Interview: Stephanie Weisman of MARSHSTREAM at The Marsh Gives Us the Scoop Behind the New Daily Streaming Platform

The Marsh San Francisco has long been known as the city's breeding ground for new performance. Like theater companies the world over, The Marsh is also having to invent new ways of engaging with audiences while in-person performances are suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Their creative solution is called MarshStream, which offers a mind-boggling variety of programming seven days a week, including game nights, live performance readings, performance development classes, and archived performance streams. Content is being offered via Zoom, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, Google Podcasts and iTunes. For weekly event schedules and additional information, visit www.themarsh.org.

BroadwayWorld recently caught up with Stephanie Weisman, The Marsh's Founder/Artistic Director, to learn more about MarshStream and check in on how she and The Marsh are weathering the pandemic. Anyone interested in arts leadership should also take note that the interview concludes with Weisman giving a fascinating account of how her education at the University of Buffalo (aka "SUNY at Buffalo") prepared her for her role at The Marsh. In conversation, Weisman is chatty, engaging and resolutely good-humored. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In a sign of the times, you're the third artistic director I've spoken to over the past ten days about how you keep engaging with your audiences while in-person performances are suspended. How did you came up with the concept for MarshStream and what do you hope it will bring to your audiences?

Well, we've been wanting to do digital stuff for a while, in fact it's in our 5-year strategic plan. But, you know - we do over 600 shows a year, we're understaffed, underpaid, so taking that on was really slow. With the amount of work we've done (It's our 30th anniversary this year!), we have a ton of content. But how do we get it beyond the confines of our theaters?

When this [the pandemic] happened, first I was focusing on trying to figure out how to get performances live streamed. We were working really hard and found a production company that was willing to do it. We would remain within the ten people [limit at that time] and do social distancing and all that stuff. So that was my first approach. Then I read that article about the chorus [the Skagit Valley Chorale in Washington state]. This was right in the beginning before the quarantines were in place, but they knew what they were supposed to be doing in terms of social distancing. They decided they would take all the precautions, they had hand sanitizer at the door and nobody sat next to each other. At the time of the article, 45 people had gotten sick at that point and several people had died. After I read that, I said "Forget it. We're not doing this. I'm not putting anybody at risk."

Then I was talking to a friend and she mentioned how folks were starting to do stuff easily digitally and I said "That's it!" I called her right before a staff meeting - this is like three weeks ago (this is not long-term planning!) - and I went to that staff meeting and said "This is what we're gonna do. We're gonna start a platform." [laughs] We'd already talked about the digital stuff, we already had the name and everything like that. I said "We're gonna start doing things every night." [laughs] Within nine days, we had our first show. And the timing - I don't know if you could [normally] do something like this that quickly. First of all, everybody doesn't expect Hollywood technique in the Zoom rooms. The expectations for quality are lower. And also people are available. So boom-boom-boom within nine days we had had seven shows to fill every night at 7:30pm, starting on a Thursday and the following Monday we had a youth program Monday through Friday at 4:00pm.

Now I'm working on our noon slots. We started our first Friday slot at noon we had "CJ's FitnesSing" which is a singing lesson and a fitness class at the same time - she's a Cal vocal professor and she's a fitness instructor. It's amazing! [laughs] And then next week, we'll have Don Reed because he was my first interview on the Stephanie MarshStream show. One of the questions we got from the live Zoom studio audience of that show was how to use Zoom cause he does a great job with it. So on Thursday, we're going to have Don Reed on to give a lesson with a question-and-answer period about how to use Zoom well.

Next week I'm going to have the amazing opportunity to interview Robert Townsend, who performed at The Marsh, and then I'm part of this group that came out of the American Performing Arts Professionals. We're in this national group right now talking about solo performance and the impact, how so much of it can be about health and healing. It's called "Solo Arts Heal" so we're doing that on Wednesday night and then I think, hilariously, we are doing Bingo Game Night with Josh Kornbluth on Fridays.

Right. So what is that?

It's actually bingo! We wanted to have a game night, a place for the community to get together and I was like "Josh would be hilarious doing a Marsh version of bingo night." His wife is a first-grade teacher so we've got the bingo equipment. I love watching Josh do improv and this is improv with a bingo game.

Talk about being in the moment!

I think it's absolutely hilarious watching it. So we have all those things, and my interviews and then we are streaming stuff on the weekends. That's kind of building, what do we do on weekends that can support the arts as much as we can. And Wildcard Tuesdays - we had a singalong this week, we had "Tell it on Tuesday" one Tuesday, we had Barbara Lane talking to three incredible authors about books during the pandemic, and she was an incredible host for that. And then we're gonna have Balanced Healing and Restorative Yoga on May 5th. So we'll keep doing a different thing every Tuesday night.

