The Living Mural Continues On

The Living Mural performing in Prospect Park./ John Schilling
The Living Mural performing in Prospect Park./ @livingmural on Instagram

As the weather gets colder and COVID-19 hotspots emerge, The Living Mural has lived on.

   The Living Mural is a new approach to live theater, featuring short, individual performances that have been performed since late August at the Mall in Central Park every Saturday from 1-4 p.m. The project is the vision of Anna Strasser, who received her MFA in Directing from Brooklyn College in 2018 and served as an adjunct lecturer to undergraduate theater students.

   During an interview on the Theater Department at Brooklyn College’s Exploring Digital Theater, Strasser revealed to Chanou Wiltshire, the co-host of the online series, that in addition to Saturdays in Central Park, The Living Mural would now also be performing in Prospect Park near Grand Army Plaza on Sundays through the end of October. 

   With this change, Strasser has split duties with Lillian Meredith, another Brooklyn College alumna who has served as the director of Prospect Park performances whilst Strasser oversees the Central Park outpost. The decision to expand the project came after months of performances with engaged audiences that went beyond what Strasser had first envisioned.

   “When we initially thought of the project, it was really supposed to be one day and then maybe it was to the end of September,” Strasser said. “And now it’s to the end of October.”

   Besides the changes in both venue and schedule, however, the pieces performed have also evolved.

   “Our initial moment in the park…we had somewhere like 10 pieces written, and now I think we have upwards of 16 or 17 pieces written because the project has sort of grown from that initial impulse,” Strasser added. “Some of the initial 10 were like sweet monologues that you could picture someone sitting on a stool with a spotlight in a theater doing really beautifully, and everybody is crying…but then you put it in Central Park, and it doesn’t work anymore.”

   This posed an early challenge for The Living Mural, as the team began to navigate Central Park and decide how to launch the project. While Central Park and Prospect Park provide safe venues for performances to live on, Strasser warns that as public spaces, they lack the intimacy that often distinguishes theater as a powerful medium.

   “You put [the sweet monologues] in Central Park, and beautiful, internal movements aren’t translating because down the way you have the percussion band and down the way you have the girl practicing ukulele with her dad, and you have the art vendors, and you have the caricature artists..There’s just a lot going on,” Strasser said. “In order to really reach over that threshold…we realized we needed much more front-footed pieces.”

   This new approach included original pieces that directly engaged the audience to generate more responses. Unlike the traditional theater setting, this often involves a call and response or question and answer format, which makes each interaction unique.

   Among new audience members was Maude Apatow, daughter of American film director Judd Apatow and actress seen most recently in The King of Staten Island. Apatow was among the first audience members in Prospect Park when they launched on Oct. 4.

   The new changes have not only drawn more of an audience to The Living Mural but have also been a means to attract new performers to join the team.

   “We also have a fair number of people who have stopped on the street and said ‘hey, I want to be a part of this,’ and I always say yes,” Strasser revealed. “We have a bunch of people who I never met before who just happened to be in the park in the mall one day, and now are performing on the street with us.”

   One of these newcomers is RJ Reyes, who debuted in The Living Mural on Oct. 10, performing an original piece called “The Quarantined Lament of the Duke.”

   “As soon as I saw some actual live theater happening, I was like ‘Ok I got to get in on this,’” Reyes told Niluka Hotaling, the production manager of the Dept. of Theater at Brooklyn College and co-host of the Exploring Digital Theater series. “This is a way to adapt to our new world, and keep the craft alive…It’s not dead. It’s just changed!”

   Despite the project’s resilience over the last few months, Strasser expects The Living Mural to finally come to a close by the end of October, as the weather transitions from chilly to freezing and with COVID-19 hotspots emerging in Brooklyn neighborhoods. Strasser still remains open to The Living Mural relaunching in 2021, but the project has already had a bigger impact than initially anticipated. 

 

BC alumna and The Living Mural actress Vanessa Chia Chung (left) with Maude Apatow (right) during performances at Prospect Park./
@livingmural on Instagram

  “What sort of started off as this impulse to heal and bring the community sort of took another level when we got an actual audience there…You’re literally six feet away from the person, looking them straight in the eye, sharing this monologue with them,” Strasser said. “When it’s over, it’s not like the curtain comes down or the lights go off and you just shuffle off. You’re left with two people standing there, and then those people can choose to have a little conversation or check in, and that is more than what I initially imagined for the project.”