DAYTON, Ohio — For more than a year, the Loft Theatre has sat quiet, the lights dim and the seats empty as its house company, the Human Race Theatrem had to find another way to perform.
They tried taping shows on sets around town, streaming a performance from the stage, but Executive Director Katherine “Kappy” Kilburn said nothing compares to the thrill of a live performance.
The stage sat unchanged for months through the pandemic
On Aug. 5, the Human Race Theatre is reopening its doors to guests for the first time for the opening night of its first in-person show in 16 months called “Looped.”
“That’s what we’ve missed in the closure that community, that true physical sense of community,” Kilburn said.
Before the pandemic, Kilburn would make a point at least once per show, to find a spot at the back of the theater, behind the lighting board and watch the audience.
“To watch how they’re responding, how they’re leaning in to listen or laughing or crying,” she said.
Kilburn shows the intimate nature of the Loft Theatre
Without that exchange, she said performances just do not feel complete. Between coronavirus restrictions and union regulations, it was nearly impossible to recreate in the Loft Theater over the past year and a half.
“It’s immensely intimate because no audience member is more than six rows away,” she said.
Unfortunately, Kilburn said it’s not designed for social distancing.
“We seat 212 people in our very intimate theater here in the Loft and so at the highest number before all the restrictions were lifted, we maybe would have been able to get 32 people in the space and financially that’s just not feasible,” she said.
That’s why Human Race Theatre lost 90% of its earned revenue in 2020 as it waited for a sign it could return to the stage.
“The stage floor from ‘Gloria a Life,’ which was the production we were in when everything shut down, was still on the floor for almost the whole time that we were closed,” she said.
In the meantime, Kilburn said she was working to find any way to keep the nonprofit theater company going. She solicited donations, researched loans, and grants and sold tickets to virtual performances, but putting those together, proved more expensive than anticipated.
“There are a lot of upfront costs,” she said.
On top of the usual cost of paying a cast and crew, Kilburn said they had to rent equipment and pay for daily coronavirus testing.
December brought some hope though, as Congress approved the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, designed specifically to help theaters and performance venues recoup their losses from the year and prime themselves for a 2020 recovery.
Kilburn waited for months to apply but when the portal opened in the spring, she said it got off to a rocky start. The portal crashed during its April 8 launch and Kilburn waited weeks to reapply.
“We submitted the final application on April 26, the day they fixed and reopened the portal,” she said.
Then came the waiting game.
The first grants were supposed to go out to the hardest-hit venues in late May.
Kilburn said she checked her account every day but never heard a word from the program or the Small Business Administration. In early July, she saw her first update.
“It said status submitted for two months, it just switched over to under review last week,” she said.
Kilburn preps the lobby ahead of reopening
Days later, she got the news she had been waiting for: the Human Race Theatre was approved and soon after, they got their grant.
“It’s great,” she said. “It’s helped with payroll and things that we can continue to push through.”
According to the SBA’s July 26 update, 15,429 applications have been submitted, 9,844 have been approved so far with about 4% of applications left to review.
Human Race Inc. was awarded more than $144,900, according to the SBA.
The Human Race Theatre is one of 298 Ohio venues getting a piece of the $7.6 billion distributed so far.
Kilburn said the SBA paid the full amount requested and it’s been a great help. Despite that, Kilburn said she still sees the theater in a precarious position.
“As we wait and see with this current wave of surges is doing and what that might mean for further restrictions or not,” she said.
As they continue to tackle upfront costs, rent, sets, rights to shows, Kilburn said she’s looking and applying for other grants as they come up, hoping to keep the theater going until they can be confident their audience is back for good.
