crisis, the word “AIDS” is never uttered, nor is there any mention of the disease. The play revolves around the friendship between two gay men.
“This story is timeless because it is about the friendship and love between these two men,” said “Lonely Planet” lead actor Robert Tombari, who plays Jody. “As Steven Dietz says: ’Friendship, not technology, is the only thing capable of showing us the enormity of the world.’ “
The irony that “Lonely Planet” closed at Stage Left just as the community began suffering another, albeit very different, deadly pandemic is not lost on Tombari.
“The words these characters say hit home differently (now because of COVID-19),” Tombari said. “There is a line that the character Jody says: ‘People I know are dying.’ Yet, he still needed help from his friend to overcome his fear of living and to embrace his place in his community.”
Tombari and his co-star and best friend in real life, Lukas Lanz, are having to immerse themselves in their lines again after a long hiatus. They will reprise their roles next month onstage in front of a professional camera crew sent to Spokane by AACT to film the full production.
The show will be shot on four professional Blackmagic cinema cameras, with a mixture of close-ups, wide angles and moving shots. That means Stage Left staff and volunteers are working overtime to rebuild the old set that was torn down a year ago.
One of the major onstage elements is an overabundance of stacked-up piles of chairs strewn throughout Jody’s store. The character Carl has been bringing chairs of dead friends into the store and leaving them there.
The image of an empty chair is particularly haunting today as communities continue to lose loved ones to the coronavirus. There are a half million more empty chairs than there were in this country a year ago. No words needed.