The COVID-19 pandemic may be in our rearview, but we’re still reckoning with pandemic-era art.
In 2020, there were Zoom play readings, virtual dance performances, concerts streamed on social media and more. They were created with urgency and heart, if not the highest production quality. Now, we can engage with them with post-pandemic perspectives and ask: What art managed to transcend its moment?
I missed Trademark Theater’s film “What You Can’t Keep” when it first streamed in 2021, mid-pandemic, and again in 2023 when it was released as an expanded version. But I caught it earlier this month on the big screen at the Parkway Theater, and you can see it again on Oct. 27 at The Main Cinema in Minneapolis. Even with its pandemic-era origins, the film stands on its own.
Playwright Harrison David Rivers, commissioned to write for Trademark in 2019, submitted his first draft just weeks before the first pandemic lockdown, said artistic director Tyler Michaels King, who spoke about the project’s history during a Q&A at the Parkway screening. The text, structured as a series of monologues about two artists whose friends set them up at a party, weaves in and out of the couple’s relationship and memory, using photography as a through-line.
In 2020, when lockdowns hit, Trademark shifted gears. Instead of rehearsing onstage, lead actors Eric Sharp and Miriam Schwartz used cell phones and attachment lenses purchased online to film themselves in their own socially-distanced apartments. Without a film crew, the actors wrestled with the tools at their disposal, shooting the scenes at close range and often employing extreme close-ups.
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During the Q&A, Schwartz recollected virtual back-and-forths about filming close-ups of her retina. She also recorded her sound and video separately, later matching her lips’ movements to the audio recording.
“This is the most opposite of live theater for a live theater artist that I had certainly ever participated in,” she said. “The detail and specificity made it actually kind of like a weird little game.”
For Rivers, the playwright, the film script allowed the audience to get even closer to the character. “I actually feel like this film is an even deeper exploration of the intimacy of this relationship, because we actually have the camera to push it closer,” he said at the Q&A.
In 2023, Trademark organized a more traditional, if minimal, film shoot to bring the second half of Rivers’ play to the screen, directed by Michaels King with cinematography and editing by Braddon Alexander. That version premiered at Main Cinema in August of that year.
As Trademark planned its current season, Michaels King sat down with Rivers and proposed he write a third part to the story. “And it became a sort of culmination for these two characters, Lizzie and Lucas, as they fell in love with each other, fought for their relationship and found something on the other side,” Michaels King said.
Onscreen, Sharp and Schwartz share a quirky, endearing chemistry as their characters move from awkward curiosity to deep affection. The extreme close-ups, a hallmark of the film’s first version, give the production a stylized intimacy. The style fits the story, as the characters’ main conflicts are internal, focused on personal reckoning rather than dramatic confrontation.
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The couple doesn’t fight so much as squabble about small things, like an argument about one of them sitting on the counter. We see a flash of a more heated fight, but the shot — part of a montage — has no dialogue. The relationship develops throughout the film’s three chapters, as the couple figures out what it means to be together when they don’t aspire to traditional notions of marriage and family.
Trademark considered screening the first and second chapters of the film on the back wall of a theater stage, then presenting the third chapter as live theater. But ultimately, Rivers decided to continue writing the third part as a film. “That’s where this lives,” he said. “And it lives powerfully there.”
When asked if Trademark planned more film projects, Michaels King was noncommittal. For now, he said, the company remains dedicated to live theater. Still, “What You Can’t Keep” exemplifies the ingenuity of pandemic-era projects, transforming low-fidelity necessity into high-quality art.
An encore screening of “What You Can’t Keep,” will take place on Monday, Oct. 27, at 7:30 p.m. at The Main, 115 SE Main St., Minneapolis ($15-$55). More information here.
Speaking of films, there’s a really strange, excellently done indy film by local artist Michael Thompsen, “Tethered to the Ether,” screening at the Casket Arts Building. In this spooky gem set amid Thompsen’s richly imaginative world, a woman is caught in the eternal void. Thursday, October 30, at 8 p.m. at Casket Arts Building, 681 17th Ave NE #145, Minneapolis ($15-20). More information here.
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