Words at Intermission: Alex Lonati

Every weekend, musical theatre fans can tune their radios (or their web browsers) to WERS, Emerson College’s award-winning radio station, to listen to Standing Room Only: Boston’s only musical theatre radio show. Hosted by a theatre-loving, radio-savvy student, it’s a wildly popular program in an entertainment form that, against the odds, has stood the test of time—video, as it turns out, did not kill Standing Room Only.

Among the talented alumni of the show (and Emerson) is Alex Lonati, a Boston-based producer, director, and arts administrator—and her history with the show goes back much further than her freshman year.

 “I’ve listened to Standing Room Only since I was maybe seven or eight years old,” she says. “So it has always been a really big part of my life.

“I grew up an hour outside of Boston, in a predominantly theatre family. My mom is a director herself, and has taught at the college level; my father, bless him, was never in the theatre but was so supportive.

“I started as a performer, then once I got to Emerson, I quickly realized that I wanted to be in charge,” she laughs. “I had a skill of creating, of seeing the big picture, and I wanted to put all the pieces together—and so, I focused on directing and arts administration.”

When she graduated, Alex got a yearlong position as the artistic fellow at SpeakEasy Stage Company, a Boston theatre company that produces local premieres of theatrical work with a focus on creating and facilitating thoughtful conversation.

“I worked directly with [artistic director] Paul Daigneault,” she says, “sort of as his assistant. I learned almost more in that one year than I did in ten years of whatever arts education I’d had—just being immersed in the day-to-day of how to run a theatre. More than anything, I felt like I’d found my theatrical home. And my fellowship was a short-term position; it ended after a year. On the last day, I wept. You know, very classic—very emotional, theatrical person.”

After drying her tears, she spent about six months trying her hand in other realms of Boston theatre, performing in a professional show and briefly working in admissions at Boston Conservatory. When a fulltime position opened up at SpeakEasy, Alex jumped at the opportunity.

“Paul and I had already created this incredible bond, and he knew that I had a SpeakEasy heart, so he brought me back. It’s such a small company and a tight knit family, and I could see the fruits of my labor in a way that was really inspiring to me. But I always did want to get back to the artistic side—I love literary management and producing and creating content.

“In July of 2019, I officially became the community programs manager. Because we’re such a small staff and we all wear a million hats, I am half in development as well—I still run our events, but I run them from a producing side. The other half of me runs our community engagement department: things like our student matinee series; the Boston Project—our new play development program; the fellowship program; our literary management; anything that is artistic but not in production kind of falls under my umbrella.”

Transitioning into community development allowed Alex to work on what she’s most passionate about: expanding accessibility.

“Something that I’m really interested in is making our work accessible to people of all abilities. I would like us to be able to offer open captioning for a number of performances; I would like us to be able to offer audio description for performances; I would like us to be able to offer a sensory-friendly performance—so that regardless of folks’ abilities, they can enjoy the show. And that is a big challenge, because that programming costs a lot of money. But it’s about prioritizing and putting in the work and saying, ‘we want to make this happen.’

“We had some really exciting accessibility programming planned for our production of Bright Star, but then COVID hit—and that sort of brings us to now, where suddenly we’re relying entirely on creating new programming, and that also sort of fell under my umbrella.”

SpeakEasy had just opened their production of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the production—and the venue—to close.

Luckily, the theatre company was able to get assistance from the government’s Payroll Protection Program, as well as an additional grant from the Barr-Klarman Massachusetts Arts Initiative, allowing them to keep the staff on payroll.

“The nine of us on staff have not been together, obviously, since March,” she says. “Our office is operating; you can go to it, and for some tasks, some folks have been choosing to go in. The protocols are incredible but insane—and very safe—but it’s just such a different world now.”

Almost none of her work has required Alex to go to the office; she had to attend one live shoot, but otherwise she’s been working fully remotely since March.

“At no point did we think, ‘oh, we’re gonna shut down a whole season.’ So it’s been interesting trying to plan programming without knowing the longevity.”

While Alex acknowledges that it’s been strange to pivot to virtual programming having spent her career working on live, in-person events, she and the rest of the company have been figuring out how to move forward in spite of the circumstances.

“We came up with the idea of a play discussion club, kind of like a virtual book club. Folks purchase a copy of a script—we have underwritten a number [of scripts] if that’s not accessible for them—they read it on their own, and then we all get together over Zoom.

“And because everybody is virtual and no one has anything to do, we have been so lucky to get a number of featured artists and playwrights to join us. Some of them have been directors or actors, but more often than not, we’ve actually gotten the playwright to join. We had Jocelyn Bioh—we had done her piece Schoolgirls, or the African Mean Girls Play a season and a half ago; we had Martyna Majok—Pulitzer Prize-winning Martyna Majok—when we read Cost of Living; it’s really incredible, these very talented playwrights that have honored us with their presence and insight.”

As the summer stretched on and it became evident that theaters would not be reopening anytime soon, the SpeakEasy staff understood that they’d have to remain fully virtual for the upcoming season—their 30^th season. While this realization was initially disappointing to the company, they’ve found a silver lining.

