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By Michael Paulson

ASHFIELD, Massachusetts – In the trees. About stilts. In the most sensible thing about a roof. Aboard a ship.

Night after night, the actors dot the farmland of a local theater here, employing each and every arrow in their level tower carcaj to maintain a safe distance from visitors walking from one level to another.

Double Edge Theater, an adventurous troupe based in Massachusetts’s rural hilltowns, was on tour in Albuquerque when the coronavirus pandemic erupted. The tour — with stops planned in California, Michigan, Norway and England — was canceled, and the company headed home to quarantine its members and renegotiate its mortgages.

And then they’re dreaming.

“We can be creative,” said Stacy Klein, the company’s founding artistic director, “even in times of loss.”

The result: “6 Feet Apart, All Together”, a new edition of the theatre’s annual summer exhibition: presented completely outdoors for masked spectators who move through the exhibition in small teams and are invited to stay separated from each other. All 22 features are sold out.

As global theater attempts to confront a pandemic that has closed scenes from coast to coast, many corporations have turned to streaming and there are a variety of other efforts, almost all with un syndicated actors, ranging from theater-dinners to film shows.

Today, several corporations check the diversifications of what’s called street theatre: outdoor productions in which audiences move in action. The form, a cousin of street theatre, has a long tradition, especially in Europe, but has a new appeal in the US. This summer due to the relative ease of separating consumers from abroad.

In Missouri, the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, which canceled its annual Shakespeare in the Park productions, features “A Late Summer Night’s Stroll”, loosely based on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with 15 scenes in Forest Park locations. The loose production, which lasted until September 6, proved so popular that the 23 nights were booked before the first performance.

And in Rhode Island, the Wilbury Theatre Group and WaterFire Providence offer “Decameron, Providence,” animated through 14th-century Boccaccio’s paintings of other young people looking to escape the Black Plague; The exhibition will be open until 22 August in 10 locations on the grounds of a former locomotive factory.

“It would be easy to close the doors and duck until there’s a vaccine,” said Josh Short, Wilbury’s artistic director, “but at times like this, theatre and storytelling are very important.”

There are many diversifications on the subject. In New York, where any type of in-person production is likely to attract the crowd, Here Arts Center offers a downloadable sound ride, “Cairns”, through performer Gelsey Bell (“Natasha, Peter and the Great Comet of 1812”); participants can pay attention for themselves as they walk through Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

And in western New York, Artpark, which hosts rock concerts in venues with a 10,000-seat outdoor amphitheater, offers “The Art of Walking,” a site-specific interactive occasion for no more than 25 people, dressed in sanitized headphones. , are guided through two actors on an hour-long trek through a giant component of Niagara Gorge Park. A level manager follows him in a car with a soundboard, mixing the audio.

Clos angelesrk says he has a long-time interest in European street theatre, but that this art form is difficult to finance in the United States. He met the paintings of Spanish artists Itsaso Iribarren and Germon de los Angeles Riva at a street theatre festival in Spain; Last fall, he paired them with a New York-based screenwriter and director, Carin Jean White, and invited them to create paintings for the 150-acre state park where his nonprofit operates.

When the pandemic made face-to-face collaboration unimaginable, he wondered if it would be imaginable for him to continue, but the team shaped online dating and created a story that combined poetry, music and physical theater.

The occasions in Providence and St. Louis involve several artists from those villages, other troops on other stages, and both seek to respond not only to the pandemic, but also to the unrest of racial justice that devastated the United States this summer.

“We started to get interested in Covid-19, however, as the Black Lives Matter motion took center stage and social justice issues came to the fore, it seemed that our artists would want much more discussion,” Short said of the Providence project. . Fixed that costs $10 to attend. “We asked the artist to build stories around idealized visions of the future.”

“Actors are consultants at night and through the complexities of what we want to do to ensure community protection,” said Barnaby Evans, who created WaterFire, a more productive art organization known for a popular bonfire-themed sculpture event. , in general years, on 3 central rivers.

In St. Louis, members of the public (one family at a time; 16 families according to the night) will walk about a mile and a quarter through animated scenes through Shakespeare’s play: a corporate dance featuring a scene between Oberon and Titania; two violinists playing Mendelssohn’s “Bridal March” from a bridge; even a burlesque artist who matches the shapes of a German doge disguised as a donkey, according to Tom Ridgely, the executive maker of the Shakespeare Festival. The first and last stops will be taken from Shakespeare.

Those who can’t get tickets can still model the project: a new band called PaintedBlack STL has recruited 14 black artists to create bows throughout the course of the show, and has a QR code that can be scanned to hear some lines of “Midsummer”. “And music.”

At Ashfield, where the race ended on Sunday, Double Edge presented 8 scenes of a variety of slowed works through the myths he had executed over the years, some of which were still in development, all related, Klein said, through the themes of “theft, loss and possibility.” Tickets cost $42 for adults; at first, only another 36 people were allowed according to consistent performance, moving through scenes in 3 teams out of 13; when they have become transparent calling for caps and possible safety, this capacity rises to 45.

Klein’s comments had been intense.

“It’s such a vital time for other people to have something alive,” he said. “We enjoyed breaking the mask barriers and distance, so that other people felt they were with us.