What if they gave a show and nobody came? In December 2020, when the theater project Andrea Kleine had labored to launch at Queens venue the Chocolate Factory Theater was cancelled due to the Covid-19 lockdown, the Columbia County performance artist and author decided to find out. In December 2020, she and her partner, musician and composer Bobby Previte, holed up in the empty industrial building, performed to nobody, and filmed the proceedings. The result is the surreal, hilarious film The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be, which will premiere at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck on May 21 at 7pm with a Q&A with Kleine, Previte, and filmmaker Jacqueline Goss (see website for ticket prices). Kleine answered the questions below via email.
—Peter Aaron
How did the film come about, and how would you describe it?
Back in May 2020, I sent an email to Brian Rogers of the Chocolate Factory asking if my December 2020 performances were effectively cancelled due to the pandemic shutdown. Brian wrote back and said, yes, public performances were cancelled, but that if there was a way my project could exist given the restrictions, we could talk about making it happen. I wrote back and asked, “What if I moved into the theater and lived there for two weeks?” Brian said, “I am 100-percent game.” Bobby and I lived quarantined in the theater. Every night we staged a performance that no live audience ever saw. We packed an air mattress, a toaster oven, a cooler of frozen Trader Joe’s meals, and an inflatable kiddie pool to bathe in. The theater staff was not allowed to enter while we lived there, and we shot the entire film ourselves on an iPad Pro. The entire thing was completely unscripted, 100-percent improvised. We didn’t know we were going to make a film until we were packing to move into the theater.
Before you were forced to adapt to the situation by turning it into a film, the residency project you’d been booked to do was originally something else. What was it intended to be, and did any elements of that iteration make it into the film? Whatever the original, pre-Covid show was, do you have plans to revive it later?
I can’t even remember what the original project was. I remember writing a grant proposal for it two weeks before the world shut down and I haven’t looked at it since. I’m also a novelist [Eden, 2018, Houghton Mifflin], and I threw out the book I had been working on right before lockdown and started over with something new. I think we are in a fascinating era where everyone has gone through a life-changing event, and we are still figuring out how it fits into the narrative of our lives.
How comparable is the performance in the film to the performance works you’ve done before? Was there anything specific that you’d done in past performances that prepared you for it?
It is very different! I talk quite a lot! If you know me in real life, you know that I am not such a talker. (And if you meet me afterwards, I hope you can carry on most of the conversation). As it was unscripted, it was also unrehearsed—also very different for me. But the nature of live performance is improvisatory. Nothing ever goes as planned. It is always much more interesting when it doesn’t.
Judging by the trailer, it seems that while the film is certainly a commentary on what many of us were going through when we were socially isolating during Covid, it also speaks to the isolation that artists have long felt as they create their work while struggling to survive both economically and emotionally.
The absence of the audience is one of the main themes of the film. I kept turning the question over in my head: “If live performance is about the electric moment of being on stage, the connection with the audience, being in the room and experiencing something together, then what does it mean if no one is there? What is performing if there is no audience?” Our daily routines in the empty theater and my evening, performed-to-no-one monologues ricocheted from the hilarious and quirky to the devastatingly sad as we kept considering that question. In a way, the film is a love letter to the absent audience.
What do you most hope people who see the film get from the experience?
I hope you laugh and cry at the same time.
This article appears in May 2023.