Every moment my mind is coming up with something; the possibilities keep expanding. We just had our first Monday Night Marsh livestream, which is what The Marsh started with 30 years ago. We had three performers on and we had about 20 minutes after for some interviewing. We had a fiddler from Scotland and I was like "Oh, he's in the Bay Area but he's originally from Scotland." Well, it turns out he was actually doing this from Scotland!" And I was like "How did you find out about us?" and he said he has a friend in San Diego who'd told him about The Marsh and said it was the best place in (I can't remember if it was the country or the world) of supporting development of new work. That's when we said "Wow! There are people around the world using our platform." And I didn't even think about that before. It's obvious if you think about it, but who knows what to think at this point?

Given that newfound ability for global access and that your initial viewer numbers are impressively high, is there any concern on your part that this will take over form in-person performances?

No, I think there's nothing like an in-person performance, there's nothing like having coffee at a café with a friend. It's not the same. It's a wonderful opportunity to have more visual contact with your friends that are in New York or Europe, but it doesn't take the place of it.

In terms of development, which is what The Marsh does, we are doing development on Zoom. We have two festivals coming up this year for our 30th anniversary. We're able to keep working through Zoom classes so the development is going on. One of the next aspects of MarshStream will be to show these Zoom classes, to show how things get developed. It's wonderful that we can do this Zoom stuff, but it's not a 3-camera shoot; it's very limited. I think it is another form. The Marsh is all about saying "yes" to people at whatever level they're at, and it gives us another way of getting out to people concurrently whatever is happening live. We're in the midst of discussions of how we're going to make everything streamed whenever we get back, hopefully soon, into the actual theater.

Thinking ahead to that much-anticipated day when you can restart live performances in the theater, do you have any thoughts on how that might happen for The Marsh? In some ways, could you be in a slightly better situation than some larger arts organizations because your venues are relatively small and you don't have huge casts, or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

Well, certainly the amount of production time for our shows is much smaller than something with a 30-person cast, and that rehearsal can much more easily be done in the home. So I think it may be easier for The Marsh. On the other hand, and economically none of this works, but if you've got a huge space you can put ten seats between everybody and still get a hundred people in, whereas we'll [only have room to] get ten people in there. Obviously, these numbers aren't real, but you know what I'm saying. If you've got a huge hall, you can have a lot of space around people. So there's both sides to that. And I don't know what the stigma's gonna be about social gatherings. After 9/11 it took a lot of time, there was a real ramp up before people wanted to gather. There's always gonna be this transition time.

I do have to say it's a tense, drastic horrible time. The Marsh, if you take out our youth program which is fully funded by the city and foundations, if you look at our total income, we're dependent about 72% on earned income to keep our performances and theater alive. It's 72% and we have nothing coming in, in terms of ticket sales. So it's catastrophic, it's a horrible time.

Hopefully if things keep going the way they're going with MarshStream we'll be fortunate to have it, although we're not making any income on it yet. The Marsh has always been a sliding scale theater, from the beginning. Probably at some point, because we do want to survive, we'll be doing a sliding scale donation for our shows. Certainly there will always be a way to do it for free because people have to be able to access it if they want it. If they don't have money, they don't have a job, we're not going to turn anyone away. In our first weeks, every donation but one was pretty small, anywhere from five dollars to a hundred. There was one thousand-dollar one, but we made nine thousand dollars in donations in our tip jar the first week. That's a lot of people, and it really swells your heart to think about the support that people are giving at this time.

We're all struggling to a certain degree these days. What's your biggest challenge right now in your role as Artistic and Executive Director of The Marsh?

That I only can work 18 hours a day! [laughs] I am working so hard. It ranges from starting up this "thing" which is totally consuming, to the joy of coming up with ideas and pushing them and trying to think of how many things you can do. It comes down to staff time and making sure they're not working too much. We're on the opposite end of nothing to do!

The other part is that minimally it costs us a hundred thousand dollars every month. We have two spaces, we pay a mortgage, we pay rent. It's not only the amount we have to put out, it's the time and the work to deal with every single component of this. Like writing grants, the normal ones, the ones for COVID-19, because we don't have a development department. It's me and some staff support. It's the business stuff, the SBA loans, talking to the mortgage people and the landlord and getting two months' rent, which has been wonderful. All of that is on top of [our regular work]. It's just overwhelming.

