Creation in Isolation: Samantha Baird

Theatre Finds a Way

By Melissa Schack

When the audience can’t come to the theatre, the theatre will come to you. Performance art speaks to us in times of crisis. War, poverty, and disease are no match for the prevalence of the theatre.

Samantha Baird, a graduate of BYU’s Theatre Arts Studies program, had to adapt her work as a director, dramaturg, playwright, performance reviewer, theater journalist, performing arts teacher, and stay-at-home mom to fit the restrictions of quarantine. She looks to the future and prepares her work for another performance.
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How have you used your theatre work to find the positives to focus on?
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Right now with social distancing recommendations, it's hard to create theatre in the traditional format. However, it isn't impossible to still create art. I have been able to use online platforms to hold rehearsals for and create recordings of a few different performances. It has been very important to remember that while there are a lot of things that we can't do, there are a lot of things that we can. Theatre and art will always find a way.
 
How does your new short play reflect this situation?
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My play The Ghost Light is an ode to theatre and the arts overall. It is about two actors who visit an old theatre that is about to be torn down. Right now, a lot of theatres, including all of Broadway, have gone dark. This means that shows are not happening and audiences are not invited to the theatre, but one thing that never goes dark is the ghost light. It's a light that is left on, on the stage, to protect actors and technicians when the theatres close at night so that they don't fall off the stage. However, behind the logistical reason, there is also the legend that the ghost light is left on for the theatre ghosts who inhabit the theatre at night. The Ghost Light is about that, that theatres are never completely empty because we leave our hearts and souls there. Theatre will prevail.
 
How has COVID-19 affected your career and your personal life?

That's a pretty loaded question. I think a better question would be how has it not affected me? In my personal life, I have been facing a lot of mental health issues. Also, my household has lost all of our income sources, so I have been working a lot to find a side hustle that doesn't require anyone to leave the house. In my career, I've had three productions canceled that I was working on, one of those was a play that I wrote. The cancellation of the one that I wrote is a little depressing, but luckily it was really just postponed and they do want to try to produce it later this year.
 
Why is it important for people to support the arts, even during times of uncertainty?

I would say that it is always important to support the arts, and even more so in times like this. Especially it is important to support your local community theatres, they are the ones that are going to hurt the most. Community theatres are often (if not always) funded by the patrons, not by any local government or other sources. These are the theatres that face the real possibility of not recovering from this and closing their doors forever. A lot of them are finding ways to produce streamed shows, so you can support by buying tickets to those. If they are not offering streamed shows, donate to them directly. It matters a lot to the artistic directors, producers, and to the people like me who work freelance at various theatres in my community.
 
What are your book recommendations for those who are looking for material to read during mass quarantine?

I love to read, but I actually haven't been reading a lot of books lately, I've been reading more of scripts. One book that I just read a month or so ago that I really liked was Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. If we're talking children's books, which I also love, I love the Fairly True Tales series by Liesl Shurtliff. One of my new favorite books is her book Rump about Rumpelstiltskin.
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