“We have the gift of time,” Alex tells me. “We’ve done a lot of internal reflection, and a lot of work on ourselves and our organization. We’re working really hard right now on making sure our organization is growing in the right direction and is using our time and resources to make ourselves better, and to help make the community better. I think that we will never return to what ‘normal’ was—both in good and bad ways. I think we’ve learned so much about what community is, what accessibility is—that can’t help but continue.

“Also, we’ve been able to get creative, and, weirdly, because everything’s on the computer, it’s a lot more accessible, so we’ve been able to engage people to a really wild level. Our thirtieth anniversary concert, we had over a thousand people watch. If we had done that in person, it would have been a one-night-only benefit, and our audience fits two hundred.

“Again, because everything was virtual, we were able to engage alumni from everywhere through SpeakEasy’s past, and from all over the country. We had over four dozen alumni in this video! It was a really wonderful celebration of thirty seasons.”

In addition to the virtual concert and the play discussion club, SpeakEasy’s found ways to provide education and create conversations.

“We created a new program called SpeakEasy University, which initially was meant to replace our internship program, and to be more accessible for those who cannot usually complete an internship—there’s a lot of conversation happening right now in general about unpaid internships, and it’s something that we’re re-evaluating as well.

“[It’s an] eight-week program, fully pay-what-you-can, giving kind of a deep dive into all the different careers that exist in the theatre world. And we found that, although there were a lot of college students that attended, we had just as many, if not more, who we affectionately call lifelong learners. Folks were just really excited to learn, so we are going to do a second semester of that program, and we are going to continue our play discussion club.

“And we’ve had a number of panels in response to current events. We did a production of Passover by Antoinette Nwandu, in January/February. It’s an incredible piece, and we hosted a panel called 2020: Black and Male in America during that time, and we reprised that conversation virtually. Again, that streamed free over Facebook, so we had thousands of people watch it. It’s been really exciting to explore ways of getting more people involved—and new people involved. We’ve been busy.”

It’s certainly been busy for everybody at SpeakEasy as they plan and coordinate a season’s worth of virtual programming, but Alex has additional work cut out for her as a board member of the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, a local arts support organization that’s been serving the Greater Boston community for decades.

“I’ve been on the board for almost five years, and we’ve always existed as a resource to provide emergency financial aid. In the past, it has been for things like emergency surgery or a fire in someone’s apartment—something catastrophic, where artists have a surprise expense and need financial relief.

“COVID has obviously been a pretty significant time for TCBF—our entire board is volunteer and we’ve historically only met maybe three times a year; it’s been pretty lowkey. All of a sudden, it went from getting maybe, maybe five applications a year to getting dozens a week.

“Hundreds of Greater Boston-based artists were out of work, unable to pay rent, unable to pay utilities, not knowing when their next job would be, and TCBF has the resources to help. Over the past nine months, we’ve funded over $240,000 in relief, primarily to individuals, but for the first six months we focused on organizations as well. It’s completely no-strings-attached funding, and we’ve been meeting every week and trying to get people this funding as soon as possible.

“I’ve felt very inspired by the work—it feels like such a measurable way of giving back, and I’m honestly very thrilled by how supportive the community has been of TCBF, because in order to have money to give, we rely on donations. Historically, most of our income has come from the Boston Theatre Marathon—all ticket sales go to TCBF—and also what we call ‘May Day Every Day’ which is when different theatre companies collect on our behalf. Obviously, theatre companies are not having shows right now and are unable to raise money, so our income has steadily slowed.”

I ask Alex what people can do to help, and the answer is fairly obvious.

“If you are in a position where you can be philanthropic, now is the time to do so. But that’s also the answer always, and to every nonprofit organization right now, so that’s a difficult one. I think that, once you feel safe, come back. The theatre companies that survive this, which is hopefully most of them, are gonna be so ready to have their performers back, and their designers and directors and technicians and administrators and audience members, and so, as soon as you can, please come back.”

Until theatre companies like SpeakEasy are able to open their doors again, Alex and her colleagues are hard at work, figuring out how to provide programming via non-traditional methods. I ask her if she has any advice for other companies looking to create online content.

“The biggest question that we asked ourselves was, ‘what do our audiences want, and what do they need?’ because we didn’t want to just do what was easy, or what we could throw together the quickest—we wanted to make sure we were actually fulfilling a need, and not creating content to create content.

“I also think it’s important to meet people where they are, both financially and content-wise, to keep a finger on the pulse. We are a company that is community first, and we’re very, very mission-focused—and the main part of our mission is creating conversations, which we can do from wherever.”

As for words of comfort, Alex draws from a source of comfort of her own: her mother.

“You know, my mom always says, ‘as all things do, this too shall pass.’ And I think that this year has been so hard for everybody, which in some ways makes it easier and in some ways makes it harder. But it will come back. Theatre is not going anywhere—it’s not. And we will be able to hug each other again; we will be able to see theatre again; we will be able to go out to eat again. I’m just as impatient as the next person, and so desperate for life to return to normal, but it will. I have to believe it will.” ↓