And on a more personal level, what are you missing the most these days?

Not being around the Marsh staff and performers in person, going in and sitting at your desk. It's taking that horrible walk, like a mile every day, to find a parking space. [laughs] But I actually like the walk, you know? It's that day-to-day stuff.

And it's the fear of what's gonna happen. How bad [is it going to get]? I'm lucky, so far. I don't know anyone actually who has it or who could die from it, but I don't know if we'll make it through. There's that part, you know?!

Where are you currently finding inspiration?

This whole MarshStream thing. I'm telling you, it's amazing! I'm inspired because of all the performers who are working on it and giving back so much, and the staff and the brains behind it. It's totally inspiring to watch this whole idea take hold and start to take off. People will say "Maybe it's all not gonna work out." and I say "I don't care. In the moment, it is just blossoming, right?" I meditate every day so I try to be "it is where it is."

The other thing is I take about a three-mile walk every day and try to make at least fifty percent of it uphill. When I'm not incensed that the runners and the bikers don't have masks on and are breathing all over me [laughs], every time I walk I notice something new, even though I may have taken that walk a thousand times. It's just so beautiful. I watch the city as I come down, and I can see it's silver! Even if it's not a sunny day, it's looking silver, shimmery. And there's this one place where you look in and it's the most beautiful, idyllic place. It's unbelievable. Every day I stop and think that this is somebody's view of the world, and you just see it through a little doorway, you know? So that keeps me inspired.

I have a final question and I'll warn you up front it's a little out of left field, so apologies for that. You're an alum of the University of Buffalo and so am I -

Oh, my goodness!

What are the chances, right? So I just have to ask: How did your college education prepare you for your current job?

Omigod, it was the absolute basis for everything I do. As an undergraduate I learned to write. I started writing for [student newspaper] The Spectrum. I wrote one article, decided I didn't like The Spectrum and then went to work for The Reporter, the university newspaper. They gave me an internship and taught me how to become a journalist. I had to take a marketing class as part of the internship so I was learning marketing and writing and all these things. I was really lucky.

And I had to learn how to talk, believe it or not. I couldn't talk very cohesively - my mother did all the talking so I never learned how to do it. I took a writing class with David Bazelon, who was incredible. He looked at me and said "Stephanie, when you learn to talk you will be able to write better." [laughs] So I took The Psychology of Groups cause I figured that would be a group place where I'd have to talk. After that, I took the Sociology of Groups, which was unbelievable. Ted Mills had taken the program from Harvard and put it at Buffalo. Every week a group would videotape you on Tuesday and then on Thursday you would watch the videotape. I learned more about groups and life and psychology in that class than I probably learned anywhere in my life. Everything from dealing with groups to learning to talk to getting the skillsets I needed for The Marsh.

I went to graduate school there because I wanted to be editor of an arts journal which had just started up. I was working for the arts council there and saw this ad to be editor of a new arts magazine, The Black Mountain II Review. Black Mountain College sold the name and there were all these colleges [within SUNY Buffalo] at the time. I got into the Creative Writing program because I had to be in it to be able to take this graduate business course. I was the editor of The Black Mountain II Review and the advisor was [poet] Robert Creeley. He and I talked every week for three years or four years about what it meant to be editor of an arts journal. That is the total basis of what I do at The Marsh, you know that's where The Marsh came from. And then because I was editor and initially didn't know how to do it and because I guess it's how I do things, I decided that I needed to learn how to produce the book. So I started a class called Small Press Publishing, combining the stuff I was learning with Robert Creeley about editing and all the business production technical stuff of producing an arts journal.

[Years later] I had a moment at The Marsh where I was like "Which direction do we want to grow in?" I wanted to take the class that I had taught and turn it into a theatrical class, a performance initiative, versus a publishing class. I basically took everything [from it] because I wanted it to have the performance development aspect as well as the business aspect. We find at The Marsh that the better people are at business, the better it's gonna be for them. So I took that concept I'd developed for the Small Press Publishing class and transferred it to what we now call the Performance Initiative which basically ends at the festival, everybody works toward the festival. We develop things over a long time and deal with the production aspects as well and culminate in the festival. So basically the same thing transferred from what I did in Buffalo. The whole point was to make a publication and learn everything from printing to censorship to editing to raising money through selling ads. If we didn't raise enough money, we had to print it on our own little political printing press that one of my first students had access to. [laughs] We printed it ourselves and it was not easy back then; that was before the Macintosh computer!